I’m a little bit sceptical about the projected power numbers provided by xert. It’d be great if they were accurate, though! What do I need to do in order to have the best chance of hitting them? Xert doesn’t give you a training plan as such; what does it assume I’m going to do for those numbers to come true? I see the expected training hours and I use the training advisor indoors but once I mix a couple of outdoor rides in there I’m not sure if I’m on track or not. I try and keep the outdoor stuff around the right intensity, but that’s about it.
Unless your signature is very overestimated (due to errors in your data), your power duration curve targets should be achievable.
The difference between Xert and other systems is that we provide a power curve that shows what you can achieve, rather than what you have historically achieved. That being said, hitting exactly what Xert shows for your X minute power will likely require almost perfect execution to the calculated wattage, overshooting the target, even for just a bit, will result in accelerated fatigue.
Hi Scott. Thanks for your reply. Interesting stuff.
I was kind of looking for advice on how to use xert over a 6 week period (or longer) in order to make the projected gains a reality. The bit I don’t understand is what the system expects me to do, beyond riding X hours per week. Does it assume I do whatever the training advisor says every day? Or is it looking at trends in my data (4 indoor sessions and 2 or 3 outdoor)? How do I know I’m training effectively? Thanks!
I believe the forward projections are a function of your desired improvement rate. The activities that the training advisor recommends are designed to give you an increasing training load to put you on a path to achieve the improvement. The training tab has a gauge that shows where you are vs. the recommendations. If you keep the gauge out of the red and preferably straight up or even further right, you should be able to meet the projections.
It seems to me that the predicted future power is mostly a function of the long term XSS (TL) - ie a correlation between demonstrated TL vs threshold power (TP). And that long term TL growth is then dependant on improvement rate.
So e.g. when you reached TL 100 in the past, you might have had a TP of 300w. So when you’re projected to hit 100 TL again in the future, it’s not too unreasonable to expect a similar 300w TP in the future (*given similar training process).
But I think where it does get a bit unrealistic is when it extrapolates past the TLs where you’ve actually been in the past…i.e. no amount of TL is going to make me pro, even if Xert thinks it will if I ride 40h/week
