I’m new to the platform and wanting to give it a go as I like the analytics, how it will make sense of the fun stuff (group rides, Zwift races etc) and it doesn’t hurt that for the price of TrainerRoad that I was using I can have Xert and Zwift.
One thing I’d appreciate some help on is managing improvement rate. At the moment I have it set to slow or moderate -1 for a TED of 220 km event in October as ‘GC specialist’ as that’s what the ride was annotated as for last years event. The problem is that it has the hours pushing up above what I can commit to by the end, and also predicting a small 7 watt gain (but that’s another issue). If I set it to no improvement to keep hours steady it suggests that I won’t improve fitness I.e. the only way I can get fitter is by riding more.
As mentioned im coming off a base block so in my mind my hours are already higher than I can really sustain, and fitness will improve with the increasing intensity sessions as the event gets closer plus just actually training regularly with some structure.
So how do I get the rate aligned as I imagine I need to for XATA to make sense?
Do I tell it to cut hours for now to less than I could actually do so I can ramp hours later to an achievable amount? Set it to maintain and then just ride what I can and let it adjust and work it out?
I figure breakthroughs on maintenance will show the fitness improvements either way. Just a bit demotivating for it to predict no improvement and strange as I imagine many of us have limited time and try to train up to that each week gaining specificity to improve fitness.
Otherwise It’s a steep learning curve on how to use the platform especially with no ‘plan’ but enjoying it.
The improvement rate doesn’t define how much time you will spend, it defines how fast the XXS prescription will increase. This means that you will end up with harder workouts or more time working out.
This is a tough conversation and something I ran into also and something that Xert did a phenomenal job helping me understand.
At some point in time, you simply need “more” time to improve further or more than the current level you are at. Xert has shown me with my time available that my fitness is not going to improve unless more hours are dedicated to training, realizing this its been beyond relief to me because it allowed me to focus on other things like skills, recovery, cooking wholesome meals, family/friends etc.
There are other things you can play with, such as the time allotted harder/more stressful workouts and after doing that for 2-3 weeks the system will recalculate based on the IR hours what that kind of stress will net in TP.
I.E in my case study, at my 6hr rate I am netting about 2% less or keeping the same fitness that my 9hr junk mile rate was getting me and about 15% lower than my 12-13hr rate had me peak when I was younger with more time.
Thanks for the responses. Even if it sets the XSS ramp rate not the time I’m still curious what is the best way to approach setting it up in terms of do I want to leave room for a ramp up by bringing my hours down now so I can build back up or do I just train the maximum hours I have each week on flat TSS as it transitions me to more and more specific workouts? Which approach gets best results basically?
I’m used to thinking traditionally of a base with increasing hours each block even sacrificing a little over how much time I can dedicate at the end. Then drop to max hours I can dedicate for build blocks with more intensity. So its just concerns to see it predicting higher and higher hours.
In terms of whether I have hit max fitness from my available time. That’s a really good point that it can let you focus elsewhere in life once you know. I doubt I’ve hit that mark just yet though, my threshold power is only 223 for ~6-8 hours a week but have only gotten back into structured training in the last 6 weeks or so.
I’m sure I’ll have heaps more questions as I go. But I’m taking away from all this that I just push-out the XSS in the time I have available and should see results so long as I haven’t hit my maximum fitness for the time I can dedicate.
Alongside that I can and should actively manage the improvement rate and shouldn’t worry about ‘falling behind’.
It’s been interesting to me how seeing the future predicted TP and XSS deficits in Xert has made me much more worried about not hitting my goal event fitness, rather than thinking about it as being as fit as I could be given the hours I had to prioritise cycling in the lead up to my event.
Especially since every platform just gives the latter, but without seeing a prediction, or a tracker of falling behind and just sub-optimal FTP tests I kinda didn’t think about it.
