Why does every workout feel easy? UPDATED

Well done! Yeah, you may be in for some work now. :wink:

Welcome to TrainerRoad AND to structured training!

I’m so glad to see this update about your FTP, but I do want to cover what others have eluded to about your surveys, and about the relevance of your FTP.

This is the most significant topic I want to address:

coupled with:

@mcneese.chad is absolutely right that those survey responses are crucial for recalibrating your workouts based upon your current fitness. If every workout you’ve been doing thus far has felt too easy, you’ll want to make sure it is represented as such in your post-workout surveys.

This is the tool that is really helping Adaptive Training lock you into the appropriate difficulty level for your future workouts.

It’s worth noting that this first week of your Base phase may not feel taxing right away; it’s the cumulative load of your training that will make workouts challenging, combined with the integration of new workouts that will target new systems and areas of your fitness.

Finally, if you’re new at FTP testing protocol, you may have underperformed in that Ramp Test a little bit, but the reason it’s not urgent to re-test or address:

  1. Your workout completion and surveys will cause your Progression Levels to grow, and your future workouts will be adapted to reflect your fitness accordingly beyond that FTP result.
  2. You can use AI FTP Detection in the future to mitigate the weaknesses all FTP testing protocols inherently have. :wink:
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Thank you for the response! Noted!
I do have a question regarding AI FTP detection.
This tool sounds amazing and I am super excited about it. i am a data nerd and junky so it excites me.
If I am using ERG mode how will AIFTP work? Since my power numbers will always be exact, does it know if I am actually improving or not?

  • This raises a point to consider if you are using a Wahoo trainer. Consider turning off the “ERG Mode Power Smoothing” setting. It may have no real impact to AIFTPD, but it shows more realistic power data than the absurdly smooth graph that Wahoo gives with this setting (that is the default unless you change it).

  • https://youtu.be/7L7hfT0I7E0

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Don’t stress about this. AI FTP Detection is looking beyond what is visible to you during workouts, and also isn’t measuring capacitive efforts to calculate your FTP. Meaning, you don’t need to be reaching any sort of max effort or do anything beyond your current expression of fitness for AI FTP Detection to know where you’re at.

Apart from your FTP, Adaptive Training is going to analyze your workouts and keep you locked into the right training progression throughout your plan. AT will keep you calibrated based upon your Progression Levels, and AI FTP Detection learns about how the workouts you complete impact your FTP as a result.

Plenty of athletes who ride outside with power and then inside with ERG mode are getting great results from this feature, we have you covered! :slight_smile:

6 Likes

I emailed support about this just now but I’m in the same boat as OP. Did my second ramp test recently, and FTP jumped from 154 to 175. I knew the initial one was low but decided to stick with it and see if TR adapted, as every workout was either easy or moderate. And when moderate, it was most like easy/moderate, maybe the hardest thing was getting uncomfortable in my saddle after a while.

But with this new FTP, I did a v02 max workout today (Grassy Ridge -3) and it was still very easy. Did not break a sweat (I almost never do, and never remotely enough to require a pad under my bike) and my HR remained in zone 2, and the lower end of zone 2. Looking ahead to future workouts, if this is my FTP, I can’t see any workout being beyond moderate.

It’s been 5 weeks now so I figured adaptations would’ve made things harder by now but it doesn’t appear to be the case. The only time my HR has ever really gotten out of zone 2 is during the latter half of the ramp test.

Compared to my outside rides (rolling, some hills), TR is FAR easier so far. Should I just raise my FTP and see how the next workout goes?

Do you remember what your progression level in VO2Max was prior to the FTP increase? It’s likely that the progression lowered after your FTP increase, but a 1.6 is pretty low for VO2 work. It would almost seem like it reset back to 1.0, which I wouldn’t think it should do unless your progression level prior to the FTP increase was also pretty low. Personally I don’t find VO2Max work very challenging below a 5.0. If you haven’t done much of it before, it can be helpful to do some of these Preparatory workouts before you progress, but I can’t imagine a VO2 1.6 is worth doing in my opinion. If it were me, I’d go diving through the workout library and try to find something in the 3.5+ range and give it a go. If that’s easy, I’d bump to 4.5 and then scale accordingly.

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I don’t, but I don’t recall any v02 max workouts in the first 5 weeks at all. But even if this was my first v02 max workout, I figured the AI would know my general fitness at that point and set the first v02 max workout accordingly? I will try to find an alternative one at 3.5+ next time.

Why not just do your own sanity test with 5 min all out effort, 5 min rest and 20 min all out. This will give you a good idea where you are at

yeah, it’s not going to do that with Progression Levels 1.0. It uses the VO2 max results from workouts you’ve done + your responses to the surveys of those workouts. That’s about it. If your PL starts at 1.0 and you haven’t done any of those workouts, it’s gonna give you a Grassy Ridge -3 or something like it. But that doesn’t preclude you from knowing where you think you are, and picking something more appropriate to accelerate the progressions.