I’ve been using both TrainerRoad and TrainingPeaks for years but only recently I’ve been able to train outside with a power meter.
I’ve just uploaded a CX training ride and TrainingPeaks is giving it an IF of .45 with 14 TSS whereas TrainerRoad is showing an IF of .85 and 48 TSS. I’m just confused to why this may be as I thought calculating these values would be the same.
As you can imagine with it being cyclo-cross there was a lot of coasting around corners with peaks of sprint power coming out of them.
Yeah, definitely sounds like an FTP setting issue.
What were the NP and AP for those rides. If those are super different then something weird is going on but if those are the same then it’s almost definitely the FTP setting.
I’ve seen that before. In TR, try selecting most of the ride but cutting off a minute or two from the beginning. For example lets say the actual ride shows 55 minutes in TR, start your selection around 1 minute and go thru the end. Then look at NP.
Some where TR is seeing a power spike that TP is filtering out. Open the ride up in TR, click on Analyze, and scroll to Personal Records. See what the max power TR is showing. I’m pretty sure the max 1 second power will be out of whack
TrainingPeaks pulls the file directly from your device. My recommendation is to go to the file in your Garmin Connect Account and compare what TP is showing you and what Garmin is showing. You can scroll down to Power and expand the view - open this power chart in Garmin and also in TP. Another thing you can do in TP is going to file - > Analyze - > charts library - > data grid. Pull that up and you’ll get second-by-second data. If you have auto-pause on, you will see ‘Stopped’. Go through the entire data grid and look for extended periods of doing nothing (not stopped, but, just the device running and no power or cadence etc being recorded. Look at the tail end of your ride or beginning of this. You can remove bad data from the Data Grid as well, then do a recalculate.
Make sure your FTP is the same across TR, Garmin, and TP. Make sure you have a bike-specific FTP in TrainingPeaks and your rides are coming across as bike. Or at least they show up as ‘bike’ in TrainingPeaks and you are using either a default power zone or a bike power zone.
Also if you set your FTP in TrainingPeaks a few days later or recently updated after you uploaded your rides, you can use the TSS backfiller tool to redo your TSS for rides that used an older FTP value.
It could be a one-off incident. In this case, I would look up another CX race or training ride you did and compare them between the three apps. If they all good then, it could just be an isolated incident.
In this case, you could delete the first 20-30 seconds of the ride in TP (save your original file though through Garmin or TP), then recalculate and see what happens. Is your device including zeros for power? It should be.
So, thanks everyone for all the help with this one. I think I’ve got to the bottom of it.
It was a CX training session so we’d do a drill then discuss and go on to the next one. My Garmin would auto pause when stopped as it should but it must have still been recording my heart rate coming down after each effort. When I select the paused gaps in TR then it’s using the HR to give a TSS value and it must be adding them all up. Power and heart rate. I guess this gives a better overall of the session.
No worries. Apologies but I don’t fully understand how turning off auto-pause would help when it comes to power. Usually it would only pause when there’s no power going through the pedals?
Yes. My point is that physiologically these are virtually the same:
waiting 2 minutes at a stop light
descending without pedaling for 2 minutes
The only difference is that auto-pause stops recording heart rate and other data in the first scenario, and continues recording in the second. And that can lead to problems when analyzing ride data in different platforms.
From my point-of-view, the primary motivation for auto-pause was to see a higher average speed (in Strava).
Fair enough. I think it is a little more useful, but I take your point.
I would say I use auto-pause to measure the actual output of my riding, and that I don’t use AP really at all due to it also not really fairly weighting the descending (or more heavily weighting the zero’s). I’m not phased really, but I have autopause on also to a)if I want to ride 90min, then I want to do 90min of riding, not being out, and b)look back and analyse roughly the work done for a given time eg 3hrs at 0.65IF is the metric I’m after for pacing and fatigue management rather than say 4hrs at 0.45IF including zero’s at trail heads or whatever.
