I’ve cobbled together a very basic script that will tell you your “live” achieved FTP during TR’s ramp test. All you have to do is put in your current FTP and hit the “start” button at the same time that your ramp test starts.
23rd Jan edit: Over my morning tea today I’ve prettified it, have another look:
(There’s a simulate button so you can get the idea without having to wait for the counter to tick up second by second!)
Some people might find this a useful motivational tool - others might find the opposite, and that it makes them stop trying once they’ve hit the target they had in mind. Feel free to look away if you’re in the latter camp!
To calculate the live FTP I’m using 75% of the past 60 seconds’ average power. Average power calculated just based on seconds in each zone. E.g. I believe that 10 seconds at 200W and 50 seconds at 206W gives an average of (200 * 10 + 206 * 50) / 60 = 205W.
This is actually really cool! We never implemented something like this because we didn’t want riders to limit themselves to hitting a target FTP and then quitting, but I can see how it could be very motivational!
I think that formula makes sense, it’s weighting the power levels by % of time inside of the zone within the last 60 seconds. I’m not sure what other way you could approach that without getting into the Normalized Power side of things, which we don’t use for FTP calculations anyway.
This is the right formula. They’ve said they do something with longer-term power as well (5-minute) to try to catch surging at the end. If you follow the ramp protocol, it’s just 75% of best 1-minute power. For live tracking, you should treat the last 60 seconds as the best one minute, as you are doing.
You can simplify your calculation a bit: your best one-minute power simply goes up by 0.1% per second. (It’s 6% per step, 60 seconds per step.)
For the first five minutes, you get no result. (I don’t know what the TR software does, but you’re still in warmup, not ramp, so I’m saying don’t handle this case.) After that, what it will report as your new FTP is (0.345 + (0.00075*t)) * original_FTP, where t is the number of seconds that have passed since the five-minute “start of test” mark.
Yep, I’m embarrassed to say I figured this out after posting. Because of the “steps” rather than a smooth ramp I had thought the progression wouldn’t be so smooth and would have a periodic nature. I am stupid, I was wrong
Nah. It doesn’t talk to the app. It calculates your ftp purely based on how much time has passed. Since it knows your ftp and the assessment protocol that’s pretty straight forward to do.
You’ll find that that depends on whether you know what you’re doing. I hear in the bedroom endurance without skill won’t earn you much points. Kinda like in crit racing I suppose.
It doesn’t communicate with the TR app, it relies on you clicking start at the same time as the ramp test starts. Obviously doesn’t make much odds if you’re out by a second or two.
I ran it side by side on Windows last year, but now I use TR on an android tablet I’d run this on my phone in parallel.
