Add stage races to the mix
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Just manually adjust down. I did that before today’s SS and my legs and nervous system are much happier! One week was enough suffering for me.
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Been following this thread for a while, since I also got an increase that didn’t seem reasonable.
My AiFTP before the new system was 334. I thought it was a bit optimistic, but not too far away. I’ve mainly been avoiding Threshold and Sweet spot workouts though, replacing them with zwift races recently. While my Endurance, VO2max, and Anaerobic WLs are fairly high while Threshold/Sweet spot were at ~2.5 before the new AI detection. The new AI FTP ended up at 349, which matches my max 9 min power on TR.
The new detection came just before a rest week and the new rest weeks actually looks much better. Previously it liked to schedule James on almost all days I had a workout, likely because of my high Endurance WL and it seemed limited to 90 min even on weekends. With the new system the intensity of all the workouts is lower and it lets me do 4 hour weekend rides at low intensity too.
In general the long endurance rides on weekends looks good too. Previously it liked to schedule workouts like Vogelsang +2 and Longfellow for my 4 hour Saturday ride, which is generally a bit too much given that I have a group ride scheduled on Sundays. Now the Saturday ride is at lower intensity and the dynamic time looks promising.
After the rest week a new build phase was starting and that looked crazy. Thanks to this thread I saw that you can set training approach for individual zones. Keeping endurance at demanding and dropping the rest to balance made it at least look survivable.
With that and other changes through the week has made the AiFTP prediction jump between 358 and 360.
Like many others I got Cloudripper -2 as first Threshold workout. It was originally scheduled on Friday with Sweet spot today, but I switched those around to be able to get a benchmark and the Sweet spot will likely be replaced with a Zwift race.
TR predicted the workout to be Hard at 52% and 42% Very Hard. I managed to push through. Having to stand up and grind through the last interval, without any recovery in the “under” part, I rated it as Maximum effort. Sure, sleep wasn’t optimal and maybe it would “only” be Very Hard with better sleep, but no way it would be just Hard.
At least the it’s only predicting an increase to 351 in two weeks instead of 360. The harder Threshold workout next week has been replaced with another Cloudripper -2 and after the predicted AiFTP increase there is a Wheel -2, which seems very similar. Still predicting them to be Hard.
So, it looks like the beatings will continue until morale improves. We’ll see if I’ll suffer through any more of these. I’ll probably try at least a sweet spot too and see how it feels. I don’t really want to lose the AiFTP detection, since a big reason for using TR is that I don’t want to do manual tests. Maybe other zones feel fine with this FTP and I can just replace Threshold and Sweet spot with Zwift races?
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Remember, you can always look at the workout the day before and say something like:
“It wants me to hold 310 watts for 3 × 15 as, in theory, sweetspot. I don’t think I can do that, but I reckon 295 is do-able, so I’m deciding now that as soon as I start the workout tomorrow I’m going to reduce the intensity by 5% and complete it at that level. If I want to bring the intensity back up for the third interval, I can do that.”
If you want to. It’s another option. Possibly a better one than working too hard.
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Lately I had been thinking the projection was useless but that is a good point. It will be interesting to play around with my weekend rides and see what happens
Maybe that would work. Just a question of how to rate the RPE to train the AI detection properly. I think previous recommendation has been to rate it as maximum effort if you lower the intensity. How does the new system handle things? Does it match the RPE with how the workout was prescribed or with how it was performed?
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I’m maybe going to try this and see what happens once I’ve finished my current block in a couple of weeks. I’ll set the RPE to reflect the work I did. It’ll be interesting to see what happens.
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