Recording more than one FTP

Asked about this before but can’t find the thread and the only reply apparently misunderstood my request.

I want to be able to record more than one FTP in TrainerRoad and have an"outside" ftp automatically applied to outside rides when using a power meter.

Presently I have one FTP recorded using the ramp test and erg mode on my smart trainer. I also have s separate FTP recorded using a power meter and a Garmin on my road bikes.
Both FTP seem correct in those environments and I see no need to change.
TrainerRoad automatically applies my TrainerRoad FTP to outside rides with my power meter and I have to manually change this each time. Being able to have a separate FTP automatically applied to outside rides would save me having to do this.

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What is stopping you from enabling power match in the settings so that you only need to worry about the power meter on your bike? This way the same FTP can be used for all situations.

Use the FTP from Garmin and power meter and the work outs in TrainerRoad are far to hard.
Use the FTP from TrainerRoad on my outside rides and the TSS become silly.
And haven’t seen the setting you refer to.

As I understand it, If you have both a PM on your bike and a smart trainer you can use the PowerMatch function to set the resistance in workouts from power reading from your on-bike PM.

That way you should have consistent power indoors and out.

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I think the short answer is. That option doesn’t currently exist.

You could potentially do a manual change to your TR ftp before you upload the ride then change your ftp back again afterwards

That’s harder than just changing the FtP for the ride :blush:
I thought there wasn’t a way of doing which is why I labeled the post feature request :sunglasses:

Not automatic, but on a per workout basis you can click the three “…” on right of this screenshot and override the ftp:

+1 for this! It would also be useful for different bikes (e.g. TT vs. road).

@mmpgh @willball12 using powermatch with the same power meter might work for some people but not all. In fact I would go as far as to say it won’t work for most people. There have been many discussions on the forum about why this is the case but TL;DR the most likely reason is lack of sufficient cooling indoors. Personally, I have tested “indoors” (OK, an underground car park on a trainer!) in -5 degrees C before and still seen a 30W reduction in my FTP over the same test outdoors.

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There at probably other factors related to the biomechanics of being in a largely stationary position and the different pedalling dynamics.

As far as I know there are no platforms out there that try to address this problem. Even WKO4 doesn’t do this even although you can separate out quite a lot of the metrics by using tags.

Mike

As an old man used to training by feeling and only in the last few years using actual power I can say that the"feel" of training on a stationary trainer and out on the road are very different. Power readings just tend to confirm this for most folk.
Certainly all the over 60 riders I know that have done FtP measurements on a trainer and on the road have a difference. Most are around the 30 Watts mark which when you’re over 60 is a big chunk of your power :blush:
Solutions that involve using the same FtP for all rides don’t do it. Manually changing the FtP is what I and others presently do.
I am no developer but would it be so complicated to have a separate stilky FtP for outdoor rides,?

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There isn’t an agreement between coaches regarding whether or not you should use a different FTP for indoors vs outdoors. Chad usually say in the different TR podcast, that its only a question cooling.
But coaches like former pro rider Greg Henderson, Joe Beer, Matt Rowe, and even Hunter Allen all recognize that there is a difference indoor vs outdoor.
Greg Says its about 7% lower indoors.
Both Matt Rowe and Joe Beer have used 5% lower indoors, as a difference in podcasts.
Hunter Allen said on a worksop he did in Copenhagen, that a rider with a 300 watt FTP measured outdoors, typical tests between 25-35 watts lower inside.

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For me, the biggest difference between inside/outside is my willingness to suffer is higher on outside rides. However from a training point-of-view, I haven’t seen any practical difference in ftp between trainer and outside. And over a one month period of time I’ve 3 protocols: 8-min vs 20-min vs 60-min, and they all came out within a couple watts of each other. Finally, I’m seeing ftp improvements over a TR training block so everything seems fine.

Agree with everyone, if I do ever see a difference then it makes perfect sense to have automatic assignment based on trainer vs outside.

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My bad! I thought the question was asking about the differences in power reading between PM and trainer. Not necessarily the natural difference between indoor and outdoor power.

