I have a question and just want to understand.
I am busy with a planner program for an event doing endurance rides. My upper endurance HR zone is 145 after that I go to tempo. SO as a test I have been increasing my ai workout’s difficulty with 3% and I was still able to keep my HR under 145 with controlled breathing. Am I officially then out of zone 2 or not?
It seems my at 145 I can push much more watts than what exert thinks into zone which according to my calculated zones at zone3.
Is my FTP calculation wrong? my last breakthrough was 4 months ago but I have been on and off the bike with a relatively big VO2MAX training block in may/June ish
I might be wrong but I never think of Xert as HR based tool, but rather a power focussed application.
You either train to HR or power, it is difficult to do both.
Remember, zones are rather transitioning/overlapping at the boundaries and not a hard line. Zone 2 in general means that you can still have a full conversation, breath through the nose and not the mouth, its a pace you can keep going for hours and hours… tempo is what you can keep for 45m, flirting with you FTP (at its upper limit over-unders as a classical structured tempo workout or 2x20m or 4x10m right under FTP with recovery inbetween). When you say you are pushing the watts to the max you can, while keeping HR under 145 it seems to me that you are pushing your endurance effort too hard. In a way, endurance, next to the focus of getting miles under your belt, is also about being the ride inbetween harder sessions, in HR language the 80% of the 80/20. To my experience the xert LTP is way too high for a meaningful endurance for example, but im no expert, this is based on my personal experiece.
I would agree with that experience. I think my comfortable endurance ( 2 hours upwards) power is 175-185 watts. LTP is currently 229.
I tend to knock 10% off LTP and that seems to work fine for me and is also a value I have read elsewhere on the forum.
Could be personal… how much do you spend riding at/near LTP?
I used to feel the same, but I’ve been focused on building my time spent riding at my goal race pace on my weekend long rides and I find that I’m able to ride a considerable amount of time (2-3 hours) slightly above LTP, while taking 60-90g carbs per hour. If I’m not taking enough carbs, I definitely feel it towards the end of the ride. So maybe consider your nutrition on those rides as well! I use the Carbs feature from our Fat/Carbs data field and aim to keep the burned carbs <70g/hour in combination with taking gels & liquid carbs (Gatorade for me).
Here are a couple of my last long rides with 4x & 6x 25 min at ~10W above LTP.
For reference, Xert has my TP around ~285 W and LTP at ~220 W. Most of these steady endurance efforts were done around ~230-235 W, so about 10-15 W above LTP.
Eating more carbs, i confirm, has been a major major change - i moved from hardy anything over to the one bar mid way, up to the current “grab a small bite (gingerbread) every 25min” and that is proving to be a great change. in my early years i naively thought riding till you hit the hammer was a badge of honour…
xert has my TP around 295 and LPT at 264 , my biggest jumps all came from 4-5min all out intervals (xert segment hunter is my beloved and trusted companion btw, wouldn’t be able to pace myself to granularly over a 5m interval without it!) , no way on earth that I could keep 295 for an hour, never in my life. So I’m pretty sure the TP is a bit optimistic, therefore the LPT is a bit optimistic…(both garmin and intervals.icu give me their estimates around 280)
anyways: endurance to me is keeping HR right under VT1, on rollers (very stable ) i do that at 180-190W. riding at 264 would be something like grey/right under tempo.
Just out of interest, are we talking average power here or a normalised power number for comparing to LTP over long rides, > 3hrs?
Otherwise, I am going to cry.
these are the numbers i aim for on garmin edge screen as my3s average outside, or use as input for an indoor ERG workout. but for watts to be meaningful you should look at Watt/kg. i’m close to 2m and 95 kg, so in watts/kg, my intervals.icu shows me below the average amateur flirting with 3w/kg (my goal for next year’s season). the fact that in tour the france, the climbers go up a mountain at +6 w/kg is mind boggling
The first ~157km I did solo at an average power of 200 W (~90% of my 220 W LTP, which is what I often recommend as an ‘all-day’ effort). In the middle section, I was able to draft off a buddy for a bit & rest up for the final solo stretch. The last ~112 km or so I averaged 177 W (~80% LTP) - by that point, the heat (& mild dehydration) became more of a limiter for me than my legs or nutrition.
I think I ate somewhere around 3000 kcal of (mostly) carbs throughout this ride. I don’t (personally) see a way I could have achieved this without constantly throwing back carbs.
Although your LTP is 77% of TP whereas mine is 93% of TP. Which probably explains why I have to knock it down by at least 10% (should be 20% really) to be able to ride 2 hours plus, whatever carbs I take in.
