- Subcriber - immediately bought into the ‘adaptive’ component after being dissatisfied with the FTP-approach from TrainerRoad and SufferFest’s kinda weird training plans/features.
- Saris H3 indoor trainer. None of my bikes have a power meter installed directly, but I have a Polar H10 heart rate monitor for any ride that matters
- I’m a young’n, early 30s
- Totally new. Just started in January.
- Recreational.
- Short-term, I want to do segments of the Colorado Trail. Medium-term, I want to do the Tour Divide. And long-term, I want to be healthy well into my old age.
- Early January.
- 2.5 stars
- Currently ‘time triallist’ but my rider profile is ‘power sprinter’
- Aggressive-1
- I was in post-event for a while but i set June 5th recently to see if that would change things
Anyway - here’s my original post question, but to recap, I’m not sure the best way to get started on Xert. My initial plan was to set the IR to Aggressive-1 and just follow the training advisor every day. My fitness numbers were going down, which spooked me. I read that setting the decay rate to “no decay” is ideal for a base phase, so I changed that up and recalculated, but that dropped my fitness even more!
Yesterday, I did a Puncheur workout that was supposed to be really hard, and it was easy for me. So I switched to Level mode and just held as much power as possible, which gave me a nice breakthrough. Based on the advice I’m reading in the forum, I’ll probably do something similar tomorrow.
The default configuration on the app seems ideal for experienced users and folks that have a lot of data in the system. It seems less good for beginners. This may be veering more into a feature request or suggestion, but perhaps new users should have an “onboarding program” that it runs through? I know the app advertises itself as “No need to ever do an FTP test again!” but it’s probably useful to establish a baseline of fitness for a week or two to see how the user adapts into training.