Surprisingly I couldn’t find this question with a quick search [but maybe didn’t look hard enough].
I’ve had a lot of time of reduced riding after moving country (breakdown below). I had standard decay set but signature still seems quite high. e.g. a ~1 min effort going up a steep hill, completely out of breath, HR peaks at 193 (max is probably 198ish) at the end but MPA has only gone 1136 to 855.
Should I leave it and figure it will come good as I build the hours back up, or apply aggressive decay from last BT? I’m not planning to really start anything super structured soon, just rough buckets idea, but that could change. Maintenance non-AI program at the moment.
I went from almost 3 stars for a 300 km attempt in October to now a bit under 1 star. November-Jan were mostly e-bike commuting plus a ride every weekend or other weekend. February didn’t ride at all and March 3 hours.
I would try for some BTs when you are fresh so that your signature is accurate enough. If you can’t break through it means your signature is too high - you can manually extract from an all-out effort (lower the parameters and hit extract, then save).
I probably wouldn’t read too much into a 1-minute effort, but if you really think it was all out you can extract a signature and go from there… I also wouldn’t expect Xert to be super accurate after 6 months off, but you never know…
At less than one star status I would ride by RPE and not worry about validating my signature yet.
By that I mean mostly easy LIT and occasional HIT at whatever I can manage in Slope mode indoors or similar strain level outdoors.
After some consistent weeks in the saddle, I’d try the short fitness test in Slope mode and see how close I get to a BT. That will confirm my signature or warrant an adjustment