Although most attention is likely to be focused on application of the Performance Manager to managing the peaking process, other benefits to this approach clearly exist and should not be overlooked. For example, experience to date indicates that, across a wide variety of athletes and disciplines (e.g., elite amateur track cyclists, masters-age marathon MTB racers, professional road racers), the “optimal” training load seems to lie at a CTL somewhere between 100 and 150 TSS/d. That is, individuals whose CTL is less than 100 TSS/d usually feel that they are undertraining, i.e., they recognize that they could tolerate a heavier training load, if only they had more time available to train and/or if other stresses in life (e.g., job, family) were minimized. (Note that this does not necessarily mean that their performance would improve as a result, which is why the word “optimal” in the sentence above is in quotes). On the other hand, few, if any, athletes seem to be able to sustain a long-term average of >150 TSS/d. Indeed, analysis of powermeter data from riders in the 2006 Tour de France and other hors category international stage races indicates that the hardest stages of such races typically generate a TSS of 200-300, which illustrates how heavy a long-term training load of >150 TSS/d would be (since the average daily TSS of, e.g., the Tour de France is reduced by the inclusion of rest days and shorter stages (e.g., individual time trials), and it is generally considered quite difficult to maintain such an effort for 3 wk, much less for the 3+ mo it would take for CTL to fully “catch up”). Of course, even if this general guideline of 100-150 TSS/d eventually proves to be incorrect, this does not change the fact that the Performance Manager approach makes it possible to quantify the long-term training load of any athlete in a manner that a) takes into account, via TSS, the volume and intensity of their training relative to that individual’s actual ability (i.e., functional threshold power), and b) does so in a manner that is consistent with the effective time course of adaptation to training, as determined using the impulse-response approach.