Please, have a look at these pictures
2018-05-29_Workout
2018-05-29_Table_View
Why there’s no fitness signature value improvement? (I’d have expected a TP improvement).
I’m afraid that now TP might be underestimated and consequently the suggested workout will have too low a wattage.
Where am I wrong?
Thx for your help.
Your signature will decline (decay) slightly in between activities. It is mathematically possible to get a breakthrough even though your signature appears to have gone down. One thing is for sure: your signature is likely very accurately established.
Thank you for the quick reply (as always)!
Ciao, Lorenzo
In order to try and fix this issue, I tried (a couple of days ago) to manually extract a signature from the May 29th workout, but got the “Signature extraction not possible” message.
So, today I deleted the faulty activity and uploaded it again.
Ta-dah!
Bronze Medal awarded, BT achieved, AND signature value improvement recorded (TP raised from 164 W to 167 W)
Now I AM confident Xert has done its job properly!
(As a side note - I tried again to manually extract a new signature from this freshly uploaded activity just to see how much apart the result would have been.
To my surprise I got again the “Signature extraction not possible” message.
Should’t manual extraction always work with any workout?
Thank you for your reply.
Ciao.
The extraction algorithm will generate this error when it gets confused. Sometimes it has a personality. 
Thanks!
(Good to know I’m not the only one to be confused here! 
)
Hello, I believe I’m encountering something similar. Could you take a look please?
Capture-breakthru activity
I tried to have as many breakthrus as I could, to avoid having a phantom breakthru (the kind registered by the garmin, but gets corrected later due to filtering). I got a breakthru, bronze medal, no change in signature at all.
Capture activity table
After reading this post, I tried extracting manually, and got the same “Signature extraction not possible” message. Tried deleting and re uploading that activity, but still have the same error. Something that caught my eye on the activity table is that on all rides that were imported from garmin prior to my using the xert work out player the signature is constantly changing (moving up and down between rides), however after may 27th (when i started using xert, and been using the xert workout player for all but one of the activities) the PP/HIE/TP become frozen and do not change at all.
Ken, what’s your Signature Decay Method? Is it Original or some of the New methods?
Lorenzo, its set on Original, I understand so little of the settings that I try not to change any of them. I tried extracting the signature from any of the workouts done with the xert workout player and got the extraction not possible error each time. I tried extracting signature from some earlier rides recorded by garmin, and signature extraction works sometimes (I would guess less than half the time, but would need to try one by one to be sure). I suspect that my signature stays constant because no signature is getting extracted from the rides. But I don’t know this, of course.
Something just happened, either some server woke up, some someone prodded the right thing, but my PP just shot up 92W, HIE went down 1.1kJ, and TP went up 15W. That’s the higher my TP has every been! Now I’m off to try to understand what HIE is, and how to raise it (I’m assuming bigger numbers are better, isn’t that how it usually works?) Thanks for all the help!
I suspect that my signature stays constant because no signature is getting extracted from the rides
I’m totally with you on this!
That’s exactly what happened to me. And that’s why I posted this.
There’s also something curious when recording workouts using the Xert Workout Player.
Have a look at this workout recorded by the Xert Workout Player and uploaded to GC. Workout Player Recording - Missing Metrics
It misses 3 metrics (IF, TSS and FTP Setting). These 3 missing metrics do show up when the workout has been recorded by another device, say a Garmin. Garmin Recording - Full Metrics .
I don’t know why and i don’t bother too much as GC doesn’t offer any PMC-like chart at the moment. So not having TSS it’s not a big issue. Nonetheless, I think it’s something worth to be investigated.
Ciao!
Now I’m off to try to understand what HIE is, and how to raise it
I would like to understand how to raise it, too, What exactly drives it and how it correlates to MPA and TP.
Armando, any input on this?
Lorenzo, same thing here with regards to FTP setting, TSS and IF on garmin when recording with xert workout player. I assume we can’t use both ranking/training systems at the same time.
With regards to training HIE, I found this
http://baronbiosys.com/using-xert-to-get-faster-than-ever/
(feature request: some way of getting to all this wonderful info)
The way I understood it is: In order to increase tp, you need high volume of training. In order to achieve high volume, one needs to stay out of the overtraining/very tired state. Training right at or below LTP is something you can recover from quickly, thus can do in high volumes, and increase TP, but sticking to training at LTP will cause your HIE to drop, or at least wont prevent its decay. Also, it takes more time to raise TP than HIE. So the strategy this appears to recommend is to start out with high volume endurance type training @LTP, raise TP and allow to HIE to drop, then start including more workouts with very high power (2+* tp) intervals that will work on raising HIE, but will cause hard to recover from stres s, which leads to lower volume, which will make it harder to raise tp.
Of course, I may have misunderstood all of this. Keep in mind that until a few weeks ago my idea of training was to ride 3x20mi as fast as I could 3 times a week.
