[bill]

Over the last couple of months I’ve noticed a growing difference between my measured hrTSS and the target TSS in Z1 workouts. Even pushing to stay at the top of Z1, the gap remains. For example, today I did a 40 minute Z1 workout on an elliptical machine, with an average HR in the top half of Z1, and a couple of minutes of warmup and cooldown. The target TSS was 40 and my hrTSS was 29. Sometimes the gap is a little smaller but not much.

So two questions:

Do I do a longer workout to bring the hrTSS (and by implication, the training load) to the target TSS?
What does this tell me about my aerobic capacity?

Thanks,
Bill

Topic

[Anonymous]

Anonymous on December 13, 2022 at 10:21 pm #73667

Bill, The estimated TSS scores in the workouts are more rough guidelines than hard targets. I encourage folks to primarily focus on time and intensity (HR) as the metrics to be concerned about. The TSS is calculated based off of the threshold heart rate (AnT) that we put in the HR zone settings page. Since everyone has a different amount of room between their top of Z1 and top of Z3 their TSS per hour at any given intensity will be quite a bit different, and that is with the assumption that everyone’s threshold, heart rate is set correctly. This makes it basically impossible to make the estimated TSS accurate for everyone doing the same training plan. I am also making the assumption that folk are going to be manually adjusting for vertical gain which you may or may not be doing. For a 40 min workout with the entirety being in Z1 I don’t think an unadjusted TSS score of around 30 is an issue at all. For these shorter Z1 sessions my very rough estimated TSS is probably a bit lofty as well.