How do I increase my PL?
Progression Levels increase to match the Workout Level of those that you complete successfully.
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Your PL’s increase based on your completion of workouts and how you respond to the post workout survey.
Honestly, my advice is to just follow the plan. Stay consistent, eat right/fuel your rides, get good sleep, take recovery rides/weeks seriously.
Sure, you could “game” the system by doing high PL workouts you can barely finish and marking them easy, but that is just artificial BS for the sake of seeing a number increase.
Any idea how much I’d give for a sneak peek at that FTP prediction tool? Whew, even if it were buggy, I’d pour out my puggy bank
I definitely wouldnt want to see an ftp prediction. I think it would be more depressing than anything. The hope I will have a 20 watt increase is what keeps me going, even though the chances are somewhat miniscule 
I was wondering the same thing after doing 5 x 16m SS upto 94% FTP and then TR saying my FTP had gone down. Odd.
if you’ve been training a while sweet spot won’t make your ftp go up. trust me
But it will make you better at longer races!
Grim
Same as for any other type of workout “you are doing for a while”.
You need to progressively overload it week by week to keep adaptions coming.
Eventually you need to do some vo2 max work to push the ftp up again however.
I used to be able to get a good 10ish w bump by doing progressive SST but that has not worked in a very long time for actually pushing up the ceiling.
If I recall correctly the longest I pushed it out to was 1x120 but would still blow up in about 30m if I tried an interval at 10w above that ftp.
Try 5w then. Or work up from a lower duration. Or go more often.
Increments typically need to get smaller the more advanced you are.
I don’t bother with <10w changes, it’s already a very small % of FTP and when you account for power meter accuracy adjusting by 5w is too small of a change.
All I am saying is adding more SST does not increase ftp for someone who is sufficiently well trained, you need some sort of stimulus to raise that ceiling, typically Vo2.
eta:
If I am already at 120m straight of SST how am I supposed to progress this sensibly lol. The caloric burn is already very high and this mostly becomes a fueling issue. I am much better off with other work to get an FTP bump rather than bashing my head against endless SST.
I do sweet spot maybe twice a year winter and early summer. See above I’ve done progressive overload from 3x30 to 2x50 over three weeks. My ftp is not gonna go up.
Sub threshold and threshold work as a way to increase ftp stops being a thing once people get past the noob gains stage.
I appreciate all of the input and agree with most of it. I’m coming back to the TrainerRoad team and asking them if I need to be working harder to increase my FTP, why aren’t the prescribed workouts harder? I’m trying to do what they say is best…
It’s a logarithmic curve. Eventually you get to the point where (in theory) you could do 4 × 60 minutes of sweetspot in a workout twice a week for a block of training and get somewhere between 0 and 5 watts for your efforts. And you’ll probably never want to ride a bike again.
The stimulus to fatigue ratio is very poor, because you’ve thoroughly mined the (largely peripheral) adaptations that sweetspot/threshold work will give you. Just adding 5 watts isn’t going to make much difference, because you’re still trying to mine the same seam.
Your muscles are now super-efficient at using oxygen, but now you need to find a way to send them more of it. That’s going to take central adaptations.
{VO2 Max training has entered the chat} 
I actually think they changed AI FTP recently and it’s weird. I might even say it’s either broken now, or it was broken before. Maybe @ZackeryWeimer can address this.
I’ve used TR for something like 7 years, I typically train in the 550-650 TSS range/week, I’m a cat 2, I think I know my body and how it adapts to training blocks pretty well, and my AI detected FTP over the past 3 months has been:
11/5/2024 = 302 watts
12/23/2024 = 301 watts
1/20/2025 = 302 watts
I’ve done 3 structured month long blocks of 3 weeks on, 1 rest week during this time. The first two blocks were lots of sweetspot, as that has worked for me in the past. The last block was following TR’s plan builder which added threshold. I replaced the first recommended threshold workout with a “breakthrough” 4.2 level and added an additional interval to it because it was still too wimpy (TR still sucks at picking a first workout in a level you haven’t done in a while), and then did the prescribed 5.1 level threshold the following week, and still increased the intensity manually because it wasn’t hard enough. I began these 3 months doing 4.8 level sweetspot workouts and ranking them very hard, and ended by doing 7.2 level sweetspot workouts and ranking them moderate. My CTL has gone from 53 to 76 during these 3 months (it’s 69 today following the last rest week). I’ve added TSS and volume. I’m been pretty structured, save for skipping the last threshold workout in the last block since it was the first sunny dry day in a long time and I wanted to ride with friends outside (I did 191 TSS over 3.75 hours, so while it wasn’t structured I wasn’t just coasting along and one missed interval day shouldn’t kill my whole block).
Subjectively, I’m much stronger today than I was on 11/5. Strava just told me I hit my 2nd best 1-minute power on a group ride a week ago even though I’ve only been doing sweetspot and threshold intervals. My FTP usually tops out in the 311-317 range each season, and to see no progression over 3 months of pretty structured training is something I’ve never seen before. Something is broken.
Hey there,
I think it sounds like you’re still making solid progress here, especially going from Workout Level 4.2 Sweet Spot sessions to Workout Level 7.2! Remember that there’s more to cycling fitness than FTP alone – improving your repeatability of hard efforts and your ability to sustain high percentages of FTP is still a good sign of progress.
It’s also “normal” not to see FTP skyrocketing up during the Base Phase, especially if you’re already a pretty experienced athlete. You’ve mostly been doing Z2 and Sweet Spot lately, working on the foundation for the higher-intensity training still to come. It looks like you’re about to start the Build Phase, so I think you’re still pushing things in the right direction and I wouldn’t be surprised if your FTP starts to bump up a bit more with the introduction of some above-threshold efforts now. 
Thanks for the response!
I get it, but with all due respect that’s kind of generic. I often have seen my biggest FTP gains during sweetspot blocks. I see less gains during more intensive blocks as I approach my FTP ceiling. So while it’s normal for most people, it’s not normal for me. Last year I went from 283 to 302 doing nothing but sweetspot and a few threshold sessions, just like what I just did. The year before I went from 302 to 314 doing the same thing. I’m using AI FTP detection exclusively. How come I didn’t budge this year?