After TR Random-AI reduced my “FTP” from 266 to 247 in January it then increased it to 249 4 weeks later. My love for TR evaporated due to this erratic pattern of inaccuracy and the refusal to acknowledge the system struggles from TR that FTP should relate to something consistent and objective to enable progress over time to be possible. Anyway..
Since then I continued my training (I ttopped following TR workouts after a while because none of the numbers felt right to me, but maintained some good training weeks). I have enjoyed my workouts through another platform (but the ride results still go back into TR)
So yesterday I do an outdoor ride for a while, bit of a 20m interval, I update the ride data and next time I log into TR I get a “TrainerRoad AI Can’t Find a Workout - Your FTP doesn’t match your recent training. Detect your FTP to start getting workouts.”
Update: So i run the detection, and it suggests a 1 watt change, and then I got the same error again the next time I opened it.
The program seems lost. It can’t work out a FTP properly because external values vary so much from it’s internal assessment.
Who else is dealing with this, and has anyone else found a better platform since the TR AI debacle?
What the message says is that TR’s idea of what FTP you are at is outdated and needs to be updated, preferably by their algorithm. I don’t find it very surprising if you have been doing workouts outside of their platform since January.
And then what happened when you allowed it to detect the FTP? Was the problem rectified.
EDIT: I just had a quick glance at your calendar - it looks like you have made decent progress. Looks like the initial drop in your FTP going to the new system from 266 to 247 was justified because you were finding level 1.5 threshold workouts “very hard” with your old higher FTP. Currently you have improved to a point where even though your reported FTP is still slightly lower (only a little bit now) you are doing level 4+ workouts - this is where TR wants you to be.
You wouldn’t have been able to do these same 4+ threshold workouts at your old FTP at the time you had that higher FTP.
TL;DR The system seems to be detecting your fitness and assigning your FTP perfectly - according to how TR wants to do it.
Basically feels like my real world ride performance is incompatible with trainer road’s proprietary use of ftp so it looks at my outside ride data and is befuddled by how someone with a “TR FTP” can ride like that.
There has been a couple of threads allready. Basicly he spent all year last year trying to get to 280 FTP and didn’t like it when the new AiFTP adjusted him further away from that target.
If i ride 280w for 20+ mins, do you think my FTP is 249? like Trainer Road Bad-AI does? I don’t neither does Training Peaks or Intervals, both of which put it at 266 and 268 respectively. That gives me a number to use for my training zones and my riding that matches
I think this is right. What I hate is the “how TR wants to do it” just doesn’t align with any other convention and I don’t like have a mental arithmetic job to do all the time between my TR score and riding a bike in ftp zones. I’m glad to be out of it
If you didn’t have an anaerobic clearing effort then I make that 280x0.9=252w
If you did a clearing effort then I agree that could indicate 280x0.95=266w.
But 249w is the number you should be using for training in TR
Now that your fitness has improved a bit you might even get away with manually entering a higher FTP number into TR and it will find you productive workouts - but 249w seems to be the optimal value at the moment.
Edit: Also I’m pretty sure the AIFTP detection is specifically an “indoor” value. TR are a little vague on how it does it but it doesn’t seem to just average the indoor and outdoor power values in your history and give you an FTP that sits between inside and outside values. It uses all the inputted data for the calculation but then the FTP is gives you seems to be aligned to what you can do inside.
The AI FTP is not your FTP. It is the number that the AI thinks will serve you best for your training within the TR system. If it gives the right workouts and makes you faster, who cares what the number is.
Because I paid for it for a year, and all the ride data goes into it anyway so I was interested to see if the new version started to make sense before I make longer term plans.
