In-Season Fitness Tracking

General
#1

I’m finally happy that outdoor season is fully back in swing for me! I’ve already enjoyed being back outside for all-out town sign sprints with a group, smashing it on hard & punchy climbs, as well as some nice recovery café rides.

Today I got to thinking about how athletes personally prefer to track/manage their fitness over the course of their season… do you prefer doing formal tests? Do you let Xert track it for you? Take a minute to fill out the poll and share your thoughts below! Would be interesting to see how athletes prefer to manage their fitness.

So, for those of you who are back to outdoor riding (or even if you’re riding indoors right now), how do you plan to track your Threshold Power throughout your season?

  • Xert Breakthrough Workouts
  • Track best efforts (10s, 5 min, 20 min, etc.)
  • 8 or 20 min FTP Tests
  • Ramp Tests
  • No Testing - Breakthroughs on Hard Rides
  • No Testing - Just Riding for Fun

0 voters

#2

Interesting poll. Wasn’t sure if you meant only during summer or over the whole year, so actually put one from each phase (even though in practice I do them all other than FTP tests at some point throughout the year).

One that’s not there is Power:hr on endurance or harder LTP rides - can either be a ‘test’ on a flat loop or the trainer, or tracking across all rides (with more sources of error, but more data). I know not perfect, and I do try to control as many other factors as possible… temperature, caffeine, time of day, ‘freshness’ etc if testing. (Not that it’s the sole metric by any means)

#3

Thats an interesting one… not one that I had originally considered. Perhaps some average power (or maybe speed) on a particular route is another way that users identify improvements in fitness

#4

I can definitely see why tracking best average 5 min power/20 min power can be a nice, easy way to monitor fitness progression, but tracking only ‘best efforts’ has the potential to miss many maximal/breakthrough efforts that Xert would be able to pick up.

Perhaps this would be an interesting blog post topic for me to write about, if people were interested to learn more about it!

#5

Garmin connect has a good example of a power curve and table of period values (1s, 30s, 60 sec, 5min, etc) of all time best efforts against latest values (i use 1 year values as latest and try to replace them or update them every year). They provide a good bench mark and provide target goals when not training for a specific event.