TSS for a 50 yr Old

Look in your calendar for red days abd yellow days, that should indicate how much fatigue you are managing.

TR analyses your workload and recommends through PB

You can adjust setting away from recommended and see what TR thinks about it:


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Thank you all for your input here, some very helpful advice and insights. Think I will use a masters plans for my event coming in April once my back is heeled. Will trust the process and whatever the TSS it throws at me I will stick to it as much as possible. It’s great to read people older than me still riding as I’ve been getting disheartened lately with injuries and my age creeping up on me. I will also try to include strength work in now.

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Don’t give up. I had a back injury that pretty much had me off the bike for over 2 years. Caused thigh muscle atrophy. But I came back.

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How did you injure your back out of interest? Was it bike related?

Long term injury from 2008. Finally found out last year it was bulging discs and a trapped nerve, now take Glucosamine everyday and my recovery when it flares up is so much quicker. The discs have been repaired by the Glucosamine and the nerves seem to have calmed down as well. I originally did the injury by lifting a box the wrong way.

I’m 50 and started off the couch last Easter. Started with resistance training and honestly I love it. I recommend the concepts in this paper

Personally I do around 35-40 minutes, at home, 3 times a week and I can do it before the rest of the household wakes up or after the kids are asleep. The low volume aids consistency and the benefits in terms of how I feel have been huge. Reflecting my age probably a third of the session is aimed at injury prevention.

From September onwards I started cycling again and have been doing 150-200 TSS a week. If I had time I’d build the volume (I don’t) but I doubt I would do more than 1.5 to two hard sessions a week and the rest would be easy.

TLDR do what you enjoy and can do consistently, building slowly. Good luck!

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Judging by your user name, I’ll have been in the same school year as you, I’m still hanging on to my 40s though :wink:

A lot depends on you, fwiw my average TSS is probably around 500.

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I’m holding on to my 40s for another 2 months this Tuesday (not that I’m counting!) :joy:

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Thank you for that paper, I will definitely incorporate strength work now as I keep losing time on the bike with my back. With my shift work job I have to fit it all where and when I can I think TR is perfect for that as it’s always adapting, I will fit the strength work in around that.

I am almost 59, and my weekly TSS this week will likely hit 800. Don’t use age to decide what’s a suitable figure. Individual as I and others have said above.

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These numbers seem very high to me. I am a competitive 67 year old masters racer in CX, XC and gravel. Doing BWR AZ next weekend. A 600 TSS week is a BIG week during the season. Closer to 450-500 during the winter. Even a whole week in Mallorca cranking out big rides everyday I never was over 750 and I was trashed for a week after. Agree that TSS alone is not helpful. I find CTL pretty helpful. I have had mine as high as 90 on really big weeks and can sustain 80, but I find I race best closer to 72 or so and +5-10 on Form (this is all training peaks).

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TSS should be a relative number. A weak rider or a strong rider doing 300 TSS should be relative to their capability, the same amount of work. This is because it’s chained to FTP. So if our power meters were all consistent, if all TSS was created equal, and all our time x intensity equalled 300 then whether we were young, old, tall, short, fat, thin it wouldn’t matter we could all say 300 is the same relative load and recommend in those terms.

And the fact that we can’t is why I think it is not a great yardstick for comparison with others - not because people are different, but because it is not a good comparative measure.

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This is good point, and sadly, I am slightly embarrassing example of this:

  • I ride quite a lot
  • yet my FTP is moderate, both in absolute (W) and relative terms (W/kg)
  • according to Garmin insights, I ride more than 98% of users but in terms of average speed, I am faster than 80% of users.

Nevertheless, I am not complaining, this is due majority of my rides being low intensity / high TSS and I am happy myself about it :slight_smile:

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I think people who don’t ride much volume, will say the TSS numbers are high. But if you put in enough weekly volume then 600 TSS or more would be quite typical even with majority low intensity. Hell during my ultra endurance events I can clock up 4,000 TSS in a week. It’s all relative to the volume you do, plus the scale of your events.

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Agree that TSS is far from perfect, but it’s the best metric I’m aware of if you want to measure training stress across individuals in a consistent way. I think the biggest mistake when comparing TSS is looking at it in the context of a single workout, single week, or even month. While TSS does a decent job of normalizing a training load across individuals, it does not tell the story of how hard that training is in relation to typical activity levels. But most of the popular training tools have structures that account for that (like CTL and stress balance). TR has the yellow/red alerts that account for prior training load as well. Athlete A might get a red day after a couple 100TSS days in a row while athlete B would be in the green after a couple 200TSS days in a row (based on athlete B having more volume in their training history). Again, TSS is far from perfect, but a heck of a lot better than hours, Kj’s, miles, etc. if you are trying to normalize across individuals.

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Though maybe it ought be normalised by TTE at FTP rather than default 1 hour.

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The best part of that video is watching the pro triathletes debate what ā€œlow volumeā€ training is. One guy saying anything under 30 hours, another saying under 20. Different perspective, even compared to pro cyclists.

Nothing too earth shaking in that video, just regurgitating what pretty much everyone knows. You need both volume and intensity. But as the volume goes up, the mix of intensity has to go down. And if you don’t have the hours to increase volume, it can be beneficial (up to a point) to increase intensity to make up for the lack of volume.

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I rarely do long endurance rides. I simply can’t be bothered. So my go-to ride is an hour at sweet spot which can be approx 66 TSS. Or something spicier for 90 mins which can be 120 TSS. So 5 or 6 of these easily adds up to 400 ish.
I do find that i need 2 days off per week nowadays. I am inspired and impressed by people in their 50’s saying that they can do way more TSS than this as i am really feeling my age these days compared to 7 or 8 years ago.

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We all have different goals if doing short intense rides is what you enjoy doing, keep it up!

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