Training load and expected average TP

I did play with the freshness slider especially when I was feeling good but when I set it back it put everything back into the yellow status.
Here is what I have done in the past 6 weeks as you suggested, the drop in TP was from a near breakthrough, there were a few days of very nice weather where I got off the trainer and went outdoors for some longer (time wise) endurance rides finishing with some intervals which may have complicated what Xert sees to determine my tired status.

I would expect to see a mild relationship. But I think how you get your TL would greatly affect what metrics it affects. I could get a very high TL by doing lots of very low endurance rides, but my PP would still be very low. I imagine the inverse might be partially true as well where a track sprinter’s TL might be very high but there TP could be very low. Other than saying more training targeting what you want to improve is likely to result in improvement it would be pretty difficult to forecast. That being said I like experiments:

TL 98
TP 290
HIE 24.5
PP 1071
LTP 229

Weight 85kgs
Height 180cms
Age 43

Currently halfway through Base period of training with a climber focus.

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The training you are doing is what I was expecting in the Base period for suggestions from XATA, but I find the suggestions are usually more pushing to get the most XSS in the focus type set. Essentially sweet spot most of the time. So nothing really suggested for below LTP. If I did more polarized intense sessions would XATA likely start making these suggestions for lower intensity to balance things? It seems like both methods will get you to the same place but I find continuous Sweet Spot to be a challenge beyond a few weeks.

I was curious seeing everyone posting their TL broken down further, so I went and checked mine out. High peaked at 2.2 and Peak peaked at .8. If someone was interested in training these specific targets what would reasonable TL be expected to rise to? I assuming that it could never approach the Low intensity TL number? I also stripped out the Low for a better comparison.


On small decay

TL = 63.4
TP = 261
PP = 989
HIE = 20
Weight = 79.5
Age = 58

Dave I think your numbers are mixed up

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Your HIE Ratio is coming out at 38. You might want to check this out as per Armando’s previous posts.

Thanks @oldcyclist65 for helping me update the sheet!

I have now added Dave as well and updated the scatter plot (see below)
I think George meant you @Yves82 when he was talking about the ratio of 38. Dave’s ratio is at 29, which is in the normal range. Yours though, Yves, does look a bit weird. So maybe your PP is not correct, or your TP is below where it should be.

Again looking at the results so far, it almost seems like there is no connection to training load at all. It really does seems weird. But then again, it’s still not a lot of data points. I will try to play around with visualising my training efficiency metric later though. Because while the chart above doesn’t show much, looking at the training efficiency metrics, there are huge differences between all of us.

Thanks everyone for the data and please keep it coming!

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Hi Luca,

No problem. No I was saying to Dave that his numbers were mixed up. He’s edited them since I mentioned it.

My other comment was to Yves about his ratio being high.

Thanks for the heads up! I flagged a recent breakthrough which appears to have some potentially faulty data.

The update parameter estimates now are

TL = 142 (139, 2.5, 0.5)
TP = 311
PP = 1006
HIE = 24.3
Weight = 87
Age = 40

Which gives me a ratio of 34.96. The values appear to be in line with my riding apart from PP, my max 1 sec effort this season was 862W. Maybe my HIE is estimated a bit too high, intervals.icu gives me a smaller value.

Edit: let me rephrase it: I do not think the data is “faulty” but I think the efforts I do for breakthroughs might “break” the modelling equations. Heard something like that from Kyle Moore (?) I think. I do the max effort on a slope which gets quite steep in the end, and after i basically already maxxed out my threshold/VOmax2 limit I can still generate quite a big anaerobic effort as I am apparently a “punchy” guy. No way I could hold the TP of 327 from that estimate for up to an hour, so the big anaerobic capacity biases the model estimates.

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Thanks for sharing this Yves, I have been wondering the same about my TP. Not sure I could maintain it for an hour (though i’d love to be able to). I wonder if there is a good BT workout that targets punchier riders, in that it doesn’t play to their strengths as much. As I much prefer the punchier stuff I think I might be choosing BT workouts that favour that style and strength of riding. I will have to try and adapt that into the future.

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Here you go!

TL 60
TP: 221
HIE: 24.7 kj
PP: 1,039 W
Weight: 84 kg
Age: 58

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Oops. yup I’ve just corrected it with the addition of peak power

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I’ve added an “Age” field so that if we think it’s needed in the calculation it’s available so to speak.

I’ve added your numbers Marc @1k2go

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So I’ve been a bit busy the last couple of days, but I thought an update of how the chart looks and some random thoughts I’ve had would do this thread some good.

So let’s look at the chart first:

Still seems like there is literally no connection between training load and TP.

Let’s look at W/kg over age next:

Yep, pretty good correlation there. (Obviously not enough data points to really be statistically significant but good enough for our purposes I guess).

Unfortunately we don’t have age entries for all our data points so we can’t work out a good factor to correct for different ages just yet.

Another curious thing I hit my head on today:

I did a Zwift ramp test because I was simply curious what it would say. I read a bunch of articles on the internet and it’s supposed to be a bit high for sprinters/more punchy athletes and maybe a bit low for long endurance riders. I was really quite tired though so I thought the result wouldn’t be all that bad. It turned out I got an FTP of 261W whereas Xert decided this same workout was a near BT for me and gave me an FTP of 239W. Now, that seems kinda crazy. In addition to that Xert had a hiccup yesterday and I had make it recalculate my fitness signature. You know what it came up with? 270W.
Manually edited some BTs so it would have more HIE and less TP and got it back to my old fitness signature which felt a bit more realistic (and gave me a more realistic HIE to PP-TP ratio). I still decided to calculate a fitness signature based on the TP result of Zwift today and added it to the chart.

here are the two results compared:


So obviously the ratio on the ramp test result seems very weird (but is in fact very close to what Xert would put me if Scott hadn’t edited my fitness signature manually a couple of months back) but how can it be that far off? Also, Xert does seem a bit like a RNG at times. I had it recalculate my fitness signature multiple times yesterday and got everything from 270W TP to 260W TP.

I’ll do another ramp test next week when I’m (hopefully) a bit more rested and fresher because I think without my legs already hurting before the ramp test I could have easily held on another 30 seconds or even a minute. Getting me to 270W or something like that. That would be a 30W difference to what Xert thinks right now…Weird!

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Like Scott said earlier, TP for me is related to my TL, but loosely.

I once downloaded all my breakthroughs (5 years of data) and mapped out TL vs TP…and it gave me a very fuzzy line. That showed there was a positive correlation, but it wasn’t telling the full story.

E.g. Here’s an interesting period of my data:

Zooming in on the first consistent rise in TP you have 3 key data points (assume weight was ~68 (+/-1kg) and i was 34yo):

Start of base in Dec 2019 (and zwift racing):

First peak in March 2020:

2nd peak in jun 2020 after volume reduced, but kept up the zwift racing:

Oh, and long term, my TP has been in freefall ever since - but I think (hope?) that’s more correlated with the coincidental TL drop (kids, work, life etc) than is attributed to aging.

Sidenote: Scotts recent quest for 300w has inspired me on a similar journey to try hit my same peak TP/TL of 4 years ago (TL ~70, TP ~265w (~4 wkg)). I should know my findings in +6mth…

Jarrad

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