Love the podcast - great stuff. Much appreciated and keep it up. You’ve done a great job of educating a lot of riders on a lot of topics (including me). With respect to showing only the next day’s workout, my preference is strongly against it. I like to have a plan in place and to understand that plan - both the long-term program and a short-term implementation plan (weekly). For the short-term, I generally plan out my cycling rides on a weekly basis, knowing that if I make the needed detailed adjustments upfront to accommodate work, family and social commitments, that I’ll be more likely to get all of those things (including cycling) accomplished. So being able to see specifics for the planned upcoming week is very helpful. I love the plan changes / updates and I’m flexible to adjust as each day arrives. On the longer term program, I also like to know if I’m falling behind (and if so, by how much) to the original program. This also serves as a motivation to me to not fall behind - so seeing the ratcheting down of future workouts is an indication that I need to be more consistent, don’t bail out of workouts, etc. I think I understand the benefits in the “show one day at a time” approach, but for me it’d reduce my ability to plan my weekly cycling workouts effectively and would leave me a little “rudderless” with respect to overall program progress. For me, “only one day’s detail at a time” seems too much like “spinning a wheel to see what comes up each day”. I’m all in for adaptability daily as needed, but I always like to have a bit a mid-range visibility.
FTP - keep it. Everyone has baked it into the cake at this point. And I think the progression levels within each zone already achieves much of the “it’s not all about FTP, but power within zones” for me. I really like that feature.
@AlexMartins touched on something that I think is important.
Looking solely at the FTP datapoint with its nebulous “about an hour” definition, & then trying to embellish it with concepts like “durability” or what their rider type is, seems a bit cumbersome when we could instead just be looking at specific points on an athlete’s power curve.
TR is already collecting the data. It seems that the next logical step after FTP estimation is to use the same AI to estimate an athlete’s potential power output at other specific durations in order to better set training zones for athletes individually. For example, the diesel may have their sweetspot & tempo zones squished up higher against threshold, because their endurance number is so high relative to FTP. It doesn’t mean FTP has to go away, indeed I think it shouldn’t, because it’s a very important number for threshold & sweetspot training. We’d just be including it amongst a more descriptive set of data.
To be honest, I think TR already does this under the hood, based on which plan you’ve chosen.
My guess is: AI sees our PDC, plots it against the population and then it looks at my chosen plan. It seems logical. How other metrics play their part I don’t know. And how could TR shows these metrics to the public in a “marketing-friendly” style, I don’t know either.
One thing we know though. Overall, new cyclist are more prone to be fixated in FTP and its gains.
I’ll add my name to the hat of “I hate the clickbait titles” team. Some are so cringy I don’t even watch them. Maybe out of spite.
My first thought after seeing the title was that it’s just a response or their version of the DJ video. Then I thought, wait hasn’t Sufferfest been doing this for years? Not exactly ignoring FTP but they test you on various time durations to give you a full power profile which they then base workouts off of, not straight % of FTP for different zones. Isn’t that what the 4DP is/was?
As far a completely disregarding FTP I think it would be a terrible idea. I don’t care about comparing it to other people or even trying to get it to go up. But it’s how I based my training. It’s what I’m used to. I’m sorry because I love TR and have used it for years, but the PLs are not consistent and would just be irritating if that’s all they base the workouts on. For one, I’ve seen the question about the differences across zones countless times. “Why are my SweetSpot levels in the 6s but my Threshold are 3s and my VO2 is 9s. Then you have the red headed stepchild Endurance PLs which are like trying to understand hieroglyphics. But even within a zone they can be wildly inconsistent, especially the VO2. I’ve done level 7s that I rate Very Hard, then do a 9 that is Moderate. Just because of the type (long sustained vs short/short). For me, the short-shorts VO2 need to be deducted probably 2 full levels across the board. But for other people they might find them harder than long intervals. It’s gotten to the point for me that for VO2, I completely disregard the PL because I know it’s meaningless and just focus on the interval prescription.
To me, FTP is the just the measurement scale. It’s like I’m workout out in the gym using pounds and then all of the sudden all my workouts are based on a new metric that combines HR and bar travel distance in space. Just something out of left field that doesn’t give me any reference. Yea I can compare my bench press with friends and act strong like I can compare my FTP with club mates. But it doesn’t change the fact that it’s a huge foundation for training correctly.
Last point about hiding workouts. I personally hate the idea. My schedule is not consistent. Which means my available training hours per day is inconsistent. I always look at my full week of workouts and swap them around based on my work schedule. Like every week. And like many others, I’ll also pick specific routes based on the workout. Or even change whether it’s an indoor or outdoor workout based on the specific workout. Even the weather plays in. I could look at the weather and see a rainy day, so then I find a workout that is better suited for indoors and place it that day. Hiding the workouts would honestly just irritate me more than anything, maybe to the point of using a different service.
This has been done (Xert/Breakaway) and works really well.
Everyone is different, let user choose if they want to use FTP or not to measure improvements.
This visualization gives me immediate feedback on what I’ve been focusing on and if it is working. FTP is just a number.
Basing all of your workouts on a set % of FTP is going to lead to less than optimal workouts >FTP. Would love to see TR use something similar to iLevels to set workouts. (TR seems to be doing this to some amount with the new larger bumps in workout difficulty).
Getting ride of FTP is just dumb, it’s a great marker of fitness and progress even though people misunderstand it quite often.
It’s not possible with erg mode but it would be great to see fuzzy targets for more intense workouts, say the system assigns 5x5m and based on the users PDC knows they can probably complete it at 450w for each interval. Rather than locking the rider in at exactly 450w give them a range from 425-475.
Maybe this requires too much discipline from the athlete to not go out too hard or too easy but ime it’s much more valuable to teach an athlete to self pace workouts and listen to your body rather than blindly trusting exact power targets.
Remove FTP? No. De-emphasize sure, but FTP is a bridge language between cyclists. And frankly it’s a big part of TR’s marketing platform.
Realistically, TR has made FTP largely obsolete on the user side and ride/race results are far more valuable. Still, I’d be in favor of something resembling a training report that grades the skills being developed based on quantity and quality of work being done, PRs being set (like maybe a new 3 or 5 hr power pr? Just me?) Maybe tell me I’ve developed durability, improved my VO2 max, sprint power. Or maybe I struggled with threshold work or missed regular rides, shortened efforts or stopped early. Am I improving why or why not? How? And is this the direction I want to go? No, I’m not trying to improve my sprint, I wanna win a 100 mile gravel race etc. Just my thought, but if you just take away FTP, you’ll alienate a lot of riders, and take away a measuring stick. Bare minimum you have to offer a new measuring stick in return, but I’d suggest adding not subtracting.
Charting power PRs has been done, but what I’m talking about is estimating an athlete’s potential at various points on the curve in order to set appropriate training zones.
Considering the cost of the fatigue induced by doing an all-out 4-hour effort, not a lot of athletes would have a 4-hour PR that accurately describes their potential for that duration. The only exception I can think of who do, would be athletes who do 100-mile TTs once or twice a year, & only if they complete it marginally slower than 25mph.
I do 3-4 hour workouts fairly regularly but never anything hard enough to make my legs want to fall off because it’s probably not the most effective use of training.
