pdlamb

I've been poking around, and seeing many ways of "measuring" training or rides or whatnot. Strava gives me relative effort while Garmin Connect has aerobic and anaerobic training effect, and of course Trainingpeaks gives me a training stress score. And of course they have different estimates of what they each deem significant, such as average W/kg, or peak power, VO2 max, vertical climbing, etc.

I'm not quite sure if any of these have any independent validity, or whether they're all attempts to entice me behind their separate moats for training and planning. Is there some way to correlate a relative effort to a TSS, for instance? Or does a user have to pick their favorite measurement and work to that, as long as it seems to be working?

(FWIW, I like the Strava score best, since it's usually the biggest. )

Hermes

Andy Coggan developed a construct for training and the basis for the training stress score (TSS). A one hour time trial or the maximum effort one could produce for one hour would equate to a TSS of 100. Once the physiology is stressed above time trial effort, then the relationship is not linear and fatigue builds up faster as one begins to increase force. This is supposed to correlate to build up of lactate in the blood.

So if you are riding around at a level of force that is hard and you think you may be able to hold that force for an hour, then you can assume that if you did your TSS will be about 100.

asgelle

Power, not force. Force is power divided by speed.

Seattle Forrest

Keep in mind that people have different goals and lifestyles. TSS is a great way to measure and prescribe something like the amount of exercise. Unless you do other stuff besides ride. Not very useful to a triathlete for instance. A lot of these different metrics are telling you different things, and depending what you want to do, it's usually best to focus on some and ignore others.

Carbonfiberboy 

I may be mistaken, but I think triathletes maintain separate TSS scores for each discipline. I assume the top competitors use power on the bike, rTSS for the run, and hrTSS for the swim. It seems that TP modifies the hrTSS depending on the discipline, but I don't know the method.

Beyond that, each person should track what's most important for them, not what's best for others. I like to track accumulated physiological stress, so I use TSS. I also use total climbing, mileage, average speed, number of PRs, watts/kg, many different things. All these measurements interact with each other. It's really not a problem Monitor what you like and watch why and how it changes, try to learn how to improve that thing. There's not one thing.

canklecat

Try the Elevate browser extension for Strava (Chrome only; Firefox is still limited to the old Stravistix extension, which does much of the same thing). Adds a little more data that I find useful.

No idea how accurate the power estimates are, relative to a real calibrated power meter. I only rely on Strava and Elevate for trends relative to Strava and Elevate. If it shows progress, good.

It also helps identify my patterns on repeated rides over the same routes, including how much time I seem to need to warm up and cool down. Elevate/Stravistix identify maximum sustained efforts, so I can see how much time I need to warm up before tackling those sustained efforts. In the past I've tended to follow the generic advice to warm up for X number of minutes, which rarely worked out for me. I'd be cooked before I really got started. Now that I see patterns indicating I need 20-30 minutes to warm up, I can arrange my rides to hit the hardest or fastest stuff after half an hour, rather than 5-10 minutes.

So far, it seems to correlate with my experience, including days when I've overdone it and had to take a couple of days off. On days like Saturday's 33 mile ride, it confirmed my intentions -- a moderate, sustainable and consistent effort. The graphs for stress, etc., matched my perceptions. So for me it's been a useful guide.

davidtinker

Last I checked the Strava numbers on the Fitness/Freshness chart (for power meter only rides, before the latest Strava heartrate update) they matched the Coggan TSS, ATL, CTL and TSB stuff very closely. I think they just used different terms to avoid trademark issues. Unfortunately Strava doesn't track your FTP over time so it all breaks down when you change your FTP.