I had a large peak power breakthrough on my ride today, which seems to be accurate. I haven’t done max sprints in a few months so it makes sense after lots of squat/deadlift gym work.
But it boosted my TP from ~170w (2.6w/kg) to 245w (3.7w/kg). I understand that I can flag this ride to ignore the TP boost, but that also negates the peak power increase.
Does anyone have insight as to why this is happening and what is the best way to interpret the results and deal with them?
I might be able to complete workouts at 190w or even 200w, for example, but 245w is certainly out of reach for me.
Flag that activity then manually enter your estimated PP beneath the power chart.
Also compare HIE to the chart in this article and tweak that if appropriate then Save (lock).
This procedure locks the signature values so any changes apply to the new reference point.
To avoid the issue in the future make sure to validate your PP more often than four months.
A few 10-20 sec max bursts now and then will do. Or deliberately select a sprint workout to ride. Click HERE for an easy one.
My outdoor data and indoor data come from different power meters. But they’re very similar as far as I can tell. I don’t max sprint on my trainer often. I got these numbers from max sprinting on my trainer. It’s the same max sprint I can do outside though.
FWIW, what I usually do when this happens on a very short sprint (and no other hard efforts) is rather than flagging the activity, you can scroll below the MPA chart and click the ‘Previous’ button to see the MPA chart recalculated with the starting signature for that day. I then manually key in the max power for the activity as the ‘Peak Power’ for the activity and then ‘Save’ the changes. This should allow your Peak Power to increase in response to the max effort sprint, but should keep your Threshold Power unchanged.
We have ideas on how this process can be improved (automatically) in the future
I have a similar issue. My TP is really bad but I can sprint - the last view breakthroughs with sprints pushed LTP and TP to unrealistically high values. E.g. yesterday I did an easy ride and with a few sprints to fill my magic buckets. And then a few sprints more because MPA was already way down => TP 195 → 262, LTP 132 → 201. The old values were 10-20 W too low but the new ones are definitely wrong.
When I correct my max power to 1230 W (I can’t reach that indoors because my Taxc Neo 2T slips somewhere around 1170 W) and extract again, I get somewhat more sensible TP values but PP and HIE look too high: PP 1312, HIE 32.7, TP 221 in this case.
There’s no way to know how well your power meters compare without actually testing, which is very easy to do. Just do a workout that spans the range of power you’re interested in while recording the output from both power meters, using different apps if necessary. Then graph the results to make it easy to spot where they diverge.
Just consider how many watts a small percentage discrepancy in power meter accuracy is compared to the numbers people often worry about with their fitness signatures and you’ll understand why it’s important to measure this!
