Training Score Explained: What the % Really Means (2026)
Your dashboard says 43 %. Forty-three percent of what, exactly? It's the single most common question our support inbox gets. Here's the honest answer.
The one-sentence answer
100 % is one full training week. Your Training Score percentage says how much of that week you've actually done.
Not 43 % of some universal maximum. Not 43 % of what a professional rides. 43 % of the week your plan built for you, this week, with your body's current state baked in.
Everything below is the fine print on that sentence: where the number comes from, why your weekly target moves around, and why it behaves differently from the load numbers you know from TrainingPeaks, Strava or Garmin.
Per session vs. per week — two numbers, one scale
Two things get mixed up constantly, and they separate cleanly once you see them side by side.
Per session, every activity gets its own absolute Training Score. A hard interval workout might come out at 25 points. A short recovery spin at 4. No percentage — just points.
Per week, those session scores add up. That sum is what gets shown as a percentage.
So a session score of 25 is roughly a quarter of a full week's adaptation stimulus. It isn't "25 % done" — it's 25 points on exactly the same scale the whole week is measured on.
Where you see it: on your dashboard, and in the training calendar (week view, on the left). The calendar shows both sides of the equation — for example "Target 92 %, done 111 %". You went over your target. That is allowed, and it's information, not a failure.
The small ℹ icons next to each value in the app explain the individual numbers in place. This article is the long version.
Your weekly target is not a constant
This is the part that trips people up. The target itself moves.
A recovery week, a week where you simply don't have the hours, or a low Body Reserve will all set your weekly target below 100 %. That's why "Target 92 %" is a completely normal thing to see on a Monday morning.
Two limits decide that target, and the lower one always wins:
- The block limit — how much your current training block can absorb. It scales with the ambition level you selected in your plan settings: a relaxed setting genuinely asks less of you than an all-in one.
- The status ramp — its starting point is your training memory: the last four weeks count in full, older weeks fade gradually, reaching back about twelve weeks. A single strong week no longer expires overnight, and a short interruption does not reset you to zero. After a real break the entry point is additionally capped against your recent actual load — you are not handed your old form outright. From there, the plan adds ten to fifteen points per week depending on the sport (running 10, cycling 15).
Your weekly target is the smaller of those two numbers. Every week. No exceptions.
"My plan is too easy" — the second-most-common message we get
Now the ramp explains itself. Come back from a break — holiday, illness, a work crunch — and your plan deliberately starts below your old form and climbs from there. The memory keeps it proportionate: two weeks of illness cost you roughly one week of build-up, and even after six weeks off the bike you are back at 100 in about four weeks — typically 65 → 80 → 95 → 100. And if you demonstrably were fit, you do not restart from zero: the ramp has a floor that follows your earlier level.
That is overload protection working as designed, not a bug. Building back gradually instead of jumping straight to where you left off is one of the oldest and least controversial heuristics in endurance training — it exists because the alternative is how athletes get injured or sick in week two.
The same mechanism is behind the other version of this complaint: "why did it plan me a 27-minute ride when I had two hours?" Short sessions with an unused time budget, no recovery week scheduled, and a planned weekly score well under 100 % — that combination is the ramp, every time.
Manual training volume — the override
If you're an experienced athlete and you know your ramp is too conservative for your situation, there's a deliberate way out.
In your training plan, under Input tab → plan attributes, set manual training volume to your intended average training hours per week. On the next recalculation, the plan builds to that volume instead of deriving it from your training history. The status ramp gets bypassed; the progression logic then applies on top of your stated baseline.
It's there on purpose, and it's the right lever if you know what you're doing. It is also the reason we don't hide the ramp from you: if you understand what set your target, you know exactly which screw to turn.
The display colours are not your target
One clarification that saves a lot of confusion, because the app shows two different things that both involve Training Score numbers.
The coloured zones on the daily score display are exactly that — display colouring. They tell you at a glance whether a day was light, solid or heavy. They are not a target you're supposed to hit.
Your actual target is the weekly one described above: the lower of block limit and status ramp. If you chase a daily colour band instead, you will fight your own plan. Read the week, not the shade.
What the 100 % actually represents
Here's where our number stops resembling everyone else's.
A full week — the 100 % — corresponds to the maximum weekly energetic depletion your physiology supports, derived from the metabolic model established by Alois Mader (Mader & Heck 1986; Mader 2003), with per-zone corrections we fit from our own data: 1,202 athletes, 15,000+ power tests and over a million analysed training sessions.
Read that again, because it's the whole point: your 100 % is a function of your physiology, not of a formula constant. Someone with a higher VO2max has a different absolute ceiling than you do. Your own ceiling moves when your engine changes.
That is why the plan needs a real measurement to work from — and why a Powertest changes your numbers, not just your ego.
Body Reserve — the number underneath
The Training Score is one half of a pair. The other half is your Body Reserve.
Every session you record draws on that reserve. Every day you don't train, it recovers a little. The plan's job for a normal training week isn't to push the reserve as low as possible — it's to steer it toward roughly the middle of the scale, because that's where adaptation happens.
This has a counter-intuitive consequence: a very high Body Reserve is not automatically good news. It can simply mean too little stimulus. And when it drops too far, the system starts protecting you — your weekly target comes down, and hard days get trimmed.
So when your target changes without you changing anything: that's the reserve talking.
Readiness owns the day. The block owns the week.
A third number, Daily Readiness, is blended from your sleep, HRV and resting-heart-rate scores. It governs the day only.
