right here:
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I’m sticking with fitness tests but I’m happy to see TR making progress with AI FTP Detection. My only request would be a way for AI FTP Detection to work better with outlier athletes. I know we’re a very small minority but I’m keeping hope alive!
But you’d name is Chad and all Chads are the same with knowledge, so…
When FTP goes up PL levels go down causing TiZ to decrease for TR workouts as they stand now. Workouts are done at a percent of FTP and the specific workout picked is based on your PL level. Two people with very different FTPs but the same PL level are likely to do the exact same workout. (the power levels in the workout are a percent of FTP so they would be doing them at different target powers)
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Taking a stab at this, ignore “other people” and just focus on a single rider.
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Presume a rider has trained for several weeks at a given FTP. They get an FTP update of 4% higher from TR, and then need to continue training.
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Presume no PL change/drop, which would mean the rider demand is higher from the elevated FTP even if the TIZ is the same (from workouts at the same PL).
- Maybe this would work for that rider, especially if they were rating recent workouts in the 1-3 range.
- But more often than not, I would expect people to struggle a bit with workouts at the higher FTP at the same PL.
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TR drops PL’s because it’s not necessarily likely that the rider can take the new FTP and perform the same workouts at the same PL’s. This is a practical solution to the reality & anxiety we have all seen or had after getting a higher FTP within a TR program. I and many others often struggled with the workouts following an FTP bump within the old TR plan setup.
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AT, and the PL’s that are part of the whole picture, deliberately step back a bit to make the transition to the new FTP a more gradual one that is easier to handle than the ways of old.
As we’ve seen, TR was tweaking the amount of reset in the PLs since they were initially released. We saw massive drops in the early times, but I am seeing much more gradual and practical drops in PL’s. These make a more appropriate reduction in effort for near term workouts and is far better than the constant “upwards and onwards” that was present before AT.
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The TR MacOS app updated for me this morning, and it provided the instructions on annotations coloring I was missing: the calendar now remembers the color you used for a specific annotation (e.g., Notes, Time Off, etc.) and defaults to that color the next time you use that specific annotation.
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Just for additional clarification. Either way, we could drop a Ramp Test on the calendar and use AI FTP as long as there is enough time between the last update of FTP.
Does not really matter for me as I put in another post yesterday. Pretty sure I am getting close to my max FTP. That is unless I am suddenly willing to hurt a lot more, either in ramp tests or training.
Much more appealing than what I understood it to be.
You could have a feature where if people click on manual FTP, the software could say something like, “look you could reasonably set your ftp to x but let’s be honest, you are at Level 3 in most progression levels. It is clear that you will get better progress by working through the levels. And your next update is only 17 days away…” Or something like that (or perhaps more snarky) and most of us will just get it and keep progressing.
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Intervals.icu does this with eFTP updates after relevant workouts, although presumably TR has a larger dataset to work with to get more accurate FTP estimates. I find intervals.icu to be lower than my ramp test results or TR’s auto detection, but I don’t get too excited about the gap. Absolute accuracy is not relevant. Having a relative benchmark is.
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How will this handle FTP decreases when somebody takes time off or greatly reduces volume? Will the adjustment happen in a similar fashion to the increases?
Asking for a friend 
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How would it work after an off-season or a long break ?
I’d like to think AUTO could help a lot there. Still Manual is a way to check (and correct sometimes) the automatic value if I think it doesn’t work well. Why not keep MANUAL every 14days?
Also I’d like as a user to decide whether to prioritize FTP up or PL progression out. That could be a user setting.Yes it depends on how far away I am from my A race but there are other factors too, how tired I am , what kind of stressor at work, …
This would be a brilliant update Nate. Im going to do some more TT’s and would find accurate FTP so useful.
It is a functional test not a physiological test.
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I don’t think this would be useful. Sure, pick the energy system you want to emphasize or endurance vs sprint so the workout target the improvements you want but the point of the AI is to figure out the best way to target that, not you telling the AI what to do
Intervals.icu and WKO do their FTP modeling based on the power/duration curve, and require maximal efforts of different durations for that model to be accurate. WKO even provides graphs that show what time durations you likely don’t have maximal efforts for.
To me the most interesting part of TR’s work in this area is to estimate your FTP without an accurate PD curve. If you are following a plan, you likely only have maximal efforts for short durations - VO2max intervals and shorter, and even those may not really be maximal.
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Yup! You got it!
And I suspect that if you’re new you want to go Up then Out. So if your first FTP is 140, it’s probably better to get that up to 210 (just an example) rather than focus on holding 140 for 60 minutes.
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Yup, we understand that it can be too sensitive and are making sure that doesn’t happen.
Not exactly. Here’s a better summary of the vision:
AI FTP Detection is run after each workout. It’s on for everyone and you’d see it in a summary screen along with your PLs after a workout. This is a smart feature that will take many things into context (including plan phase and PLs) on when to change your FTP.
For the “power users”, they have the option to run a manual check every 4 weeks. We don’t want to encourage this behavior but we’ll have it as an option. Many athletes won’t even discover this.
Plans will default to not having ramp tests but have an option to add them. For those on a plan with ramp tests, you could get a detection on that day (if it’s been >28 days) and have the ramp test switched out for a workout.
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Don’t worry, we won’t be presenting 1-2 watt changes. It’s better just to work through your PLs.
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Think of it like this:
FTP = Benchmark of where you are.
Progression Levels = Fine-tune adjustment of different energy systems. Effectively remove the relation between VO2/Anaerobic/Endurance/etc with FTP. If you get sick PLs will get lower (depending on how long you are sick) and will zero into your fitness post-sickness pretty quickly.
Red light/Green light = Try to protect the athlete from doing too much. IE doing a big group ride on Sat then a race on Sunday and a Vo2 on Monday. Then they fail Monday’s workout and say TR is too hard. 
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