MoAlpha

I am currently scoring the acute stress/fatigue (minimal) and not the chronic/beneficial stress (also minimal) of weight training in my training log. However, as more data are reported about the good effects of RT on metabolic and circulatory health, I wonder whether weight workouts shouldn't score a little something in the chronic column and when a big workout affects my sleep and appetite, I think maybe the estimated score is also too low on the acute side.

Does anyone have any smart readings or ideas on this?

base2 

I think a lot of fitness nutrition advice is geared towards the mostly sedentary person with a new found interest in physical fitness. As a seasoned "athlete" by most standards, it would stand to reason that your weight training stress registers as "low" because you already have the adaptions necessary to perform at a given load. At best, you are probably treading water, so to speak, with your efforts.

Just a wild a guess on my part. I'm actually genuinely interested because I spent a winter on a stair climber 4 hours per week at my local gym a few years ago. My cycling got worse.

MoAlpha

I should have said that I am using intervals.icu to derive HR-based load, which is based in turn on workouts where power and HR are available. This yields tiny TSS values for resistance workouts because my HR barely bumps. This might be the root problem, but I don't know what else to use. I could score total weight lifted, but I don't know how to convert those data into a stress score.

RChung

TSS was originally modeled on Bannister's TRIMPS, which were a HR-based measure, so TRIMPS (and, thus, TSS) only track "aerobic" stress.

MoAlpha

Yeah, that's at the heart of the problem, but the stress from resistance seems to interact with "aerobic" stress, at least for me. Do we got something better?

Carbonfiberboy 

I also upload strength workouts from a HRM and notice the same difference between HR predicted stress and how I feel the next morning. Before I had a pacemaker, I used HRV to get next-morning stress, which seemed to be more in line with how I was feeling. Still, that doesn't help with CTL. I just ignored that issue. I figure, close enough, though I only strength train 2 hours/week, so not a great proportion of my CTL.

I get a 40-50 hrTSS from a strength workout, about the same as the TSS from an hour of below-VT1 on my rollers. I rest 1' between sets and try to keep it somewhat aerobic. The short rests seem to improve my results on the bike.

RChung

The idea of being able to combine aerobic TSS with some version of a non-aerobic TSS is complicated because they're not measuring the same thing. They may measure something related in terms of fatigue but the physiological systems seem pretty different, so the stresses are almost orthogonal. (Not quite, but almost). What you might want to measure is something related to substitutablility and complementarity. We do construct measures or indices of complementary things, sometimes scaled independently, sometimes not. (Think of composite measures like foot-pounds or Newton-meters or person-hours or per member per month). There, we're pretty much explicitly saying that the two components are orthogonal.

This is a long way of saying that rather than try to get resistance into a TSS framework, you may want to think about a new combined metric.

ThermionicScott 

Seems like traditional results (like being able to progressively lift more weight each time) would be the best gauge of efficacy. Sometime I will add a note as to whether a particular set felt easy or I reached failure, as guidance for my next workout. I don't know of a better way to measure "stress" in that context -- EMG?

If you made more of an aerobic exercise out of it to be able to measure it on that type of system, you'd probably stop getting the benefits of weight training.

Ric Stern

i don't think there's a suitable way to include strength work into the performance manager chart, because as robert suggested they're different things. i can't think of a suitable way to include these sessions into a numerical way of measuring fatigue or stress.

however, i use a Whoop. this shows me that i had more strain on the days that i do strength training, and gives a numerical score of how well recovered i am (the next day). But, i also do my strength sessions after i've done my interval sessions, so the whoop would have to be pretty awful if it wasn't detecting that my strain was higher on these days (because obviously it is).

additionally, it's also worth thinking about what phase of strength training you're in. There are points in my training where i reduce my lifting weight, and do more reps and times when i increase the lifting weight and do less reps. i find that more reps and less weight is more stressful and results in more fatigue the following days than lifting at near max levels.

what someone could do is a strength session without any cycling on that day and see how a smart watch measures the strain, but that isn't something i'll be attempting as it'd mess with my training and goal setting.

MoAlpha

Thanks, all, for the thoughtful answers. I guess the question was ill-posed and maybe the best strategy is to pay more attention to the biomarkers such as HRV, or just nerd a little less. I can’t wait for Spring!

RChung

I'm an academic doing arcane things in an obscure field. If I didn't wonder about ill-posed questions and nerd out more, I wouldn't've had a career. "The purpose of models is not to fit the data but to sharpen the questions." Some of my best thinking happened while waiting for metaphorical Spring.

PeteHski

When I was using Wahoo SYSTM, their strength/mobility workouts had a nominal TSS value which I thought was quite reasonable. Better than nothing anyway.

When you think about it, how do we account for the effects of all the other stresses of daily life in a training model? For me they are certainly not a constant value.

TSS for me has always been a bit hit and miss. For example 1 hour at FTP takes a lot more out of me than 2 hours for the same 100 TSS score. Are they really equivalents in terms of stress and fatigue?

MoAlpha

Live by the Performance Management Chart, die by the Performance Management Chart.

RChung

When Andy first proposed TSS 20 (!!) years ago, we had quite a lot of discussion on the old Wattage List about this. Back then, I thought that these two different ways to achieve 100 TSS felt very different in the doing of it, but not so much the day after.

We often seem to focus on the workout and the composition of the workout (high intensity or low, polarized or pyramidal, volume vs. intensity) when maybe we should be spending at least a little of our attention on managing fatigue and recovery. In that view, we'd be spending some time thinking about how to manage training stress in order to get to and then maintain the "right" level of recovery. We don't improve from the stress per se, we improve when our bodies are responding to the stress. (This is related to my thoughts about Zone 2 training).

Carbonfiberboy 

Only my single has a PM. I wear a HRM for all my workouts: single, tandem, strength, hikes, walks, runs, etc. I upload every workout to TrainingPeaks: For my single bike workouts, I can click back and forth on TP between TSS and hrTSS. On steady-state roller rides, those two numbers are usually about the same, which to me indicates that I have my zones about right. On interval workouts of course TSS will be larger than hrTSS.

Getting down to subject of this thread, we see that hrTSS from strength workouts will always underestimate real TS. Nonetheless, I do record it and it becomes part of my CTL. I don't let the fact that it might be too low bother me. As I get closer to my major cycling events I greatly decrease or stop doing strength work anyway. Since I've been doing this for quite a few years, I know about what I need in terms of CTL to ride as well as I can expect in various events.

Basically, I ignore the fact that my CTL, Form, and Fatigue might not perfectly represent my physical condition at the end of every week and go somewhat by feel. That said, my experience is that my numbers are usually closer to reality than my emotions or inner assessment. I've had weeks where my legs were sore all week and I've felt strong on the Sunday ride anyway. Though usually If I get too far in the hole w/r to Fatigue, I take a day off. For me, increasing CTL by about 3/week works well but hey, I'm old and not a talented athlete anyway. One needs to get experience with what works and a good way to do that is to upload all your workouts somewhere. IME of course.