TSB? What is THAT?

tomdavis80 said:

I'm having trouble trying to understand what TSB is in the PMC in WKO+. I understand the concepts of ATL and CTL but for the life of me, I can't figure out what exactly is TSB? Anyone? Also, how would you use this data? What's it good for? How does it play into planning and training?

TSB (Training Stress Balance) is just CTL - ATL and it's intended as a measure of form or readiness to put out best efforts. During training it's normally negative since you should be ramping up CTL and ATL but ATL climbs faster. When you rest or taper for an event CTL drops more slowly than ATL and your TSB rebounds towards or into the positive numbers. You should expect to see best performances during these rebounds. TSB is a good way of visualizing how deep a "hole" you're digging during hard training periods and how much you rebound during rest or tapers. It can be a useful metric for planning training, rest and for peaking for key events.

Here's an intro by Hunter Allen: http://www.swimsmooth.com/Documents/Performance_Manager.pdf

-Dave

daveryanwyoming said:

TSB (Training Stress Balance) is just CTL - ATL and it's intended as a measure of form or readiness to put out best efforts. During training it's normally negative since you should be ramping up CTL and ATL but ATL climbs faster. When you rest or taper for an event CTL drops more slowly than ATL and your TSB rebounds towards or into the positive numbers. You should expect to see best performances during these rebounds. TSB is a good way of visualizing how deep a "hole" you're digging during hard training periods and how much you rebound during rest or tapers. It can be a useful metric for planning training, rest and for peaking for key events.

Here's an intro by Hunter Allen: http://www.swimsmooth.com/Documents/Performance_Manager.pdf

-Dave

Good explanation - I couldn't have said it better myself (literally!).

One additional point: in the Performance Manager chart, your TSB on day X is the difference between CTL and ATL on day X-1. The reason for this is that you almost always want to know how "fresh" you are before you train (or race) on a particular day, not how (un)fresh you are afterwards.