Normalized power

Training
1

I go for a 55 min spin, for the most of the ride I spin 100watts (not even that).
Within that ride I did 2min effort at 333 watts.
Avg power - 102watts
Normalized power - 161 watts ?!
IF - 0.79

I mean, really?

During the recovery week rides I often do 1 or 2 sprints, or these 1-2min efforts during the ride, just to keep the legs bit sharp, but this inflates my TSS so much that during the recovery week I have almost the same TSS as the previous high load week, just because of these few efforts.

Can I somehow change this? For example I think strava calculations of weighted avarage power are much more representative .

This is the ride

2

Not that I’ve done the math - but I’m pretty sure that Nate and the crew have done the debugging of this to make sure the NP calculations are correct. :slight_smile:

What’s the real concern here? That you’ve got too much TSS in a given recovery ride?

3

There’s opening the legs up and then there’s going bloody hard. IMO you’re pushing far too hard for a recovery effort. Those two efforts are anaerobic and you’re pushing right at the top end of the recovery zone with quite a low cadence. Try knocking it right back and the TSS and IF should resemble a recovery ride.

4

How much glycogen do you burn during 2 minutes of exercise at 165% of FTP? Does anybody know?

ETA: I did find this study:

https://physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1113/jphysiol.1974.sp010639

It looks to me that during 2 minutes of exercise at 150% of max VO2 you use about 25% of your total glycogen store, which is about the same as how much you would use during an hour of exercise at 64% of max VO2. To me, that seems to agree with the normalized power number.

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