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TSS Points used for Long Rides

Nate ParadyNate Parady
in General Training Discussions

I've seen a few comments about what duration of a ride indoors equals an outdoor ride with the general theme being riding indoors can cut your overall duration down by a certain percentage.  Example: a 3 hour indoor ride might equal a 3:30 or even 4:00 outdoor ride.  Reason being when inside you aren't coasting, stopping for traffic, etc but rather constantly pedaling.  This has lead me to focus more on TSS points from last season's IM training rides to see what I was doing for my long rides. 

 Of course all of this is my attempt to be more efficient in my training (3rd IM season, typical).  

 Trying to focus on my longer rides:

Is there a desired TSS score for the Average Saturday EN Ride?  Is this a bad way to look at it, or is it just one piece of the puzzle?   

 Advantages of riding inside versus outside aside, is there any value in just focusing at TSS points for a Saturday ride versus chasing a certain ride time?? I also believe I read someone saying 150 TSS points was “good enough” for a Saturday ride.  Much to my surprise all of my longer rides last year were over 150 TSS points. Might I be pushing a bit too hard?

 Is there room for an Indoor or Outdoor Protocol that would call for something like: doing your Z4 intervals and then ride at whatever pace until you hit a certain TSS number?

 Some data from last season:

 

Ride Time

TSS

IF

Comment(all outdoor)

5:36

254

.67

RR1

3:56

303

.87

Hard effort

3:47

252

.81

 

2:55

172

.76

 

4:19

259

.77

 

4:00

185

.68

Big Day Ride

 

 

Comments

  • Al TruscottAl Truscott

    Nate - recently I've commented here about "saturday rides" and indoor time vs outdoor time. I did mention TSS points. But It is VERY IMPORTANT to note that all my comments were about HIM training, which doesn't extrapolate well to IM training. For HIM, we're doing mostly 3 hour Saturday rides, with a heavy emphasis on 40-55 minutes of FTP work at the start, then 45-60 minutes of 80% ABP/SS work after that.

    I, like many, do not like doing long rides on a trainer, and only do them when absolutely forced to by weather. I've ridden 3-6 hours in the rain while training for IMs, and I really don't like the experience, except for the HTFU value. My comment about my rule of thumb being an indoor ride of 2 hours equates to an outdoor ride of 3 hours is said from a purely subjective point of view, with a bias against riding long indoors.

    TSS points give us info about both the training value of a workout and also the fatigue value, i.e., how it might affect downstream workouts. So talking about the "standard" TSS value for a long weekend ride has to be take in the context of both how well trained you are when you are doing the ride, and how much you are willing to risk not being able to do good wkos in the subsequent few days. 150 TSS points for a three hour ride early in HIM training may not be a great idea at all, and it may be too little with three weeks to go before the race.

    To your specific question, what TSS value are we shooting for in IM Saturday ride ... and how does that relate to whether I'm doing them inside or outside?  You can compare proposed workouts inside and out using a handy little excel spreadsheet, and see if doing the ride inside will be "good enough" I don't know how to attach an xls file to this thread, but I think I put it up on the Dashboard.

  • Nate ParadyNate Parady
    Thanks Al and I got the Spreadsheet from the Dashboard..
  • Coach RichCoach Rich

    Nate, good discussion. My notes:

    • ZERO need to do any long rides longer than ~2-2.5hrs on a trainer unless you are training for an early season race and have no other choice. If you do have a choice and you can ride outside, ride outside!!
    • In my opinion, time on the bike should be considered a very fixed constraint. For this reason, your goal should be to maximize the TSS of your ride given the time we've scheduled or that you have available, not punch the clock on the bike until you've racked up the TSS score you want. 

    The keys to this TSS/unit of time efficiency are:

    1. Ride with current power, normalized power, and IF on the same screen. Ride so that the Pnorm is always higher than current watts. This pushes up IF, Pnorm is also pushed up = you have to put out higher current watts...and an evil feedback look is created. 
    2. If you do the same rides regularly, use Strava and other data tools to track and benchmark yourself over time. I have historic IF and Pnorm numbers on about a dozen regular rides that I do so I'm always racing against/getting my ass kicked by my former self. More importantly, I have expectations for final numbers nearly every time I clip in. 
    3. You can then relate the TSS you see in training to the TSS you'll likely see in a race. A well paced HIM bike usually yields about 175-190 TSS. Well pace Ironman bike is 275 to ~320 TSS (there's a lot of "other stuff" in those numbers) and we like to see a VI 1.02-1.07. As you ride and benchmark your rides against these numbers you'll just learn a lot about yourself, your style of riding, your strength and weaknesses, etc. 
  • Nate ParadyNate Parady
    Rich, thanks for the input...The good news is I have incorporated much of what you describe into how I ride outdoors in terms of Joule setup and comparing one ride to another.

    One improvement for sure is knowing when to hold back a bit...that ride I show below of 3:56 with a IF of .87 had me cooked for a few days.

    Great input...
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