Recovery Calculator — Post-Ride Recovery Time

Recovery Estimation

The starting point is your Training Stress Score (TSS). Dr Andrew Coggan's published TrainingPeaks recovery bands are the anchor for this estimate:

• Under 150 TSS — low stress; you should be recovered by the next day.
• 150–300 TSS — medium stress; some residual fatigue the next day, gone by the second day.
• 300–450 TSS — high stress; residual fatigue can linger even after two days.
• Over 450 TSS — very high; expect several days (an "epic" can take longer).

To turn those bands into a number, the model uses roughly 1 hour of recovery per 5 TSS points, which lands inside each published band at the 150 / 300 / 450 breakpoints (≈30 h, ≈60 h, ≈90 h).

Two small adjusters are layered on top:

• Felt-effort / muscle-damage adjuster: Easy (×0.6), Moderate (×0.8), Hard (×1.0), Race (×1.3). Note that TSS already encodes intensity via IF² (TSS ≈ duration_h × IF² × 100), so this is not double-counting your power — it is a small allowance for the extra muscle damage and nervous-system fatigue that very hard or all-out efforts add beyond the raw number.
• Age allowance: +1% per year over 30. Trained masters cyclists usually recover at a similar objective rate to younger riders but report more subjective fatigue, so this is a conservative cushion rather than a measured rate.

This is a simplified, non-clinical estimate. Actual recovery depends on many individual factors including sleep, nutrition, hydration, stress and overall training history.