Originally Posted by
kingston
atwl77, I just got my first powermeter last week and am trying to figure out what TSS I should aim for. I came in at 836 last week which was sort of a normal in-season week for me; one long ride (8h 200k), two hard ~90 minute rides, two easy ~60 minute rides and two days off. Does that seem about right?
I think a daily TSS is a more useful measure than weekly, because big rides or events or races (such as your 200k) end up as spikes that skew the amount significantly. Here, for example, 836/7 = 119 average TSS/day, which makes it sound like you're doing hard rides every day but in actual fact, your actual daily TSS is probably on a much lower end with the big spike on the 200k ride.
What I found useful for me was to get a Training Peaks account and dump in all my past rides and workouts, and have it figure out my CTL, ATL and TSB scores. The CTL was a more relevant metric I could refer to when deciding what kind of workouts I needed to do. The TSS score for rides that are close or slightly higher to my CTL are good for maintaining fitness; doing rides whose TSS value is significantly lower than CTL would be considered recovery or detraining (or tapering, where relevant) whereas rides significantly above CTL serve to improve fitness.
For me, as an example, my current CTL took a dip from 60 to 52 after taking a break due to a cold. So I had planned to start back with some simple tempo efforts mixed with a sweet spot interval this week. So when I plan the workouts I do in The Sufferfest I search by TSS, looking for workouts around the 50-60 range that are based on tempo or sweet spot intervals. Then there'll probably a big, unplanned-as-far-as-training-is-concerned ride over the weekend which will show up as a spike, but I work around it in training by seeing how much ATL (and TSB) is affected and then start of my Mondays-Tuesdays with something easier, slowly ramping up TSS to Thursday, then rest on Friday, while evaluating my week to see how my CTL has changed over the week and decide what I should be focusing on the following week. Though this is just my current "eventless, just aimlessly but gradually improving fitness" routine; when we used to still have outdoor events to aim for, I would be planning and aiming for a specific CTL and TSB value for an upcoming big event but sadly, those times may not be happening anytime soon...