I’m thinking about moving over to TR from a human coach, just to help cut costs. I have:
a Kickr Core on which my FTP is measured at about 285;
a 4iii left crank power meter (172.5 mm) on my cross bike and old summer bike on which my FTP is measured at about 265;
and on my race bike another 4iii left crank (165 mm) on which we’re estimating it at 255.
They’re all calibrated regularly.
I’m not bothered by the idea of which is “true”, as we just adjust powers and expectations according to which one we’re using. But it does make the CTL and TSS figures a bit complicated to compare. An automatic system would see an hour at 285 on the turbo as generating less TSS than an hour at 255 on the race bike, even though both would generate the same RPE.
I know I can use powermatch to let a power meter crank control the turbo. But is there a way that Trainerroad can cope with two different FTPs from the two different outside power meters?
Pretty much go off of your indoor trainer for as long as your are indoors, what TR will do is give you workouts and then adapt based on how you are completing them, you will gain progression levels at which point it will recommend you a new AI detected FTP after a workout that gave you a chance to demonstrate a new higher FTP.
The TR ftp is from my experience usually different from intervals eftp or a ramp test ftp but it is well suited for using their platform to consistently train.
As for the distinction in TSS, yes it’s more TSS to do an hour at 285 as opposed to 255 but generally an indoor hour is much taxing than an outdoor hour, not all TSS is created equal. Whether or not you need to worry about these differences is up to you are your goals but it sounds like you have a good handle on stuff such that you can supervise TR with a mix of self coaching and get good results. And in the worst case scenario that you start going into your biggest week of build switching from indoor to outdoor you probably have the skill to recognise how much to tune the workout % level to keep it mapping well despite changing power meters.
There is not a way to make TR adjust power. Some power meters do have the ability to adjust the scale in their app, I’m not familiar enough with 4iiii to know if they do.
I would put the bikes on the trainer and dual record at several different power levels. Unless you have that, you don’t actually know how much the power meters read compared to the trainer, people make different amounts of power indoors vs outdoors for many different reasons.
When I was using a TR plan solely indoors and riding unstructured outdoors, I was using intervals.icu for analysis, which has two different indoor and outdoor FTP’s, which would scale TSS accordingly.
Thanks both. Yeah, I’m not so much concerned about each individual workout as I can adjust that myself by RPE and the knowledge of each power meter’s power curve relative to the others.
It’s more that the overall TSS and CTL will be unreliable so that TR might think I’ve done more work than I have, and back me off; or that it might see me as “overperforming” a particular workout because it’s on a high-reading power meter (compared to the others) and then up the ante.
But I guess in reality that when I’m on the turbo it’ll be winter and that 80% of my weekly rides will be on that, so hopefully TR can just absorb the 20% slightly different data.
As you know, the best thing would be to use PowerMatch to have TrainerRoad control the Kickr using one of your 4iiii meters as the power source. This helps make the data between indoor and outdoor more consistent.
TrainerRoad only supports one active FTP at a time in your profile. It doesn’t allow you to set separate FTPs based on which power meter or bike you’re using.
However, a workaround many athletes use is to manually adjust your FTP before rides, based on which power meter/bike you’ll be using. Not ideal, but it can help keep your TSS and progression levels more realistic.
My suggestion would be to choose one power meter as the primary–Use that meter both indoors (via PowerMatch) and outdoors whenever possible to standardize data. In your case, maybe one of the 4iii units could become your “anchor” for consistency.
I have two bikes with diff pms, one reads about 5% higher than the the one I use indoors. Usually when outdoor season comes, I evenly split my bike workouts between indoor and outdoor.
TR outside workouts usually give you a 10-20 watt range to be in. On the outdoor bike, with the pm that reads higher, I just keep myself in the upper end of that range. Usually I either skip the survey or adaptations based on outdoor workouts, as that could make the indoor ones too hard. Works for me!
Thanks all. Looks like the easiest way is to use PowerMatch and to move the crank across from outside bike to turbo as required. A bit of a pain, but hardly super-difficult, so I’ll give this a go. I reckon I’ll be coming across to TR in the next 7 months or so (towards the end of the outside racing season here in the UK), so we’ll see how it goes then.