There's a clean division of labour, and it resolves the apparent contradiction athletes ask about most:
- Hard week scheduled + bad night's sleep + Body Reserve still fine → the hard week stays. The block-level plan doesn't panic over one night.
- But today's intervals get shortened, dropped, or the session is skipped entirely. Readiness has the last word on the day.
Two time scales that complement each other. The week holds; the dose adapts.
Training Score vs. TSS, Relative Effort and Training Load
If you're coming from another platform, this is the difference that matters — and it's a difference in method, not in quality.
| Metric | What it measures | Reference point | Says what you can still do? |
|---|---|---|---|
| TSS (TrainingPeaks) | intensity × duration | your threshold (FTP) | no |
| Relative Effort (Strava) | time spent in heart-rate zones | your HR zones | no |
| Training Load (Garmin) | post-exercise oxygen consumption (EPOC) | your rolling 7-day load | no |
| Training Score (A Faster You) | energetic depletion in a metabolic model | a full week of adaptation at your physiology | yes — via Body Reserve |
All three of the others are output metrics. They're well-built, widely validated, and they answer one question honestly: how much did you just do?
They do not have a capacity counterpart. Nothing in a TSS number tells you how much is left in the tank — that's why you need a coach, a spreadsheet or a gut feeling on top of it.
Our Training Score runs the other direction. It's the visible face of a capacity model, which is precisely why your weekly target changes when you take a break, sleep badly, or hit a recovery week. If the number never moved, it wouldn't be telling you anything about your body.
The honest trade-off: a threshold-based number is simpler and more transparent — 100 TSS is always 100 TSS. Ours is more personal, but it requires a valid measurement of your physiology to mean anything. That's the deal. Pick the one that matches how you want to train.
Methodology: where these numbers come from
We don't aggregate other people's tables. The per-zone corrections in the weekly model are fitted on our own database — 1,202 athletes, 15,000+ power tests, 1M+ analysed training sessions — on top of the published Mader metabolic model. Session scores are computed by the backend pipeline with zone weighting and recomputed after every activity sync, so the value your plan uses is always the value your activity actually produced.
The exact internal calibration constants aren't published. The mechanism is, and that's what you need to steer by.
What to do with this
Three things, in order of impact:
- Read the week, not the day. One low day means nothing. A week at 60 % of a target that should have been 100 % means something.
- Fix the input before you fight the output. If your Training Score feels wrong across the board, the underlying physiological values are usually the problem — an outdated or invalid Powertest skews everything downstream of it.
- Connect all your sports. Your body doesn't split fatigue between running and cycling, and neither does the plan. Sessions that never reach the platform can't be counted — which is what the Zwift sync exists for.
Ready to see your own numbers instead of reading about them? Start your free trial — the plan builds itself around whatever your recent weeks actually looked like.
One more thing
Everything above rests on one assumption: that we know your engine. The block limit, the ramp, the full-week ceiling — all of it scales with your VO2max and your VLamax.
Which raises the obvious next question: where do those numbers come from, and how much does a watch estimate actually get right? That's a different article — and it starts here.
FAQ
What does the percentage on my Training Score refer to? To one full training week — your weekly training target. 43 % means you've completed 43 % of that week. It is not a percentage of some universal maximum, and it is not benchmarked against other athletes.
Why is my weekly target below 100 %? Because the target is set fresh each week as the lower of two limits: what your training block can absorb, and where your status ramp currently stands. A recovery week, limited available time or a low Body Reserve will all put it under 100 % on purpose.
My plan got much easier after a break. Is that a bug? No. After time off, your status ramp deliberately starts below your old form and climbs ten to fifteen points per week depending on the sport. Its memory reaches back about twelve weeks and fades gradually: two weeks of illness cost you roughly one week, and even after six weeks off you are back at 100 in about four weeks. It's overload protection. If you want to override it, set manual training volume in the plan attributes (Input tab).
Is a Training Score of 81–100 the goal? No — and this is the most common misreading. Those coloured bands are display colouring for the daily view, not a plan target. Your real target is the weekly one: the lower of block limit and status ramp.
Why do my calendar and my timeline show different numbers? Usually because they measure different things. The calendar shows your cumulative weekly score across all sports; the timeline shows the score per sport. Ride 80 points and run 40 in the same week, and the calendar says 120 while your cycling view says 80. Both are right. The plan uses the cumulative number, because your body doesn't split recovery between disciplines.
Does a rest day lower my Training Score? Your accumulated score doesn't drop — you just add nothing to it. What does change on a rest day is your Body Reserve, which recovers. That's usually the number people actually mean when they ask this.
How is this different from TSS? TSS measures intensity and duration relative to your threshold power. Training Score measures energetic depletion in a metabolic model of your physiology and pairs it with a capacity number (Body Reserve). TSS tells you what you did; Training Score also carries information about what you can still do.
Sources: Mader, A. & Heck, H. (1986). A theory of the metabolic origin of the anaerobic threshold. International Journal of Sports Medicine, 7(Suppl 1), 45–65. · Mader, A. (2003). Glycolysis and oxidative phosphorylation as a function of cytosolic phosphorylation state and power output of the muscle cell. European Journal of Applied Physiology, 88(4–5), 317–338. · TrainingPeaks, "What is TSS?" · Strava Support, "Relative Effort" · Garmin, "Training Load". Platform figures: A Faster You internal database, 1,202 athletes, 15,000+ power tests, 1M+ analysed training sessions.