Hi
I’m quite new to xert, I’m following a xfai and all hit days are proposed with around 23 sec intervals even if into the description it’s suggested to push for 1 minute ore more. I didn’t find any day with intervals longer than 30 sec.
Let me know if this is what I should expect.
Many thanks
Tiz
What are your Program settings?
Post a desktop view screenshot of your Planner showing a week or two.
Do you plan to ride outdoors and indoors?
Hi,
my program is Forecast AI event 28jun hilly road race 1h.30, therefore focus is puncheur 4 min. General settings = defaults except recovery demand slightly diminished. I ride both indoors and outdoors (the latter more and more with summer).
This is my planner
Many thanks!
Improving 4 min power will involve a good amount of High & Peak XSS, so it’s not surprising to see high power, shorter intervals recommended. You can do longer intervals, but you’ll need to spend more time really light pedalling/noodling to allow yourself to recover enough to do multiple of these intervals. And when you’re noodling, you’re not efficiently filling your Low bucket 
Xert sees it as more time-efficient to do shorter intervals and then recover under fatigue, and does seem to correspond with the proven effectiveness of various micro-intervals (30-30’s, 30-15’s, 20-10’s, 40-20’s, etc.), but doesn’t require the strict, rigid structure that those workouts call for.
You can visualize what’s happening with Xert really well using the new Magic Buckets generated workout feature and customizing the interval length.
Here’s an example of a ride that has 168 total XSS, including 15 High & 5 Peak. By default the interval duration is estimated at 14s, and this workout is expected to take ~2 hrs at Challenge Level 5 (CL5):
I could modify my workout to do 1 min intervals, but notice how the workout now takes so much longer to complete - even at the same CL. This is because you need to allow your MPA to recover so much between efforts that you’re not able to effectively fill the low bucket in that time.
Cheers!
I have the same issue will using continuous improvement with a focus on 10 minute power. I’d be interested if you find anyway to resolve your issue.
Regarding the first post in this thread - I’ve also been confused about the discrepancy between the (old) description of a workout and the actually prescribed workout. For example, the standard textual description for a Puncheur training session starts with “Your focus is on long, punchy accelerations which will improve your ability to tackle shorter hills. Focus on pushing hard for a couple of minutes or so…” This contrasts with the Magic Buckets prescription of intervals that in my case are supposed to last up to 25 seconds.
I’ve learned to just ignore the textual description and usually just go with Magic Buckets or make up my own session to fill the buckets and achieve the right Xert Focus. It seems to me that the canned text in the descriptions haven’t kept up with the changes elsewhere in Xert, so it would be nice if they too could be updated or just removed.
Totally agree. This is confusing.
