Xert Form Score Vs Garmin Recovery Advisor

Hello. My subjection impressions of the xert form score and the Green/Blue/Yellow/Red status that it drives is that it tends to over count the stress put on by very short, peak effort attempts while under counting the stress put on by long hours at below LTP. I have nothing to back this up with, it just feels that way. I have a hard time after 2 days of Lucy in the sky with diamonds 100, despite the advisor thinking that should be cake. Meanwhile, advisor really frowns on something like a 10s burst to peak power in order to climb a hill, which doesn’t seem to have any lasting effects.
I don’t know how the Garmin Recovery Advisor works. I know it uses heart rate, but that’s about it. Most of the time, it just blocks my workout screen a tad during the beginning of every workout telling me “good” or occasionally fair. This morning had me starting my workout in the blue/fresh (according to xert), but the advisor came up with “poor”. I have never seen poor before, I didn’t know it was even possible. Subjectively, I did not feel “fresh”, I rather dreaded the workout. I also d id not feel “poor” and despite having some trouble with a difficult workout, felt like I was able to give it a pretty good effort.
The reason I bring all this up is that I’m growing increasingly skeptical at the Xert form score having a consistent relationship with how I’m actually feeling. The form score is driving the Xert Workout Advisor, which account to a great deal of the appeal of the program.

Hi Ken. It appears that your TP has been increased with HIE decreased recently. This will cause the issue you’re describing where LSD workouts are harder to complete and generating high strain with shorter efforts is easier. Look for an activity where your signature TP rose and HIE declined and see if there was an explanation for this. Let us know if you need help.

Armando: I recently had two unintentional breakthroughs/near breakthroughs (jul 13th and 16th). I wasn’t going for a BT, I didn’t realize I was close to a BT, I was simply following the workout directions. As far as I remember, garmin didn’t even display a break thru medal. Since I didn’t intend a break thru, I didn’t hold the effort, but rather let off when the target power changed. I believe that caused or could have caused a slight error in signature calculation (since the error was likely to be no more than 2 watts I didn’t think it was worth worrying about).
In the past, I tried different ways of achieving BT, with the most obvious, and easiest to me being a very short sprint to try to beat MPA when its very close to PP, letting off almost immediately. This seems to result in a high PP and HIE, but low TP. Seeing that, I switched to trying a prolong sprint @120%-150% and hold it for the long as I could. I got hunch that Xert is looking for the rate at which power drops near exhaustion. This resulted in higher TP but lower PP. Meanwhile, the unintentional stuff resu lts in low HIE.
I assumed that this is just minor noise not worth worrying about. The biggest change I notice between my previous, unplanned training (Try to complete a 20mile loop as quickly as possible 3 times a week) and the structured Xert training is a drop in HIE while TP is rising. Also, the previous workouts had much higher difficulty scores, but felt easier than the longer (distance) interval training that Xert sends me on.
All that said, I’ve gotten to the point of that I almost want to ignore what XWA says. It would have me do 160xss workouts 6 days a week, and doing 2 of those in a row completely wipes me out, so that by day 3 pedaling at half TP feels very difficult after 10-15min, and my hear rate refuses to rise. I’ve had better luck with alternating longer (approx 130-170XSS) and shorter (70-100XSS) workouts, or at least I did until this week. I suspect my approach of picking workouts purely based on XSS is insufficient, and I should be considering difficulty and type as well, but I’m not at all sure what I should be looking for.

Looking at the results more closely, I obviously don’t understand things nearly as well as I thought I did. I noticed that 3hr power went up, despite TP,HIE,and PP all going down post BT. Looking closer I noticed that LTP actually went up. I didn’t pay too much attention to that stat, as I thought it was a simple percentage of TP.

LTP isn’t just a simple percentage. It represents your highest theoretical sustainable power. LTP in inversely related to HIE.