Effort
A unified measure of how hard a workout was, regardless of sport.
Effort is Updraft’s way of putting every workout on the same scale. Whether you went for a bike ride with a power meter or a trail run with just a heart rate monitor, Effort tells you how much stress that session put on your body.
The scale
Effort is calibrated so that one hour at your threshold intensity equals 100. A recovery spin might score 30. A hard two-hour ride could be 180. A 45-minute tempo run might land around 70.
This makes it easy to compare across sports and across days without worrying about which metrics were available.
How it’s calculated
- Cycling with power: Effort uses the standard Training Stress Score (TSS) formula based on your Functional Threshold Power (FTP) and Normalized Power.
- Heart rate–based (all sports): Effort uses a heart rate impulse (TRIMP) calculation, normalized against your lactate threshold heart rate so the numbers land on the same scale as power-based workouts.
Why it matters
A single number for training stress unlocks everything else — your training load trends, your acute-to-chronic workload ratio, and ultimately your readiness score all build on top of Effort.