Hi all! I’ve been using the app to monitor my workouts for a while now, but I’ve never understood the fitness tab.
I use Trainerroad and have the workouts scheduled in the calendar, but when I go to Fitness, the graphs are erratic and don’t match reality.
What am I doing wrong?
I think you only get the name from TrainerRoad and not the workout itself and TSS Load
Intervals.icu does get load for the TR workouts. I think the issue is that you are normally doing quite a bit more than what TR has planned for you. So the “future fitness” from the workouts is much less that what you actually end up with.
It was what I thought, that I only had the descriptions. Hence the data and curve seems to be updated only when you finish a training session… but:
It makes sense, is there any way I can fix it?
I mean: i have the whole training season planned in TR, plus the free training/rides i do with my team that @david refers to.
So, how do I know what shape I’m in using Intervals.icu? I hope I’m understood, I’m using a translator. Thanks for your help guys.
Hi all. I have my Training Peaks calendar synced, but my fitness graph doesn’t show future fitness. Does intervals pull the load from TP or just the workout name? It looks to me like it is just the name… if so, is there a way to get the load/tss to come through? @david
You can simply create a workout with a load coresponding more or less to your free training rides with your team and add it to you calendar in place of your future team rides.
your fitness is around 80 so it means 80 tss abg for a week and the trainingfrom the picture is like 50tss avg so the graph is deeping
I understand what you mean, although maybe it’s a bit complicated for me (a bit tedious at least). I mainly use the app to learn how to interpret (little by little) my training data and check that everything is going well. Also to have a record of my marks. I’m very happy with TR workouts, maybe it’s too much to ask that intervals.icu also predicts my free rides, right? Thanks for your replies, I will follow the topic closely.
ok so from the beginning 
Tss - training stress score
tss = 100 when you ride for an 1 hour at your ftp
so for example your trainings are around 60tss and 1h30m long that means they are below treshold and are more or less not that hard and on mon 30tss is easy ride
Important: ftp test is crutial to set your treshold, all other data is taken from your ftp or hr. It would still be 1h=100 tss but if your ftp is too low your training will be too easy and if too high you can overttain yourself. Or in other words with frp set too low you ride same watts but interval thinks all the rides are above ftp and you get high tss score or if ftp is too high interval thinks your ride is very easy and give you very low tss. So some people push harder and they train too hard even when the score is low.
Load 259 is just your weekly tss sum and you can divide by 7 to get your avg weekly tss 259/7=37
now:
Your fitness chart shows rollng avg of your load from last 62 days (if i remember correctly the number). But your Ffitness is 81 and not 37. That means the week from the picture is very easy compared to previous ones (you have 81 tss avg for last 62 days that means some of the days were really hard and or very long -it iis hard to ride more then 1h @ ftp and get tss above 100 but still you can ride easier for 5 hours and you will get 150 tsso or more). Second possibility is you’ve changed ftp to much higher (earlier weeks were with much lower ftp and intervals sees them as all above ftp). As i said earlier it is always 1h@ftp100 tss so if you had your ftp set too low you could rget high fitness score without riding a lot. You just got a lot of time above ftp. Evry ride has its own ftp so you can just check some of the earlier rides.
Fatigue is just your weekly avg tss so i see many weeks above 100 which is very very hard. After such weeks you ahould take a rest week or there is a high possibility your body will find a way to rest (injury, ilness …) assuming ftp is correct
Form is Fitness minus fatigue (more or less)
now 2:
Intervals can be used to plan a whole season. That means you periodise your trainings. The idea is to slowly progress load and duration during the season (without slow progression, fatigue would skyrocket and form sink very fast) So for example after hard weeks as on your pictjre you see your form is getting lower but after every 3 weeks you plan a rest week with much lower loads (less then half of the proper week) to rise your form and make space for new higher loads. That way you can plan whole season from load perspective. (imagine lifting weights, you can’t start from 300kg but you can predict that if you start from 100kg and rise little by little weight you will eventualy get there and important nthing to remember from training lerspective lifting 150kg all the time is pointless and creates onle strees for your body, the idea behind trainig. is to push a litte above your limit, take some rest to give your body time to adapt and again push a little harder and so on always looking for not pushing too hard or resting too little and figness chart helps planning training that way)
Now back to your qestion. You can populate the intervals calendar with tr workouts. The main complain about tr is lack of proper rest weeks so probably you won’t get them so you should watch for your form by yourself and add some rest days or weeks acordingly to your mood and overall feeling. Remember that all the graphs are just simple math and they can’t see your overall “life load”. Your feeling are always more important than graphs and beeing a good athlete is more or less lnowing when to traing and how hard but more importantly when to rest.
But back to main topic. When you add tr plan to your calendar you will get a graph of your fitness. But as you said earlier some of the rides are out of the plan. And lack of them planned is probably destroying your future fitness graph. But you can just create some simple workouts (the workout builder is very easy) and looking back at your group rides you create a workout with similiar load (for example put -2h z3 into workout builder and look for load ) and add it in all the places you think you will ride a group ride. Then look at your fitness chart again. Next level would be to look at the form chart and search for red places or very low green and for example if the weekly load gets very high just skip one tr workout (remember that tr doesn’t know about your group rides too) or skip group ride if it ia during rest week and you know that riding weasy with friends is not possible. And even more next level would be to plan next season for example starting from some base tr program then next program of tempo/sweet spots and next one of treshold or vo2max ofc with rest weeks inbetween and all the time checking for weekly load when adding group rides.and overall ramp rate (a graph showing how fast your fitness is rising should be ~4 a week /it depends how long you train and what part of season it is, during build period it can be higher)
.
ps. intervals can’t predict anything. it is just simple math to better let you plan youe season. But you can gather all other data like sleep hr hrv and compare. It is getting more important when you are closer to your training limit where an extra interval on monday will end in missed training on friday or lack of aleep or higher strees makes some trainings impossible to perform.
cheerz and ask if you have any qestion i tried to explain simple rules but i know it is hard to understand at the beginning
If you can get the workout description to include the load as “TSS 123” then this will be picked up and you future fitness updated.
