Why Traditional Load Metrics Fall Short
For decades, endurance athletes have relied on outdated load metrics that don’t tell the whole story. At Vekta, we’ve built something better.
For example, imagine you and your teammate both finish the day with the exact same TSS®. You spent 4 hours in steady endurance; they rode 2.5 hours with sharp intervals.
According to TSS®, those rides were identical in training load. Physiologically, they aren’t…
The problem? Most traditional load metrics, such as Training Stress Score® (TSS®), are built on models from over 20 years ago. While groundbreaking at the time, they now oversimplify how we quantify training demands.
That gap matters. When the numbers don’t tell the full story, you risk plateauing because the true stimulus wasn’t enough, burning out because hidden stress wasn’t accounted for, or mistiming your peak because your periodisation was built on incomplete data.
Vekta’s Volume and Intensity change this. They’re two distinct, complementary metrics designed to describe a training session completely. Together, they deliver the clarity you need to train smarter, recover better, and reach peak performance at the right time.
Why It’s Time to Move Past TSS®
Most current platforms give you one score for a session. That single number blends “how much” you did with “how hard” you did it, without distinguishing between them.
Imagine these two sessions:
5 hours steady endurance
2 hours with repeated VO2max intervals
Both could produce a similar TSS®, yet their physiological demands and recovery needs are entirely different.
Recent sports science has shown why this is a problem:
Intensity isn’t linear: efforts above Critical Power (CP) cause a disproportionately higher strain.
Environment matters: altitude, heat, and even hydration status can make the same absolute power output harder to sustain.
Fatigue is cumulative: back-to-back high-intensity intervals carry more cost than the same efforts spaced apart.
Without separating Volume and Intensity, planning and periodisation remain educated guesswork.
The Vekta Solution: Two Lenses on the Same Session
At Vekta, we rethought load tracking from the ground up, combining the latest sports science with real coaching insight. Instead of one oversimplified score, we built metrics that clearly show both how much work was done and how hard it felt — the two factors that matter most for performance.
Vekta Volume
Total session demand → a macro view of how much work you’ve done.
Vekta Intensity
Effort difficulty, regardless of duration → a micro view of how hard it felt.
Think of them like distance and gradient. Distance tells you how far you’ve gone, and gradient tells you how steep it was. One without the other gives an incomplete picture.
Vekta Volume: Measuring the Total Demand
Volume is about the total demand of a session. It answers the question: how much work did I really do?
Definition: Volume represents the total energy produced during a session, adjusted for the rate of production.
Core Principles
Weight-normalised: Increases fairness across body sizes. 200W for 60kg is not the same as 200W for 80kg.
Unlimited scale: The more you do, the higher the score.
Data Needed
Power data from the session
Athlete’s body weight
Session duration
Duration required to reach a 100 Vekta Volume score
Vekta Intensity: Measuring the Difficulty
Intensity answers a different question: how hard did it feel, regardless of duration?
Definition: Intensity captures how hard a session was, regardless of how long it lasted. It’s calculated continuously throughout the ride as “local intensity” and then aggregated.
Core Principles
Above-CP weighting: Efforts above CP are disproportionately more costly, based on recent physiological models.
Athlete-specific scaling: based on CP, W′, and Pmax, so both a sprinter and a time trialist have fair scales, as do beginners and pros.
Cumulative fatigue: Repeated and prolonged intervals amplify local intensity.
Environmental adjustment: 300W at 2,000m altitude feels harder and scores higher than at sea level.
Standardized range: Always between 0 and 100 for comparability.
Examples
2h with 3 x 10 x 30/15 at VO2max → ~75 Intensity
3h with 2x20min at Threshold → ~50 Intensity
How Volume & Intensity Work Together
One number tells part of the story. Both together tell the whole story.
When you put Volume and Intensity together, the picture becomes clear: recovery rides (low + low), long endurance days (high + low), sharp interval sessions (low + high), and race-like efforts (high + high).
Volume | Intensity | Likely Session Type |
Low | Low | Recovery / Coffee ride |
High | Low | Long endurance |
Low | High | Short high-intensity |
High | High | Race conditions |
Putting Volume & Intensity Into Practice
In weekly planning, track your cumulative Volume with Vekta Load, while using Intensity to make sure you’re mixing hard days with easier ones. In periodisation, lean on high-Volume weeks to build aerobic base, and high-Intensity days to sharpen for competition. And when it comes to recovery, watch out for those high-Volume + high-Intensity days. Your signal that more rest is essential.
Weekly Planning
Track cumulative Volume using Vekta Load; use Intensity to ensure variety.
Periodisation
High-Volume weeks for aerobic base. High-Intensity days for race-specific sharpening.
Recovery Management
A High-Volume + High-Intensity day signals the need for extra recovery.
Race Analysis
Identify if fatigue came from total load or extreme moments of intensity.
The Bottom Line
Training load is complex, but traditional metrics often reduce it to a single, oversimplified number. That approach hides important details. Details that matter for performance, adaptation, and recovery.
Vekta Volume and Intensity bridge that gap. By separating how much work you do from how hard it is for you, we give athletes and coaches a clearer, more granular view of each session. This allows for more informed planning, better periodisation, and smarter decisions grounded in the latest sports science.
At Vekta, our mission is to give athletes and coaches the clearest possible view of their training. Volume and Intensity are our next step in delivering that, tools built on the latest science, designed for real-world performance.
We’re not replacing existing tools. We’re enhancing them, so your data reflects the true demands of your training.
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Further Reading
Leo, Peter & Spragg, James & Wakefield, John. (2022). The Compound Score in elite road cycling.
Training Stress Score® (TSS®) is a registered trademark owned by TrainingPeaks, LLC.
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