With those difficulty scores I suspect your fitness signature is too low. Have you tried something like «A Pain I Am Used To»?
FWIW, I’ve seen variation in signature as the 3 components might move around, but if you track your power at your targeted Focus, you’ll see more consistency.
Hi Hans,
I’ve never heared of that workout before you mentioned it. I’ll definitely look into that after my current races, looks like a real challenge where I’ll need some fresh legs. 2 more weekends to go like the previous one first.
Thanks for the tip Jesse. I’m pretty new in the world of structured training so I’ll take every advice I can get!
For me, having a benchmark MMP duration, like 5 minutes, is a good way to reference my fitness against other time periods, and it’s more motivating. Power at 60 minutes, is almost always a guess and I don’t find it super useful.
Effort was just about at what Xert was modelling my 4m power at. I kind of like these breakthroughs that “zero in” on a previous and tend to confirm it.
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That Difficulty seems outrageous. I’m not suggesting it’s wrong, just love to hear some commentary from @ManofSteele .
Last BT was about four weeks ago. Since then I’ve been steadily stretching my rides (started cycling in May) and can now knock out 50 km without any issues—on a gravel bike, but mostly on asphalt. I’ve felt a big jump in fitness even without pushing to the limit, and last week 140–150 W LTP already felt a bit too low.
So I ran the Xert Fitness Test for Breakthrough v2 on my erg (JetBlack Victory). As a beginner it’s pretty amazing to feel these gains—I know you only get this kind of progress in the first year.
Funny thing: right after the “push twice” interval (interval after the largest spike) I thought, “Nope, not today. Maybe my signature was even too optimistic.” But as a newbie you really can’t trust your legs. Kept going… and —Breakthrough achieved. Here it is:
New signature:
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Can you share more details about this race — distance, time, and terrain?
Big congrats on AdZ sub 60. Took me about 7 all out efforts then I went and threw in a 56 minute effort. I was on a high for a week
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Steady ride up Dunkery Beacon on FulGaz. Just kept going on the climb and bang - a 5 minute improve on my previous time and a gold BT.
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Good work @johnnybike - congrats on the 5 min improvement! What is your Peak Power? Looks like there’s a fairly narrow gap between your Peak Power and Threshold.
Threshold 261 PP 495.
PP has always been low and I don’t ride outdoors now which limits the chance of improving it that much.
How come? I actually think it’s the other way around: doing proper PP training outdoors is very difficult — safety concerns, bike instability, rough pavement, needing to focus on traffic, and so on. Indoors, on the other hand, I can go all-out without holding back.
Try to do some max efforts in slope mode. take good recovery in between your efforts at very low intensity. Stand and push all you can whilst holding thigh on your handlebars. Also, try with different gears to see where you max out.
if you are mostly riding indoors — seated and in ERG mode — it should be no surprise that the highest recorded power is less than 500 W. But you can probably do a lot more if you test yourself.
Sprint workouts (15-60 sec intervals) can be difficult to execute outdoors depending on locale, but determining your Pmax only requires a short max effort (5-7 sec minimum).
It’s not unusual for PP to be higher by 100 watts or more outdoors. The reason being you can thrash your bike in a manner you can’t replicate indoors on a trainer.
If I spend winter months strictly indoors I’ll make the effort to validate my PP when spring weather arrives. I’ll do this by rolling into a short steep hill then jump up and go all out in a gear that requires smashing the pedals. If I try to do that indoors it feels tough but I never achieve the same number. YMMV