In threads where training philosophy comes up, discussions of TRIMPS and TSS and other training models occasionally intrude. These models are not very well known, and even more poorly understood, so probably SolarEnergy, qbrain and I are just talking to each other and killing threads in those conversations. In any case, I figured I would present a brief overview of what it is that we're talking about when this terminology starts showing up.
Best case, this will introduce these models to the subset of swimmers (or coaches) who would be interested enough to use them, but didn't previously know enough to do so.
Plus, even if you're not the type to be interested in quantifying your training, it can be useful to think about workouts in this general framework.
And, at the very least, this might serve as a place to discuss some of the details without worrying about driving those other threads too far off-topic.
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Q-points are not all that transferable between people of differing abilities. 1000 points for me will probably not represent the same amount of training as 1000 points for someone else. That might be okay if the time constants associated with the impulse response are a little more uniform. (They probably are, but I'm sure not everyone has the same time constants.)
The normal assumption is that these time constants are fairly transferable. You can (some have) fit the time constants, but it requires a lot of data and work.
It's fairly reasonable to think that they should be constant. They have a fairly biological interpretation, and are related to the rates at which your body can build new mitochondria, or hemoglobin, etc. It seems reasonable to think that these biological rates would be pretty similar across individuals.
This is why qbrain's discarding of the swimmer-specific constants makes so much sense, since they're all just linear coefficients. As long as I don't care about comparing points with you, i can scale my points by whatever factor I like.
Edit: for the same reason, it's not worth fussing about whether the 100 in qbrain's formula is yards or meters. Since I swim SCY, I have been using 100 yards rather than 91.44 meters to do my calculations to make life easier. That means my "yards-points" are not the same as qbrain's "meter-points", but we already knew that we can't compare points across different swimmers. The only time the units matter is if I want to compare points earned in an SCY pool to points earned (by me) in a SCM or LCM pool.
Q-points are not all that transferable between people of differing abilities. 1000 points for me will probably not represent the same amount of training as 1000 points for someone else. That might be okay if the time constants associated with the impulse response are a little more uniform. (They probably are, but I'm sure not everyone has the same time constants.)
The normal assumption is that these time constants are fairly transferable. You can (some have) fit the time constants, but it requires a lot of data and work.
It's fairly reasonable to think that they should be constant. They have a fairly biological interpretation, and are related to the rates at which your body can build new mitochondria, or hemoglobin, etc. It seems reasonable to think that these biological rates would be pretty similar across individuals.
This is why qbrain's discarding of the swimmer-specific constants makes so much sense, since they're all just linear coefficients. As long as I don't care about comparing points with you, i can scale my points by whatever factor I like.
Edit: for the same reason, it's not worth fussing about whether the 100 in qbrain's formula is yards or meters. Since I swim SCY, I have been using 100 yards rather than 91.44 meters to do my calculations to make life easier. That means my "yards-points" are not the same as qbrain's "meter-points", but we already knew that we can't compare points across different swimmers. The only time the units matter is if I want to compare points earned in an SCY pool to points earned (by me) in a SCM or LCM pool.
