So April is rolling around and this is about the time I dust off the TT bike and start riding it again in preparation for TT season (15k generally but want to get back to 40ks this year).
My plan is a Masters 40k TT with an A race at the beginning of August with two hard sessions per week, one midweek endurance ride, and a Sunday Dynamic Endurance ride up to 3 hrs. I am not a huge fan of endurance rides in ERG so I’ve set these up as solo rides. My FTP predictor has been safely turned off since about the day after it was launched but I’ve had consistent, solid gains with TR AI.
The issue for me, from a training perspective, is a decrease in power in my aero position vs my typical road position (~5-10% depending on how often I ride the TT bike).
Now that AI FTP being an anchor point for workout selection. my current thinking is to do all the interval stuff on the TT bike, either indoors or out and initially just manually decrease AI FTP. Having had 3 months of TR AI I am fairly sure I know what “Hard” is supposed to feel like for me so maybe I’d start with a 5% drop? If that’s still too high I’d know pretty quickly.
The endurance rides would be on my roadbike or my gravel/CX bike but I’d get in at least a couple of longer rides on the TT bike as well. I understand that the IF etc for these rides might be over-inflated if I take my roadbike because of the manual FTP drop but I think I might be OK being slightly over on these?
I have never used my FTP # to formally pace, I go by PE and use my power meter to ensure I don’t go off too hard and then as an anti-lollygagging measure later (thank you whoever came up with that on here recently).
So I think I am looking for an FTP # as a way to pick appropriate hard workouts in the TT position, which should be what AI FTP does now. I suspect there are lots of things I haven’t considered, but is there something really major that I’ve missed?
I think the fundamental issue is that manually moving ftp up or down does not make the prescribed workout harder/easier in the current system (unless you pin/lock all your workouts). TR is only looking at what work you have done (time and watts), it doesn’t care what your ftp is set at. And then it prescribes a workout based on the time/watts it thinks you should be doing. FTP only comes into play to find a workout that best fits the time/watts TR thinks you should do. So, lower your ftp manually and TR will just change the scheduled workout to one with a higher progression level (but theoretically equivalent in difficulty and goals). In practice, it’s not that clean and you can run into weirdness, but that’s the general idea. Bottom line is that manually manipulating ftp in the current system is not an effective mechanism to make workouts harder or easier. Better to just use the adjustment mechanism in the workout, eventually the system should recognize the lower watts and adjust workouts going forward.
All of that is based on my understanding of the current system, I could certainly be wrong and maybe there is a better way to manage. I’d suggest reaching out to support and tell them what you are trying to do. They might have a better workaround.
Bad idea. Just accept TR’s AI FTP in your training and use a different number for pacing if necessary. You’d have to do that anyway, because for most people, their FTP in a TT position tends to be lower than their FTP in a regular position.
Longer explanation: TR uses the FTP when selecting the correct workouts, but not when it judges how well you did (the workout scoring algorithm). Your FTP acts as an intermediary that converts workouts in TR’s library, which are all specified relative to one’s FTP. With the FTP you have set, these workouts are then converted into absolute watts. These workouts in absolute watts are then scored by TR AI, which, again, has no concept of FTP. Your proposal would artificially limit the workouts available to you.
That completely contradicts everything Nate has said since TrainerRoad AI was released. He has said multiple times that the AI software doesn’t know, or need to know, your FTP as it works purely from the watts you have produced in previous workouts.
This is all you need to do. No other changes or work arounds.
Rate your effort truthfully at the end of the workout. If you are certain you know you are weaker in TT position, then turn down the intensity 5%. AI should adapt.
No, it does not. This has been covered several times before:
TR AI consists of scoring algorithms, among other things, and these know nothing about your FTP. This is what @Nate_Pearson is referring to.
TR’s entire workout library has power defined relative to FTP, though. So TR AI has no idea what to with them since it expects absolute power numbers.
TR’s AI FTP acts as a mediator between TR AI and TR’s workout library: the FTP is used to translate workouts from “percentage of FTP” to “absolute power”. These are then fed into TR AI and scored. Based on the scores, TR AI selects the most suitable workout.
AI FTP is optimized to give TR AI workouts in the “fat part” of the bell curve, which gives TR AI access to workouts that suit you best. If you adjust your FTP manually, you may get less-than-ideal workouts prescribed, because you artificially limit your selections.
In the future, I expect TR to release a “dynamically generated workouts” feature, which could circumvent FTP altogether. But right now TR AI is reliant on TR’s huge workout library.
This is a true statement - if you manually change your FTP the workout difficulty of future workouts will change in the opposite direction to cancel it out.
Thanks to you and @grwoolf - that was the piece I was missing!
And thank you to everyone in the thread, I think I’ll go and just manually change the workout intensity when I do my intervals on the TT bike and wait for AI FTP to catch up.
I start this week, so let’s see how this works - always fun to play with the system and see what happens
but I’ve had consistent, solid gains with TR AI.