Thank you very much for your response, and for your time to explain it to me!! My FTP is fine, I have been doing interval training for almost 2 years now and I usually do tests and look at the estimated data from intervals, Garmin and TR to check that the numbers are correct.
As for rest, I have to say that every 4 weeks I lower the intensity or stop altogether, depending on how I feel (it comes in the TR plan itself).
I am currently in the specialty phase for a MTB marathon competition (XCM) (I’m guessing 300+ TSS) on September 18. I want to arrive in good shape, but I also don’t want to sacrifice the sunny days of August (in the north of Spain they are few, you know). That’s why in summer I do longer and more demanding rides for the pure enjoyment (sacrificing the September goal, since many times I’m aware that I overtrain).
That is to say (see img above), there are days when I should do intervals with a TSS of 77 and I end up doing an outdoor route of 172 TSS. Here I think the problem with my Fitness tab lies, as you rightly point out: having done a few weeks with a lot of TSS, the workouts of the current week (and future weeks), do not produce enough fatigue.
I will definitely try to add those rides to the calendar. The only problem is that they are planned on short notice, often overnight! Thanks for your help, things are becoming much clearer 
If your FTP is fine then it is all about proper tranining scheduling
You can add a race tag to you fitness chart. Nice little feature, but helps a lot. And besides the race day, you can set and name training blocks you are actualy doing.
/add entry → race or notes
Thats good. Tr and other platforms are designed for time constrained athletes so they omit longer rides most of the time. So nothing wrong with longer rides and actually they are very good for your overall fitness. And getting fun from riding should be always something you care most i think. We are not pro riders at the and of the day.
Things to remember while doing them during the training plan is:
-treat them as long base rides z2 with no extra surges (every surge will make your next weeks interval training weaker and we dno.t want that) just to have fun, ride longer distance, drink coffee 70km from home and go back
-if it is a group ride and you ride hard with your friends just treat it from your plan perspective as a prep race. All surges, hard uphills allowed but remember about proper rest day or two days after. We train during winter just to have more of that space for such rides, winter for training - summer for having fun or racing
If you can add some hard efforts to you plan and you don`t feel tired then probably your training plan is too easy and the overall load is to low for you. With a more demanding plan, a unscheduled hard ride would make the hard session next week really impossible to ride. It is weird that your MTB plan is not around 750tss weekly. But it can be their algorithm is so clever that it is lowering your weekly tss while it knows you like to add extra 300tss as a fun ride or two
I think you have two ways to solve the problem. (maybe there is a way to add group rides into tr and push their algorithm to edit your plan but i don’t know tr from inside and as said earlier their algorithm can try to lower your tss)
Very easy and it`s more of a hack then solving a problem. It would be to set the unscheduled rides as irrevelant for counting your load (it is the first option in actions menu of your ride). Then the graph would correspond to your tr plan. You should not do that but the option is there. The graph would be nice but irrevelant.
Much better but harder would be to correct your plan accordingly. I mean if you can ride longer and harder then your plan thinks and more importantly without negative overtraining effects, then you should stick with your group rides when you want but edit all the planned workouts accordingly. So for example:
-your fitness score is 81 (81x7=567 weekly load to maintain fitness, lower to lose or rest, higher to build, I oversimplify a little - numbers should be higher to compensate for longer fitness avg))
-you enter your race into calendar and plan backwards from it:
race → taper week with some easy rides and leg openers and much lower load (for example 250-300 tss) → peak week with short hard vo2max efforts and couple of z2 rides (around 600tss can be lower then speciality while vo2max are moretaxing) → specialty phase (560 → 650 tss) /the block you can get from tr
-add one or two extra intervals or 30m z2 to each tr ride to get your planned tss for the week exactly as you do with the group rides but in a more planned way. Nothing wrong with riding 1h easy and performing your workout at the end of the ride.
-in trainig it is always about proper relation between hard and easy efforts. But couple of hard efforts and a lot of z2 rides is a great compromise so tto stick with around 80tss you can either add volume (more hours but you need time) or add some hard efforts (but you need to be carefull with your stress levels)
-if you`ve built to 80 fitness and your body adapted to that load, you can use that fitness to train harder otherway it would be kind of waste of earlier training
-to sum up: plan your your tss and change your plan acordingly. It will be very oversimplified but imagine your mtb marathon is 250tss (just for example) so it would be amazing to ride it from a perspective of fitness around 80 (after a tapered week coming from 85 to be fresh). It would be similar effort to three consecutive of your training days - hard but not impossible. From a perspective of your tr plan of around 40tss it would be a load of 6 days of training. And 6 days of load from 80tss perspective would mean a marathon at 480tss.
ps. i would ask trainingroads forum how to proper integrate group rides into your training plan made by their algortihm.
I need a little time to sort out my thoughts, but I think I’m getting the hang of it.
Thanks for your help 
