This has never happened before. I have been following a plan for almost a year now.
and also been using Trainerroad for years. I have never had my ftp drop from one month to the next when following a plan. It was only 2 watts but was somewhat surprised. Any thoughts?
Would need more info but 2w (imo) is noise.
Have you been consistent with completion of workouts?
Has your volume been steady or increasing?
I assume this is ai ftp and not a ramp test or long form ftp test.
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Here we go again…
@Muskiecast At some point, we all plateau based on the volume/load we can contribute to training.
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Yes this is ai ftp. very consistent and have completed the workouts. I went from sustained power build to an olympic triathlon plan. There has been a few yellow days. I have been following all the adaptions.
I would probably ask tr support to take a look as the data we have here leads to basically just speculation.
It could be that you are plateauing as @AJS914 said, it could be the workouts you are doing are not enough to push your abilities or they are the wrong ones to increase your ftp but are working on others parts of your power curve.
You can always go do a long form test to validate a higher ftp if you think your current one is too low.
Hopefully TR staff can chime in as they can see your data and will have a better idea of what is going on.
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Where we going?
I think he’s referencing a big thread from a couple weeks ago about AI FTP reducing after successfully completing all prescribed workouts
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Hopefully not off the rails like the last topic with a similar title.
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This
And this.
Actually, unless you are still in your 20’s, the plateau will eventually turn downward as we age if we don’t keep introducing additional training stress (via intensity and/or volume). Nothing wrong with maintaining or just slowing your decline, but if you want to keep adding watts, you have to keep adding more and more training stress. The good news is that most of us amateurs are so far away from our genetic potential that we can keep improving well into our 40’s, 50’s and even much older for some.
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Ok thanks, i get that. I guess since this ai is somwhat new was wondering if there were flaws people may have encountered.
Thanks for the input.
Whether or not this is normal depends on the type of training, certainly in the offseason and during certain kinds of blocks it may be not possible to express your true peak. For this reason FTP is such an annoying metric because it’s loosely defined.
As an example : If you go do a 3 week camp in mallorca and ride your heart’s content and then come back and do an FTP test after a taper and you get a PR, your ftp physiologically before the test is the same as it was after you punched the test data into TR or intervals.icu. So if you were 300 but then tested at 320, really what it means is that you were 320 the whole time physiologically it just wasnt expressed/measured yet.
In the conventional way we measure ftp usually you have to actually accomplish the effort in order for it to be “real”, this is a limitation because it takes undue TSS to constantly test your FTP, hence the use of AI tools that can discern it from your targeted workouts (which are not undue TSS).
and therein lies the rub because it’s only your tested FTP that has gone down and as mentioned, only barely.
There are at least a couple other threads with people doubting the numbers that ai ftp is giving them.
You can either trust it or go and verify what you think your ftp should be.
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FTP as a metric is very clearly defined and has been for ages now.
If you are doing things right, testing it is pretty low impact and also a great training stimulus 
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Or we just wait for a regularly scheduled workout that serves as a reasonable indicator for FTP and call it close enough. It’s kind of like AIFTP, but without the “artificial” part. For me, that is Over/Under threshold work. Doing some over/unders when at a reasonable fatigue level, I’ll always come out with a good understanding of my FTP within 5 watts or so. And that’s good enough. Certainly better than what I’d get from a ramp test. If you want to figure out where your sustainable steady state is, it’s not that hard to find once you have some experience feeling it out.
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Unfortunately not and especially not in common parlance.
I would do a test. There have been several recent examples of people getting similar behaviour with the AIFTP. One option is that you have plateaud, the other is that the AIFTP is off. In my case it was the latter.
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Coggan defined it quite some time ago now.
never heard of him, does he work for ANSI ?
Point I am making is FTP is a massive egregore it has long since grown wings and mutated to the point at which barely anyone has the same idea of what they are really saying when they say my FTP is X.
What plan are you doing? Is it increasing FTP plan? In my case, I do try to follow the FTP increase custom plan consistently for several seasons, however I think the lack of increasing volume has some play on diminishing my improvement. I have 1 or 2 prior improvements before the last FTP drop. I’m going to play with the new custom volume update feature and see what results I get.