So today I did Carpathian Peak +2 and I struggled a bit. Half way through the third u/o interval I had to drop the intensity to 94% to complete it.
I’m using an Elite Suito in ERG mode and I have a Stages PM for my outdoor rides. Both have the latest FW. Following some feedback from @jpowers in another thread I started having a closer look at the power readings of the trainer vs the Stages as the Stages seems to report higher power than the Elite trainer.
So, prior to starting my training and after warming up the Elite, I calibrated both.
During the training, I noticed that the Stages was consistently reporting significant higher power outputs. Especially at ‘higher’ wattage, the absolute difference was quite high: eg the target for the overs was 232W, however my Stages was indicating I was doing around 260W…
For the entire ride, TR (using the data from the trainer) reported an avg power of 170 - IF=0.87
My Garmin and Zwift (both using the Stages data) reported an avg power of 182 - IF=0.936…
FTP is set to the same value on all platforms.
I’ve tried to overlay the Garmin power (Stages data - purple line) on top of the TR (trainer data), aligning scales as good as possible:
So, if my stages is the most accurate and the Elite Suito becomes more inaccurate as the Wattages go up, my training intensity is quite a bit higher than prescribed, especially for the Sweetspot and Threshold work… This would mean that my sweet spot is actually work above threshold, etc… I’m thinking that recovery from those might be harder than intended. Short term, I’m thinking, hey if I can do this harder work, it’s only going to make me stronger, but I’m not sure longer term how this would play out as I understand that recovery would be quite a bit harder etc. Is this going to be a problem?
This might also explain why I struggled so much doing today’s workout as all intervals appeared to be above FTP vs under/over FTP.
Alternatively, my Stages is off and the Elite is the most accurate. In that case I’ll just ignore the Stages data altogether for my indoor training. Not sure how I should go about the data from my outdoor rides then…
Does anyone have the Elite Suito and Stages and have you observed similar challenges? How did you deal with those?
Or it is perhaps time to contact Elite and Stages support to have a look at the data?