Weekly TSS and FTP increase question

Hi All, I’ve been trying to maintain around 400 tss per week and add roughly 5-10 tss more each week. I just retested my ftp after 5 weeks of good training and it increased roughly 30 watts. I was very surprised as I thought it might only be a 5 or 10 watts at most.

I am curious, with new higher set ftp, does this mean that it will be harder (or even overtraining) to try and hit 400 tss goal?

The 4th and 5th week of my previous training was getting much easier to overshoot the targeted tss for a workout and hit my tss goal for the week early. I’m thinking that won’t be the case any more since my new ftp numbers are more accurate and updated in the system.

Wondering if I need to drop my tss this week to around 350 and then add 10 next week, 10 the next week, etc…until I retest ftp in about 6 weeks? Basically starting over with the new ftp and building back up to where I’m hitting 450tss in the final weeks when it’s (hopefully) getting easy again??

TSS scales to your ftp. So 400 tss of workouts X, Y, and Z at an ftp of 200W is less “work” than doing them at an ftp of 215W. If you look at the training plans, you’ll see a few weeks of rising TSS, a rest week, then a retest. The next block of the plan will start with lower TSS than last block because hopefully your ftp went up meaning it’s still hard.

I get the impression you’re managing your own training here? Apppologies if I’m off-base here, but I would actually recommend just following the plans for a while so you get the feel for how to structure your training. I worry that you’re missing the fact that not all TSS is the same (vo2 vs endurance). Doing random workouts and going solely by TSS may not give you progression the way you’re hoping.

1 Like

Like the other reply said, TSS is relative to your FTP, so if you did the exact same workouts (defined by %FTP) then you’ll get the same levels of TSS as before. Obviously you’ll need to work ‘harder’ because you’re doing them at a higher wattage, but the TSS will be the same. In a overly simplified world, that TSS equivalence suggests you’re not working harder.

In practice, you will be working harder. For a start, the energy requirements have increased. You’ll now utilise more kJ of energy because you’re working at a higher power level. So remember to adapt your nutrition to fuel and recovery properly.

If the FTP increase was a large % increase relative to your old value, there’s a chance you were working too easily for some of your later workouts. In other words, your true FTP on the day of a particular session might’ve been higher than you thought, due to the rate of progress. Thus, those workouts were easier than the TSS would suggest.

So yes, it will be harder.

PlYou usually have 3 increasing weeks then a recovery week to adapt.

Have a look at plan builder, even without an event.

Hi yes, managing my training. I looked through the plans and was going to do one, but all of the ones I saw had at least one (but sometimes more) days where the training went for more than an hour. Unfortunately between a toddler and a 4 year old, work, and home chores, the max I can get away is 1 hour.

I thought about doing a training plan and splitting some of the longer workouts into two days, but then decided to keep it simple and just do full 1 hour workouts and shoot for specific tss to start then add a little tss each week.

I have been training for more than 5 weeks I mentioned in initial post (just thought the last 5 were particularly solid), and do rest weeks where I lower the tss to around 60%.

Hi, thank you that makes sense. I believe the later workouts were getting easier - they definitely felt it.

Maybe rather than TSS you should look at the workouts you can’t fit in and see what the training is specifying and pick a workout that’s closest that fits within an hour.

A simple example would be Antelope-4, which is 4 x 10 min sweetspot, or 40 mins work in a 75 minute workout. Antelope -5 is the same amount of work (40 mins) but with less rest but total workout is 60 minutes.

This gets more important if you are considering V02 work, as total time at the target % FTP is what you would want to avoid cutting. As has been said above, the TSS from Antelope vs a V02 workout may be quite different as not all TSS is equal (although it’s arguably only going to be substantial comparing high IF to low IF like V02 to Endurance work).

Basically, don’t be a slave to TSS, you’ll benefit more from looking at the work prescribed in your plan, the intensity of the workouts and then manage your meso-cycles or blocks around that.

1 Like

Yes FTP, CTL, ATL, TSB are all interlinked thru TSS. As you know, TSS was an early attempt to measure physiological load using intensity squared x duration, but in recent work several groups found this wasn’t quite accurate but nevertheless it remains very useful concept. We made a really simple tool to play around with the appropriate rate of increase of TSS & CTL here: FFT TSS & CTL Ramp Rate Planner - Google Sheets. Its nothing too clever, but can provide a heads up about avoiding undertraining and overtraining.

1 Like

Hi thank you this is good to know. I knew there were alternates in there but it just didn’t occur to me to modify the plan like that.

If I were to choose Antelope -5 instead of the plan prescribed -4, would it show on my weekly/monthly summary that I didn’t complete the prescribed workout for the day? Can you switch out the workouts so that it ‘counts’ toward the plan?