Great, thank you for the explanation. I will repeat the same workout next weekend just holding the power as long as I can
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Enjoy Mallorca.
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Thanks Armando. I’m trying as you no doubt did 
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After setting off-season for 3 weeks from 3 months of moderate-1 progressive overload. Threshold drop down to -15w.
This week start back to slow progression and did a race few hours ago with breakthrough of threshold +11w.
Check out my activity on Strava: 22.0 km Ride Activity on April 27, 2023 by Peter O. on Strava
Lesson learnt, even if set off-season, there is a need to meet the required weekly xss, which i didn’t (way under the required xss by end of the week), end-up getting drop far away by my friend on last saturday outdoor ride.
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I tried a breakthrough to day using “Xert Fitness Test for Breakthrough Version 2”, but unfortunately it was only a near breakthrough. The workout was done in Auto, which means that everything, except that last four sprints were in ERG mode.
I am sure I could have extended the last interval a bit to perhaps reach a real breakthrough, but it looks the like workout is constructed in a way where the interval completes when MPA reaches the target power of the third interval. How is this supposed to work?
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the last interval should not be done in erg mode and you should push until you cannot push anymore
Yes, thanks.
it looks like that is a workaround, but no such instructions are given in the description or when executing the workout. In fact, it is tagged as #mixedmode, which means that it will automatically switch to slope mode for some intervals.
I think it would be much better if the workout was constructed in a way where it worked as intended out of the box.
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2 weeks of slight illness, recovery and minimal riding post Chasing Classics. Decided to do a longer breakthrough effort (Innsbruck Reverse KOM) to see where I was. Zwift and Xert was within 6 watts. 249 vs 255.
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Been almost a month this my last breakthrough, I set out today to our group ride saying i’m going to get a breakthrough today.
Been a bit disappointed due to my TP going down almost 20 over the past few weeks after a massive uprise in TP for the past few months and simply struggling lately with the workouts.
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What has your XPMC looked like for the past ~4-6 weeks? What’s the trend in your Training Load? Is it holding steady? Increasing? Decreasing?
January 25 was my first uptrend for TP, went from 327 to 341 and held steady. On April 1st it went up to 355 and slowly declined and hit 315 recently (About a month this last breakthrough). Yesterday after this breakthrough it went back up to 324.
I did have the last week of April that I didnt ride for a whole week due to some discomfort on my shoulder but that’s about it.
I believe the major issue was drop in trainings hours but insane how much it affected my TP on the charts.
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Not the breakthrough you want to see but the breakthrough you have to see.
(1) - week post my peak race with a month of hard riding/racing.
It goes to show that the system really is sensing what my body is trying to tell me and without visual reinforcement I would ignore it. This is now a -10 TP since I peaked my TP on 4/15/2023 on a B race and my A race was 4/29/23.
Monitoring my Xert I can clearly see that peaking or racing a race that hard on 4/15/23 hindered or hurt my 4/29/23 performance (by a little) and now almost a month out I am still trying to recover/fight the onset of the peak/race phase.
Great tool, excited to start my training back up for another mid-summer peak during MTB racing! This information allows me to see and understand as I train and B/C race during my training how it will affect me and how I need to rest or avoid all out weekly road rides (which I do).
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Can’t argue with you, but once you know how the workout is structured, another possibility is to just hit the “previous interval” button towards the end of that last ERG interval and repeat it until failure.
For a bit of context here, I was training since the start of the year for an event towards the end of April called the Dirty Reiver in the UK. It’s a gravel ride in the north of England, and I chose to do the 130km event - which actually turned out to actually be just over 120km.
I only started using Xert in Jan, so felt that I was still learning a lot & was having to believe in the process. There seemed to be a lot of lower effort work, without many harder intervals thrown in & I worried a bit that I was going to struggle through the event.
2 weeks before the event I got a cold, which knocked the training back a bit & was a bit of an extra worry for me.
However, In the end I did much better in the event than I really expected to do.
Stats were 122km, 2239m elevation gain & an official time of 6hrs 26mins. This includes a couple of feedstop stops. All of the low-intensity work really seemed to help build my endurance, which is something I have never really found the time for. I will definitely be incorporating more of this into my training.
Anyway - breakthroughs…there is a crit club race series currently on Zwift which I decided to try. It’s not really my normal riding strength, so is a good way to shake things up.
My TP had dropped within Xert quite a lot because of the cold prior to the event and a couple of weeks of very low effort after the event.
This was the breakthrough achieved after the first crit race. The jump in TP is pretty artificial I think. Decay is set to optimal, but seems to have dropped much more than I would expect. I think this breakthrough was more about resetting my fitness signature.
Last night I did the crit club race 2, which was 8 laps of downtown dolphin; a mainly flat course with a slight kick towards the end of the lap.
What’s interesting to me about this one, is the ‘staircase’ nature of the MPA, which tracks each lap of the race, with a clear dip when attacking up the kicker. It definitely mirrors how I was feeling during the race.
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Reset my PP by the -84W, it bumped my TP up by 3 watts and it updated the breakthrough chart with the revised values. Very happy with results and current signature and my progress. Wish I had this improvement in April during my 2 big events.
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did it again on yesterday ride, early breakthrough as the group going fast at the starts…just bite-on when it was my turn to pull the group till i got a breakthrough.
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Another crit race on Zwift - the third of the series, and another breakthrough!
5 laps of La Guardia loop this time. Still got beaten on the run to the line, so need to work on that!
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