Yep. I tried it this past year when it was on sale Black Friday and gave it a few months but won’t renew. The plans are meh and the OTS score isn’t actionable in any meaningful way, since it really is just a “you’re too tired to do the workout” or “you’re not too tired to do the workout” sign. The value itself tracked somewhat with how I felt, but felt a lot more hit-or-miss than my Garmin. The Garmin training readiness score also provides you with a lot more detail about the variables that generate the daily value. And honestly, for me, resting HR seems to be the gold standard for how rundown my body is.
I had a few very helpful and detailed responses from some of the coaches, but the responses from Frank himself (which was most of them) were literally just copy-paste jobs from their website. It’s all pretty underwhelming, especially considering there’s no way to push the workouts to any device natively and you have to email them to add a plan to TrainingPeaks. All that said, I’ve been having great luck riding outdoors with the JOIN app, as it’s been great for ramping up volume in sustainable way, telling me which days are good for hard workouts, and which days I should rest.
When I take it outside, my workouts are usually pretty darn easy to remember… “z2 base with x number of intervals at threshold for y minutes, 3 minute rest between”
Anything more specific and I’m watching the computer interest of the road/trail. Much prefer doing intervals on the mtb lately
Yeah, that and more mentioned in their most recent podcast in the opener (bug fixes, TR integration and such). Apparently there will be more to come on xPower in a pending podcast as well.
xPower has a published formula that predates the FasCat app, I’m not sure why that blog article states “Our exact formula is proprietary”
Skins was on a FasCat podcast a year or two ago and discussed the fundamentals. I’m guessing the next podcast will focus more on practical use. Conceptually xPower is Normalized Power with some minor differences in how it’s calculated, and therefore IIRC it gives a different number in certain situations (spiky power) but not in others (steady state power).
According to Skiba, exponential decay is better than Coggan’s linear decay in representing the way the body reacts to changes in effort. xPower – Science4Performance
Also CP is is used in the xPower where it is generally greater than FTP for most, ~5%. It’s pretty clear NP busting is pretty hard if there was an equivalent concept in the first place. BikeScore vs TSS and same performance chart concept is used to plot Chronic Training Load/Long Term Stress (CTL/LTS) and Acute Training Load/Short Term Stress (ATL/STL). UG_Glossary · GoldenCheetah/GoldenCheetah Wiki · GitHub. Is it a better representation of the physiological cost? It’s an art and I’m bad at drawing. YMMV.
Interesting to hear that this differs from the other xPower (Dr. Phil Skiba’s). Honestly, this is just a poor choice by Frank. Using the same term for a similar, but still different metric is only going to cause confusion. Sure would have been better to call it something else, and not invite the mess we’ve already seen above with the mixed use. Straight up marketing fail right there.
Seriously though, a bit like TR chose to make AI FTP Detection with their twist, FasCat could have done something unique as well. FCP (FasCatPower) seems an obvious one as well as FPower or any other derivative. Just seems a clear mistake on one hand and a totally missed opportunity on the other.
because it is proprietary, to quote from the podcast:
“sorry, same name, sorry for the miscommunication”
They literally could have taken Skiba’s xPower formula, changed the averaging window to 35-seconds, and called it proprietary. To be clear I’m not saying thats what they did, but one little change and its proprietary.
Frank’s position is that whatever change they made, it does a better job for the purpose of using a variant of normalized power to estimate your FTP during your season. Test after the off-season, test after base, and then use FasCat’s xPower on hard efforts to help estimate FTP during the season. Test twice a year.
Yeah, that’s what I thought to myself, too. Frank is plugged into the community and knows everyone. If I were Skiba, I would be a bit annoyed.
Plus “xPower” isn’t descriptive either.
Yeah, but why even put yourself in that position. If Frank and his team did a straightforward modification of Skiba’s xPower, then calling it that puts an arrow on that. Instead, they could have called it “Frank’s Effective Power” or some such and never mentioned where it came from. Re-using the name suggests a connection.
It seems to me, Frank and his team are not very good at marketing (see their website and this naming decision), especially if the product is solid.
I’d rather have a solid plan to build my engine, than great marketing. I like to think of FasCat as a coaching company building solutions to coaching problems.
Did Skiba not work directly with Frank on the Fascat app? My understanding is he did.
And agree with @WindWarrior , there’s plenty that could be improved, but I’m having trouble coming up with significant irritations with what I’ve paid for - significantly fewer than other training platforms I’ve used previously
