Just curious, why would you see the time in zone for just an interval?
Because I do a lot of long intervals? And lately, an extra 30-60 minutes of low endurance to keep building overall volume and load (CTL).
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Yes, WKO5 is powerful, but it won’t make one person a coach. For a professional coach WKO5 on the other hand is a valuable tool, simplifying their workflow.
I say get WKO5 if you like to geek out with data and learn about training. They have hours and hours of educational material. The whole package is an incredible bargain for someone that wants to learn this stuff.
But if you don’t want to spend the many hours learning, then just use intervals.icu and TR and call it done.
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Thanks!
I do even longer intervals for about 45-60min etc.
For me is this enough information for longer intervals in combination with the power page for the overall Time in Zone.
The latter, and I did a bunch of lab validation to adjust the needed variables, and then had done a few over time. The model actually holds remarkably well. But yes HR can be influenced by other factors, but over time you can track.
Thanks is your graph from overtime or only per ride?
The one i snapped was for a ride, but i track trend as well though it has some work required to knock out rides that can skew the data set. What I have found is a very low power recovery ride where your HR never gets near LT1 can mess up the overall dataset.
What you say is true, but what @WindWarrior says is also correct. You don’t have to keep a model well populated just for the sake of keeping the model accurate. For example, you don’t need an accurate power profile to do VO2max. You don’t need an accurate power profile to do a heavy lifting session and endurance volume. If you have a good “feel” for FTP, you don’t need a good model for SST/Threshold work.
In the last probably 90-120 days I have let most of my athlete’s models lapse because our training targets were good enough and relevant. Now that a lot of them are coming out of VO2max time, getting an accurate feel for FTP is more important, and we’re updating their models again.
So, some coaches are hard up on keeping the model fed 100% of the time… others are not.
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do you not make a workout which just hits residuals? that’s typically how i maintain mine. over the course of 6-8 weeks, relatively easy to throw in a specified duration effort which keeps things relatively in-line.
i dont disagree that you dont have to, but a lot of the metrics (ie. TiZ for ilevels) get skewed if you dont keep the model and mFTP up to date.
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I think a self-coached athlete can get what they need out of Intervals.icu for sure. I prefer WKO5 because of the easier integration with TrainingPeaks and TrainingPeaks is my platform of choice for coaching my athletes, but in no way does that mean I think a self-coached athlete needs WKO5. As long as you understand where the stuff is coming from and how to use Intervals.icu, it’s perfectly fine.
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I do, I have my athletes test residuals when it’s relevant. Most of the time you can kind of see a pattern… it’s usually something like:
5s, 1m, 5m, 20m
Then
30s, 2m, 25m
Then
1s, 8m, 50m+ (depends on the TTE, etc.)
But like I’m not going to interrupt a VO2max block to test residuals. And I’m not going to have them test residuals going into that block. I’d rather just let most of the model lapse and re-baseline them again. Good enough is good enough.
When I have some specific reason to test them (like I want them working on 6min power or something), then we test that. And with some athletes, I’ll do more residual testing just to get them to practice and improve their pacing skills. Other athletes don’t really need it.
So again it just depends on what we’re planning to work on as to whether or not I care about how accurate the model is at that moment. The more specific the training, the more I care. The more general the training, the less I care as long as I have a good feel for their FTP and endurance power levels, e.g.
As a relevant aside: a long-form FTP test that gives you insights on TTE also helps eliminate the need for a bunch of residual testing, IMO. If you’re doing extensive SST/threshold work and the guy does a 36-minute threshold effort to exhaustion, you know your starting point.
About 8 years ago I started with Golden Cheetah at the recommendation of my son who was a collegiate racer. It was a reasonable start, but its documentation was poor and I felt it worth it for me to spend the money for WKO.
