For the record, my current stats are: TP 258W, HIE 20.9kJ, 1022WPP, 206W LTP
I was riding with the magic buckets in interval mode today, doing the hard efforts on the hills during my ride. In the beginning it was giving me intervals at around 380W. Hard (which is the point), but doable for actual intervals, especially since there is always a range taken into account around that number.
Nearing the end of my workout however the interval target kept on creeping up, to impossible values:
This was 50 minutes later. I kept on riding after this picture, and then I just gave it all, but after all the riding I had been doing up to that point, I couldn’t even hit the number for 1 second. To be more precise I couldn’t even get my power above 700. This power target was impossible to attain for me, let alone ride somewhere around it for 10-30 seconds.
Why is it proposing these crazy high values?
I did manage to fill the buckets (and overfill all 3) but I did it riding around 330W for the hard parts.
XMB provides guidelines for the target work and rest intervals to fill your buckets in close proportion to each other at the targeted Focus.
As you approach the end of your intervals you may see a rise in watts that better fill any gap in High and/or Peak buckets.
When you ride above TP there is a contribution to all three buckets according to this chart.
The lines vary some based on your individual signature but you can see where the most XSS accumulates into which bucket at what %TP.
At 779 (300%) the highest contribution is to Peak followed by Low then High.
Short efforts at high watts will be taxing, especially at the end of a workout, but a few stand-up sprints (at whatever you can generate) would be fastest way to fill a Peak bucket gap.
If 5+ secs is unattainable do what works best for you. Again, the number is a guideline.
Any efforts above TP will eventually fill high/peak buckets at which point you can ease up to fill any remaining Low XSS…
I filled them since I know the way the buckets fill. I just don’t understand why it suggests these crazy power numbers while I can fill the bucket with lower power numbers (literally half the suggested power) too.
My focus is 6 minute power (which is estimated at 311W by Xert).
I don’t know how things work physiologically, but for my focus wouldn’t it make more sense to do those 350W intervals, instead of getting out of the saddle and doing neuromuscular max efforts just to fill the last part of the bucket?
You’ve already over-filled your High Bucket. You could do the intervals at a lower target power, but you’ll over-fill your High bucket even more. Instead, Buckets is suggesting how you can most efficient complete your training, which would be to Peak Power efforts to fill the Peak bucket.
You just needed 0.3 Peak XSS… get out of the saddle for one hard max effort sprint and it’d likely be over-filled as well
Ultimately the point of buckets is to help you fill the three buckets (for high-intensity days) in an efficient manner - without overfilling any of them, since overreaching can negatively impact your training plan. If you generally do a good job of following the interval targets, you should be fairly close.
There are some edge cases if you start overfilling High (or Peak) before the others are filled - you’ve encountered one of them:
If you’ve over-filled High bucket, the Target switches to 20s power - e.g. sprint power - to finish filling peak.
If you’ve over-filled peak bucket, the Target switches to 90s power - still a hard effort but far intensive on your HIE system to help fill High bucket as efficiently as possible
Wouldn’t it make more sense to decrease the power target once peak is reached to limit overfilling? Now I see a sudden increase, which doesn’t really make sense as long as you have enough remaining low XSS.
Not necessarily. Even at 90s power, the relative input from peak system is quite low while the input from High system is near its maximum.
You could do intervals just above Threshold to finish filling High while mostly avoiding peak, but 1) it’d take a very long time and 2) it might then over-fill your low bucket.
I was just surprised to see the interval target increase to 507 W when I ran out of peak XSS for a workout with an original interval target at ~430 W. And I still had a lot of low XXS left. I just had to use a harder gear, so not a big problem.
It’s hard to account for every single possible scenario users might run into with Buckets, as there are infinitely many combinations of remaining Low, High, & Peak XSS targets. Pair that with the fact that riding above Threshold always accumulates XSS in all 3 buckets at once (albeit at different ratios). Still further, it’s hard to account for how “over-filled” a bucket can be before it becomes a bigger a problem… after some lengthy discussions, we figured that the two situations outlined above (recommending 90s power or 20s power) are sufficient “catch-all” to help the user complete the buckets with a pretty straightforward/simple calculation. We could probably come up with some additional logic, but it’d be overly complicated to figure out, test with actual devices, and wouldn’t add much value for the effort.
If you’ve generally been following the recommendations, you should be pretty close to achieving the XSS targets. If you’re significantly off (which might happen if you’re doing something entirely different, like a Zwift race or hard group ride), then finishing with some harder efforts should top up the High/Peak buckets and then you can ride easy to close out Low XSS. If you overfill a bit, you can always adapt your forecast afterwards, right?
The latest version should improve on this and allow the bucket that’s full to overfill in order to avoid very high interval targets. Be sure to upgrade.
I appricate that some athletes might have lower low XSS targets than I have, and thus will risk running out of low XSS (or time) before filling their high XSS. And that you do not want to account for all the possibilities, at least now.
Also very happy to see the training plan adapt to steer the towards the right load in each energy system even if you are slightly off in the individual workouts. I believe this is a great strength in Xert over template-based training plans in systems such as TrainerRoad.
