In 8 months of TR (all spent on back-to-back FTP plans), I saw a 1-month gain, 6 months flat line, and 1 month gain.
That’s not what I’m seeing on my end.. Your FTP has been steadily increasing since February..
Also, your 6-week TSS average peaked during the second week of November and dipped until it finally bumped up above that November figure in early January. It looks like you were mixing in some Zwift workouts then and were having some workout issues as well, so that was all likely playing a role in your fitness..
I know you say focus on this year, but I have been raising the FTP flatline issues for several months
If you want me to dig deeper into last fall, I can do that, but I feel like since your FTP has increased steadily since then, that’s good enough news that things are going well now.
What are you hoping to uncover with your training last fall?
Looking at the calendar, I think I can explain most of the October>May fluctuations due to injury/missed workouts, etc. However there are a couple of drops which seem strange:
jan 3 2026 - 249w > jan 10 2026 246w
apr 5 2026 - 253w > may 3 2026 251w ( i did miss 1 hard workout on apr 9)
I know we’re only talking about 3w & 2w, but at my age and fitness 5w is a big deal! If I have caused a drop by how I have rated a workout, or perhaps elevated HR I’m not complaining, but is nice to understand how things are working.
I have also noticed strange behaviour with the check volume function (I will start a separate thread). Thanks for all the help (and looking back through the calendar has reminded me of some forgotten skips/amends which obviously affect FTP)
The drop you’re seeing in January is likely due to the release of TR AI and the updated FTP model. A good chunk of our athletes’ FTPs changed after that.
As for April/May, you missed that hard workout on April 9th, but also a key threshold workout on May 2nd, one day before your detection, which maybe would have served as a good confirmation of your fitness before your FTP update.
It’s a bit hard to say for certain since we’re looking at a month’s worth of workouts and a 0.8% drop in FTP. It’s easier to see changes in FTP Predictions on the backend, but bigger periods like this take a bit more digging.
It looks like you did pretty well with your training throughout April, and you hit a 90-minute all-time power PR three days before that detection, so your fitness was definitely good.
Your 6-week average TSS dipped down for most of April and then started to pick back up in early May, so maybe that, alongside missing those two key workouts, as well as returning to a Base phase after finishing a Specialty phase in mid-March, is what caused your progress to slow a bit.
It’s normal to see fitness gains slow down when you transition from Build and Specialty phases back to Base training.
If my TSS dropped in april it was only because the plan lead me to. You said previously in DM that my april workouts (following April 5th one) “adapted in a cascading effect after completing Cumberland -3”… I wasn’t sure what that meant, or whether it was a bad thing. Did you ever manage to look into it? (This was shortly after my FTP detection showed in the log 3 times for April 5th)
If my TSS dropped in april it was only because the plan lead me to.
Again, this was likely due to you going from a specialty phase back to base training.
A cascading effect is when one action triggers another, and another, and so on. In that scenario, something with that workout caused us to update your future prescribed workouts. If we update this week’s workouts, then next week’s should probably be updated as well.
This changing of one workout resulting in the need to change another is sort of like the butterfly effect in that one change affects what you’ll see two or three weeks down the road.
That’s what I meant about a cascading of your workouts.
If I have caused a drop by how I have rated a workout, or perhaps elevated HR I’m not complaining, but is nice to understand how things are working.