If you go to your calendar it looks like you can associate a workout to the outdoor ride this may help reduce the sliding PL you are talking about.
I know this is some added work that you likely don’t want to have to do but for now may be the only solution for your issue?
Will it only be available if your following a training plan ?
The question is can you repeatedly do your intervals in training and get faster.
There’s a “Seven Deadly Sins” of FTP post from a LONG time ago that describes different testing methods and how good they are.
"the seven deadly sins....
...er, ways of determining your functional threshold power (roughly in order of increasing certainty):
1) from inspection of a ride file.
2) from power distribution profile from multiple rides.
3) from blood lactate measurements (better or worse, depending on how it is done).
4) based on normalized power from a hard ~1 h race.
5) using critical power testing and analysis.
6) from the power that you can routinely generate during long intervals done in training.
7) from the average power during a ~1 h TT (the best predictor of performance is performance itself).
Note the key words "hard", "routinely", and "average" in methods 4, 6 and 7..."
AI FTP Detection is essentially doing #6. It’s looking at your routinely generated intervals (but we can now look at long and short) and making a prediction.
Then Adaptive Training doubles down on #6, by constantly looking at what you’re doing in training and adjusting. All the time being able to quantifiably measure that you’re getting faster if your PLs increase.
I would argue that #7 is very very hard for most athletes. I’ve never done a properly paced hour. Hour-long climbs also have elevation and oxygen to take into consideration. And I put out way less power on my TT bike. So I’d need some sort of flat hour-long course I could do on my road bike AND put on steady power (so hard…).
And then I’d have to have the fucking motivation to even do that, which is like something I can generate once or twice a season.
We knew that testing and looking at individual ride files wasn’t the best way. And we knew we can’t expect everyone to do lactate testing routinely at home. We also know people have bad days, extra good days, low motivation, high motivation, high-stress days, etc.
So we built Adaptive Training and AI FTP Detection to constantly look at the athlete and make small changes. For those engineers out there you can think of it like a PID controller for your fitness ;-D.
And we made the system so that you can still do any testing you want or input whatever number you want in that FTP box and train away.
I haven’t actually did an indoors session since May and looking back in my calendar it looks like they were either a just hit or larger miss. I’ve marked most of my outdoors workouts since as ‘did not pass’ but I am getting faster. Motivation probably is the key and I’m guilty of over thinking 
Thanks for the insight Nate. I think the above is a very clear reason why it’s valuable/important for this AI FTP to be ‘close enough’ to what “FTP really is”, and not just some number that can be used to scale training.
Can we please make this a soft gate? So instead of having the hard gate capped at 14 it is set to 12 days? If it was 28 days change that to 26? I sometimes need to move my plan around and that means these hard caps mess up the ability to use AI detection?
100% what [grwoolf] says.
@Nate_Pearson I also think that is important that AIftp is close to a persons actual ftp because people use their ftp to scale for race efforts. I have used my ftp to scale for my power target during triathlon bike legs. If AIftp diverges from that and is just a “training metric”, it loses some value.
You bring up a very valid point.
The counter argument to your logic would be if your most recent FTP test was 4 weeks ago and you hit all your targets during those 4 weeks is that still your true FTP for the event?
Agreed, it is a moving target that could vary day-to-day based on a number of factors.
I’m not sure if this has been discussed before, but reading some of the COVID threads in the forum made me wonder: @Nate_Pearson, have y’all thought about ways you can use this automated FTP detection or AT in general to aid in COVID recovery? Like for example, after a certain period of no workouts with a long sickness annotation (maybe even adding an explicit “COVID” annotation), have TR take that into account when adjusting FTP and/or PLs to aid in recovery and help people ramp back up? Reading those threads, seems like there’s a fair bit of guesswork involved in how to get back into training and what kinds of efforts to attempt while recovering, and I feel like TR’s tools could be more helpful there.
My experience is very similar to others in that AI FTP significantly overestimates hour FTP - which experienced TR users know and expect, just like ramp test - but that problem was further exacerbated in the 40k TT specialty plan when combined with AT.
Here’s the problem I saw with AT - when I finally saw a near continuous 1 hr workout, which is what I believe the latter part of the 40k plan was designed to offer - it was far above my real FTP/TTE. So AT then wanted to replace all of the near-continuous hour PL6+ workouts - which I think are a key specialty TTE objective - with lower PL workouts that were intervals/rests of long slow ramps from Z2 - essentially just falling back to the early part of the plan.