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I am a developer and I don’t see it being difficult to allow different FTPs per bike + location combo, in much the same way TrainingPeaks allow you to assign gear to a workout (bike, shoes, etc). However, the tricky bit is assigning it automatically. A simple solution would be to specify a default bike and apply your indoor FTP for TrainerRoad and other obvious indoor workouts (e.g. Zwift :speak_no_evil:) and your outdoor FTP otherwise. There will be edge cases here though. For example, if someone uses an old school speedo outdoors with no GPS data it would be easilly confused with an indoor workout. Figuring out which bike someone is on (e.g. road vs. TT) would be very difficult though so I imagine that will need to be done manually.

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For what I want it should be more straightforward. All rides done on trainerroad use the FtP established by trainerroad, all other rides to use a FtP set by myself. If trainerroad can read the FtP set by Garmin this would be even better as this shows in Garmin connect and I assume is recorded in the original file by my Edge. Trainerroad gets the file from Garmin connect after all.
In my case some of the imported files from Garmin connect hsve no power data, no meter on my CX bike or track bike. In these cases I set my subjective view of how hard these rides were in trainerroad,bI guess the FtP doesn’t matter in these cases?

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+1 here!

At the end of summer, the difference between my outdoor FTP (as suggested by Garmin) and indoor (TrainerRoad ramp test) was around 40 Watts. As others have said, having just one FTP skews TSS calculations.

Like others, it would be great to simply have TrainerRoad have two separate FTP values, one for TrainerRoad rides, and one for everything else.

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Yes, the possibility of different FTP would be nice. Until then I see the following workarounds:

  • Using Powermatch
  • Some powermeters have the ability to configure an adjustment factor which you could set so that powermeter matches the smart trainer
  • Manually setting different FTP per ride

Concerning the last point I created a more general feature request that could also be used to set different FTP for multiple rides in one step (so you could do it just once for all past rides based on a specific search criteria like power input). Maybe you want to take a look:

Most outside rides come in via strava - could TR just take the FTP recorded in Strava for those rides?

It’s not as simple as having two FTP’s, and so doing throws off a ton of TR’s calcs about fitness etc., namely TSS that are used to track fitness. Adding noise to what is the foundational number by which all the other algorithms are based introduces undesirable and unnecessary sources of error into TR’s currently clean processes, training plans, etc. IOW, it ain’t gonna happen.

I, presumably like you, have significant differences in the power that I can hold outside on my road bike and inside on my TT bike (covering the spread by using the extremes). Inside, I do all my TR workouts in aero on my TT bike, so I use the assessed FTP, in that modality, in that position. I also use Strava’s PMC (TP works better, but am unwilling to pay for a premium account) for outdoor rides and to generally track fitness, TSB, etc. over time.

You have to consider why these numbers are different - is it a cooling issue, positioning issue, I have a personal theory that sitting on an indoor trainer you are engaging far fewer stabilizer muscles (arms, core, etc.) than outside, and similarly are actually fighting the bike more indoors as the bike doesn’t move underneath you, but forces you to move around the bike.

This actually requires you to consider what FTP is… it’s your assessed FUNCTIONAL POWER - remove threshold from this, as that has physiological connotations which we’re not discussing here. Functional power is what you can do under those circumstances. In my case, I want to train in the extreme aero position, so that has a functional application. Whether it’s adaptation to the position (combination of flexibility and recruitment), that’s independent (correlation is not causation) from training your physiology.

However, my outdoor FTP is based on my MLSS, a physiological limiter, which is what I train to stimulate physiological adaptions. Moreover, it is off of this number that I track CTL and TSB, which should better represent physiological stress and how much recovery I need. Plus of course how I feel.

Training indoors on the ERG, even at lower power, elicits the same training benefit, even though it’s ~10% below what I can do outside. I know that’s hard for some people to grasp, but training lower that what you CAN DO, still elicits a significant performance result even though you’re not killing yourself to accomplish it. I would argue it’s even better for base training, because it doesn’t result in the same cortisol as maximum efforts, you subsequently sleep and recover better, and you can do more of it.

The rest is all for ego. Seriously. Power and w/kg are tools and metrics, and have nothing to do with performance. I have known guys with world tour power numbers that never get out out Cat 3 because they can’t perform in races. I would recommend instead of worrying about swapping back and forth to make sure you get all the internet points you’re entitled to, don’t worry so much about it. Enjoy the process, track your progress through performance improvement (FTP is NOT performance), and don’t worry about the other stuff.

People are so neurotic about this stuff that it becomes a stressor itself and ends up impairing or even negating progress that you’ve worked for.

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