Golden Cheetah Bike Score

Comments

• tim cronk

  May 23, 2013 9:01AM

  My understanding is for all practical purposes Bikescore = TSS... Its just trademark and mathematical calculations.... I just compared Bikescore to TSS in one of my recent workouts and Bikescore was 94 and TSS was 96.7.... Close enough for me...

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• MikeMcMahon

  May 23, 2013 11:42AM

  Yes, Bike Score is the same as TSS. The only difference is that one uses a 30 second rolling average and the other uses a 25 second rolling average in the calculations (due to a licensing issues in Training Peaks WKO).
  
  Also, I think that xPower is pretty much the same as Normalized Power (slightly different formula, but I think the same idea). One uses exponential smoothing instead of a moving average in its calculations.
  
  Also, I think that Golden Cheetah version 3 (in development, but you can download a release candidate version) will start to use the terms TSS and Normalized Power to better align with more industry standard terms. I guess they sorted the licensing out.

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• MikeMcMahon

  May 23, 2013 11:44AM

  This is a good little article explaining the name differences.
  
  http://www.thetallcyclist.com/2012/11/making-sense-of-your-powermeter-data-golden-cheetah/
  

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• William Jenks

  May 23, 2013 3:46PM

  The main difference between TSS and Bike score (and NP vs xPower) is how they handle the rolling averages. the xPower is exponential, while the NP is a rolling boxcar. Arguably, the exponential weighting makes more sense, but that's another matter. In any case, my observation is that xPower is typically a (very) few W lower than NP and Bike score is a couple of percent lower than TSS for that reason. Otherwise, they are (as others have said) functionally equivalent. Mike is right about GC3 having NP/TSS/etc.

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• Rumpole

  May 28, 2013 2:05PM

  
  Posted By William Jenks on 23 May 2013 03:46 PM
  
  
  The main difference between TSS and Bike score (and NP vs xPower) is how they handle the rolling averages. the xPower is exponential, while the NP is a rolling boxcar. Arguably, the exponential weighting makes more sense, but that's another matter. In any case, my observation is that xPower is typically a (very) few W lower than NP and Bike score is a couple of percent lower than TSS for that reason. Otherwise, they are (as others have said) functionally equivalent. Mike is right about GC3 having NP/TSS/etc.
  

  I've found this to be true for short rides, but for longer ones > 2 hours,  xpower < NP by about 10 percent. Bikescore also lower by around same margin.  

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• Peter Greagg

  May 28, 2013 6:10PM

  Just to dig a little more into William's answer, because Np is a 'boxcar' average whereas Xpower is an 'exponential' weighted average, then if the power is very steady, both will give almost identical results. Conversely, if the power is changing a lot (and changing quickly) — think VO2 max sets — then the results will be quite different.
  
  So, as most of our long rides in season are usually spending significant time practicing riding steady, in those circumstances I would expect that these results on those types of rides would be fairly similar.

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