I suspect that what it should have done is find similar long hour workouts at say 90% - or - AI FTP has to recognize if you are in a TT specialty plan, a longer TTE FTP needs to be considered when planning workouts because you really need to get to those higher PLs.
I did this partially as an experiment to just “trust AI FTP, trust AT” to see what would happen - and I did OK on the interval workouts with the inflated FTP, and even the long progressions from Z2. But once TTE at threshold came into play, which is absolutely crucial for a 40k, I think the algorithms went off the ideal course.
Maybe not a dominant use case, but one I’m sure I’m not alone in. I also think it’s a good test case because all of my best efforts over a couple minutes and nearly all my recent training was on my TT bike, aero position - e.g. consistent pretty clean data going in.
I still wonder - should I have manually intervened to do a few more near max hour efforts to strengthen mental confidence in what I could do for an hour, or did I get more training benefit sticking with intervals that were well over true hour power later into the plan as I ended up doing? I think the Z2-Z4 longer ramp workouts were uniquely different from regular intervals - and challenging/helpful to start preparing for a full hour - so maybe next year I would aim to do the plan at a manually reduced FTP and get more of those near-continuous hours in or maybe even get more workout volume / consistency working at a more reasonable FTP?
To be specific, with an AI FTP of 287W, my all-out no excuse race day was 269W / 56:58, well above a practice run a few days prior at ~262W. I’m happy with it as it was good enough for a state level podium that I never imagined possible - but absolutely no way 280+W would happen! And I’m running low on aero ideas and want to keep pushing the engine up as effectively as possible - per last week’s podcast, no $15K TT bikes for me 
I think AI FTP has done a pretty decent job for me, but the last one was a little high. Maybe 5 watts, so I’ll say that’s pretty damn good. I accepted it for a day just to capture it (and stroke my ego a bit), but then adjusted it down a little before my next interval workout. The byproduct was that it kind of monkeyed with my progression levels with the bumped up FTP, so in hindsight I should have rejected it. Not a big deal, the system will eventually bump those back up if I’m knocking out workouts. I think there is probably a place for some kind of adjustment for progression when you reduce your FTP (especially if it’s an obvious/immediate adjustment down from a recent bump), but either way it should take care of itself after a couple workouts with feedback. One thing I’ve definitely picked up on with AT - the system has a strong bias toward erring on the side of easier workouts and slower progressions. It’s very conservative, but that probably a good approach.
Are those wattages measured using the same power meter? I’ve also heard power inside isn’t always equivalent to power outside.
Yea, all the TR structured workouts, and vast majority of all the riding in general is done outside on TT bike, all with same power meter.
This is a very nice constructive and useful post!
But I sincerely hope you, nor your AI, will actually truly control us/me;-)
Just saw in the latest app update that you can use AI FTP Detection for scheduled Ramp Tests that are well into the future (no only in the upcoming 48h like it was before this update).
This is a bit confusing - does an FTP detection scheduled 1 month from now take into account your completed workouts, or completed + scheduled workouts up to that specific ramp test?
Hmm I know they were looking at FTP prediction… I think the key issue was a lot of people do a lot of riding that’s not scheduled in their calendar, so hard to predict…
I am pretty sure you misread that latest update text.
The real “fix” that was present there is that they are not locking the 48 hour window for FTP detection to the specific hour/minute that you last ran the AIFTPD tool. That was the case previously, and lead to some undesired restriction when people wanted to run the tool when it should have been open based on the day only.
I have read that update info twice (Android & Win updates), but didn’t bother to grab a screen shot. And due to the fact that TR doesn’t allow revisiting that info, we need to see if someone else that is yet to update can snag a picture of that info to confirm.
That or maybe @IvyAudrain can get us the official update info to clarify this issue?
I will add, that the lack of an easy access Change Log is frustrating at times like this. It’s easy to dismiss those messages when we are intent on just launching the app and doing a workout… only to realize we should have spent a bit to time to read those release notes. I know it’s been mentioned before, but I think TR is missing a step by not making access to that updated info easier outside of that singular notification.
It is now quite clear also, why TR decided on such a complicated approach. What is the point of attaching the AI detection buttons to all rump tests in the calendar? Wouldnt it be a lot easier and cleaner to just have this button located in the main menu and to grey it out if it is not available due to the time limit? The button could even have an availability countdown on it.