Once TP offered an online version, I also starting using it and quickly upgraded to TP Premium. I find that TP Premium is great for daily analysis, especially for its PMC chart, ride/segment/ride section analysis, and peak #s. However, for more serious analysis, including being able to compare performance over multiple periods, it pales in comparison to its big brother, WKO. [Fortunately, data uploaded to TP syncs with WKO]
One downside that @WindWarrior mentioned that I’d like to highlight: WKO has evolved over 20+ years. It is super feature rich. However, it not designed from a modern UI (incl ease of use) perspective, and hence has a significant learning curve. This is probably the #1 reason that is used by pro coaches (i.e. they have the time and detailed data analysis really matters) and prosumer users and doesn’t have broader appeal.
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Last time I used Golden Cheetah, I had to hack C code to get it to do what I can do with modifying existing WKO charts (with a little expression scripting). Maybe Golden Cheetah has a scripting language now? Doesn’t matter to me, that shipped sailed years ago and now I’m very happy with WKO5 purchase from 3+ years ago.
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Yeh, my son (computer science) stuck with GC for his 4 years racing and got it to do what he wanted. I started down that same path (he showed me a bunch of stuff). I just concluded that my time was worth more than trying to learn what he knew. So I’ve been on the WKO path for ~7 years.
FWIW: I use expressions for date ranges, but not much more customization than that.
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Personally, I’d keep an eye on my residuals and then do one effort per week. It’s really no problem to fit in a 10 second, 30 second, 2 minute, etc. effort once a week.
Started with WKO+ 3. I’m not really into the analytics as much as most but, it was the best thing around way back then. I have progressed with 4 and now 5 but, I’m not planning on going further. I just don’t feel I use it to a fraction of it’s potential and can get plenty of data from other less complex sources to yield really good actionable data.
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WKO5 helps you make decisions. For example: If you are in a phase of doing a bunch of SST. When should you move on to next phase to do some threshold workouts? Maybe the time when you can not increase your SST workout TimeInZone(TIZ) anymore, or maybe the time when you have reach mftp % VO2Max 85%. Those are reasons you might consider move to next phase. Moving to different phases at the right time will keep you have the greatest chance to keep improving your FTP. And FTP is what many cyclists spend so much time training for.
This mirror’s Kusick’s method and I don’t think it’s a bad one. I just also don’t think it’s necessary to feed the model for the sake of the model, as already mentioned.
I’ve done it both ways over the course of seasons - one season where I tested residuals weekly, and another where I just maintained it when I needed it, and I didn’t find any benefit to having the residuals all the time.
Even as a coach now with remote athletes, I have a pretty good feel for things without having the model up to date constantly.
That said, I do have a couple of athletes who struggle with test execution, so I test them more frequently just because some of the testing they do they get interrupted by stop lights and stuff… seriously. 
Testing and pacing is a real learning process for some…
TrainingPeaks Premium is plenty adequate for most people. You can hack a PDC off of it and make some similar type decisions from the data that’s there. I can get really good FTP and threshold HR estimates for athletes I’m onboarding just by looking at their TrainingPeaks history before I’ve ever uploaded stuff into WKO (without using what they have set or what TP stays their thresholds are, because that’s almost always off by a bit IME.)
It does, but you don’t even really need WKO for that stuff. You know your no-kidding FTP and you have an accurately tested 5-min power, if that FTP is close to 85% of your 5-min power, good chance some VO2max work is in order. It’s not exactly what WKO uses, but it’s a decent proxy if you want to make that decision without a fully developed PDC/analytics engine. My mFTP never hits 85% of VO2max, highest I’ve ever seen is like 83%+, but when I train VO2max in that case, FTP goes up, historically by quite a bit (10-25W depending on how solid my base is). So, don’t wait till WKO says 85%… know your history and act on THAT.
And you certainly don’t need it to decide when to move from an extensive progression to something else. You can just do that when you hit a time available limit, you’re doing 60+ minutes at threshold, or by the time you have left to train before an A event, as examples.
WKO is very useful… I just don’t think it’s necessary for most people. That said, I use it every day.
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