TRIMPS to estimate TSS

doyler78

My power meter is suggesting I'm about to win the Tour de France by quite a margin so whilst it is away for repair I've gone back to HR plus RPE (which was never my strong point though training with power has helped me get a better handle on it). I can't really use prior data to estimate TSS I have only just started a complete overhaul of my current training schedule and my routine has a lot more variety within each workout therefore I've found trying to break the training session down into it's various components and estimate TSS for each section then total it really cumbersome and then at the end of it I have no idea if all effort gives me anything useful.

So what I'm looking for is a TRIMPs calculator that will analyse my polar hr data and give me an estimated TSS. I thought that WKO+ done that automatically if power data wasn't available but if it does I can't find it.

jibberjim

You can use Training Load plugin in SportTracks to do it.

Indeed for me, I find an HR based mechanism of tracking Training Stress and identifying when I will perform well, and when I'm too fatigued / under trained to do well more accurate than a power based one.

see
http://www.tritalk.co.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?t=67118

fidbod

Jim,

thanks for pointing over to a useful post on tritalk. How did you go about determining the factors to apply to the different HR zones?

Alex_Simmons/RST

doyler78 wrote:

So what I'm looking for is a TRIMPs calculator that will analyse my polar hr data and give me an estimated TSS. I thought that WKO+ done that automatically if power data wasn't available but if it does I can't find it.

I would suggest that rather than go by HR to get a TSS, one is simply better off assigning an estimated IF for the ride and calculating TSS from that. But once you get past about 10% of rides being manually estimated, then you potentially introduce some error into the Performance Manager that may provide some misleading indicators.

http://cyclecoach.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=125#p125

jibberjim wrote:

You can use Training Load plugin in SportTracks to do it.

Indeed for me, I find an HR based mechanism of tracking Training Stress and identifying when I will perform well, and when I'm too fatigued / under trained to do well more accurate than a power based one.

see
http://www.tritalk.co.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?t=67118

Perhaps you are not using the power based methodology well? Although you are trying to apply the impulse response model across more than one sport (and only cycling enables the use of power), and that in itself I think is problematic and needs to be thought through some more. Certainly Phil Skiba has given it plenty of thought.

A HR based metric significantly undervalues hard efforts, since by definition HR can't extend past a maximum value. HR can also significantly overvalue low efforts (since when we stop riding hard, HR does not drop away in the way power does). I'm not sure these two wrongs make a right.

I don't agree that there is a "strong correlation" between HR and intensity. I would say there is a good correlation but not necessarily a strong one. The correlation is higher indoors and/or in a controlled setting but once the efforts become quite variable (like they do when training outdoors) and/or involve hard efforts, the correlation falls away significantly.

Your example of a 30-min ride break overly inflating TSS would suggest to me that the ride was in fact two rides and not one (a break long enough to have a beer and eat a burrito). What happens when you create two rides with your data?

I also note the comment about not being concerned about the absolute accuracy of the TSS (well FTP really) and it's more about the overall trends/shapes. While that's certainly true to some extent, I think once you start to examine multiple seasons of data for an athlete, you'll realise the accuracy of having a pretty good handle on FTP makes a difference in what you can learn about training impulse/response (especially when an athlete is training significantly).

So rather than fudge it, just get good data to start with. It's not hard to do.

All up though, these are not major issues (only interesting discussion points) , as for the majority of first time users the charts simply reveal the bleeding obvious - i.e. they don't train enough, or with sufficient consistency, or try to do too much in too short a time span and suffer the consequences.

doyler78

Thanks guys for the responses. I've now downloaded the sporttracks program and the plugin. I have to say the TRIMP score is a lot closer than I thought it would be both on what I was estimating and on the few files that I imported in just to see how things compared. With the lumpy terrain I have I was expecting more problems.

It's a shame that the power meter went down just as I was about to start my Vo2 max and above intervals and as I haven't ever really done these before (at least not intentionally - more terrain related - 15-20% tends to force you into that) so going of feel is a bit of an unkonwn quantity for me.

Alex that's how I was estimating TSS. It's just I've never been able to get off a bike and say that felt like a .92 IF. It's more that I could break down the different parts of the ride and assign an IF to them and I've got pretty good at that however with the new training rides there is a lot more variety and this proved a bit of pain for estimating TSS however I think I will persist and use the TRIMP score to confirm or question my estimate.

Interestingly on today's ride I estimated 260TSS and I've actually done a pretty similar route in the past and at a similar intensity and it was 266TSS - though it was 16mins shorter however I done a proper warmup and cool down today, something that I haven't really done in the past hence why I'm going to stick with the lower overall score. TRIMPS estimated 261TSS.