The redefining of FTP with TrainerRoad AI is confusing a lot of people including myself. It doesn’t give me any information about pacing, which is what people want, along with a number to flex. TrainerRoad never prescribes capacitive efforts, which might be fine from a training methodology standpoint, but it makes it hard to know what you’re capable of. I would love to see a critical power profile showing what TrainerRoad AI thinks my personal best power would be at every duration currently and in the future, like the FTP prediction.
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The best predictor of performance is performance itself 
I do worry that giving such a precise number will just lead to more posts about people under performing/over performing what the ai thinks they can achieve.
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The power profile could show a small range based on the models confidence. That wouldn’t be too complicated to display. It would help so much to see this. I think workout levels are trying to address this, but a power profile would more intuitive.
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Would this prediction really do anything for you that looking at your own power curve or power pr’s can’t already do?
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If I’m following my plan, I don’t really have any recent all out efforts to look at. There aren’t any TR workouts that push you that hard in a single effort. Racing can fill it in here and there but still doesn’t show you a full profile of your capabilities. It would be cool to see for pacing estimates and ego boosting.
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One could argue that if you don’t have all out power pr’s in each of the durations you care about from racing or race like rides, then you aren’t actually going to use them for pacing. You just want to see your numbers for the second option you listed, ego boosting. That’s fine. But my ego would be way more boosted by what I’ve actually done, not by what TR would estimate I could maybe possibly do.
As someone who doesn’t have the opportunity to join weekly race group rides and may go months between races this feature would help me a lot in feeling like I’m prepared for the p12 road races I’ll be doing.
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I agree with you that there will be posts about it but those people are posting now. Having a traditionally determined FTP was never a guarantee of success either. I’d just love to have the estimated power curve to pace from.
In the past on the ramp test, I knew that if I focused that I could hold 92% of ftp for an hour. When AiFTP first launched I was able to hold 94% so it was an improvement in accuracy if you think of one-hour power.
With new system I honestly have no idea
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Yes, because I’m on a 40k TT plan but no workout gives me an hour long effort. Which means I don’t actually have a real power PR for that duration.
Also nearing my A event I wont have done any VO2 or anaerobic efforts so my records over 6 weeks will reflect a much lower ability than I could do in reality. Once my A event is over I like to take my fitness and chase some strava segments. I look at the time for the KOM and then my power profile to see how much power I can hold for that time. Stupid use probably but it gets me out the door having fun.
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Cahuilla is an hour at 99%, Reynolds is 45 minutes, Lola is half an hour. Bookmark those and check the predicted difficulty every now and then.
(I’d also rather have a predicted power curve than a predicted FTP but these are what I’m using in the meantime.)
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How long are your SS intervals pushing out? Threshold? That should give you a pretty decent idea.
Currently threshold are 10 minutes and sweet spot 15 minutes. I am assuming that when I enter specialty phase that the system will stop trying to increase ftp and focus on extending my time in zone so as the plan progresses it may become more clear but in the meantime I have no idea what wattage I can hold. I do know that current ftp I cannot hold.
Depending upon what comes from specialty phase, these workouts could be an option. Or I may just do a ramp test as I know historically what I can do from the ftp it generates.
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+1
The less data points along the curve with Hard / Very Hard / All out efforts the more uncertainty around the curve. The more data points the less uncertainty. Would be very nice as a simple lightweight alternative to WKO.
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if you can find a TR workout that mimics the duration you’d like to see on your power curve, you can basically back into the wattage TR thinks you can do for that duration using the workout predictor and manually playing with ftp. The simplest example is picking a workout that has 60 minutes straight right at threshold. Just pick an ftp and see if the workout predictor thinks you can do it or not.
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This is an interesting idea but I worry about making a bunch of manual adjustments to FTP to try and find a number perhaps messing up my current plan. Is there a way to do this without saving a manual ftp that I am not aware of?
If I can actually do this then I would say that so could TrainerRoad and remove all the leg work for me.
My suggestion for them would be to make the curve a band rather than a line. The narrower the band the more certainty of the number and the wider the less certainty.
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I’ve been playing with it quite a bit and you just delete the FTP’s after you create them and look at the workout until you get to the FTP you want…or go back to the AI one. If you’re interested:
Lola is 30 mins steady TH
Onyx is 45
Cahuilla is 60.
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So I tried this and today was a red day but the change removed the red day now and increased my predicted FTP by 1w after dropping it yesterday after the ride by 2w.
This is the reason I am hesitant to mess about with manual FTP changes. Going back and forth can be kind of messy for the calendar in my experience (specially with no “undo” sort of functionality). One thing that would be nice is that in lieu of a predicted curve that a sandbox for playing with adjustments before applying them to the calendar would be nice.
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Oh, I totally agree with you, I want these things too, I was just showing you how to work around it.
As for getting back your red day, try moving a workout back and forth or declining and reaccepting your AI FTP.
I did re-accept and deleted the manual entries. I’ll probably just skip the ride as planned for today. The rest of the calendar seems unaffected. Your method did work though and I figure that my pacing is about where I expected.
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