Living in Atlanta, it is hard to have flattish rides. Pretty much all the Saturday or Sunday group rides are pretty hilly, which makes hitting sweet spot time hard. So my question is what is more important to FT#P on the weekend group ride: hitting the total TSS or hitting time in Sweet Spot and Zone 2?
Here is a screen shot (if you can read it) of a typical Saturday ride. I selected the ~2 hours that were hardest. As you can see, the IF was .97, the NP was 251, but the average power 195. Because of the hills, the power swings are big. Time ins Sweet Spot was only around 30 minutes. But total TSS 266.
When you are training in the base period it would be important to stay under FTP so that you are working on your aerobic engine. So I would try to stay under your FTP.
But right now this late into summer most likely just going out having a hard ride with a good amount of TSS is fine.
Hey @sandy.draper - for efforts this long I barely look at average power - much more so normalized power because it is a truer representation of what you are doing, physiologically.
That said - those automatically generated bins for ‘time in zone’ aren’t that useful bc they only bin the average power.
I’d easily call this 2 hours of sweet spot. In fact at .97 IF one could say 2 hours of threshold. And taking it a step further: if you can do .97 IF for 2 hours I bet you could do > 1.05 for 20 minutes and therefore your current FTP is greater than what you have it set at in TP.
That is a good problem to have. One idea to reconcile the difference is to use a 20minute strava segment where you go as hard as you can and use this as a field test to update your zones.
Thanks @FRANK and @Jake. I’m going to do a 20 min FTP test on either Saturday or Sunday (likely an indoor test). No road that are either flat enough without lights or climbs long enough. So indoors I can be the most consistent with my efforts. The only issue becomes how different are my indoor and outdoor FTP. I know the actual physiology isn’t different, but I hear a lot that people can get a higher FTP based on a 20 min test outdoor than indoors. I’ll see what happens!
I’ve got a wahoo fan and the round Lasko. With both cranked up, I get a pretty good cooling. I do a lot of my training indoors so getting good fans was a must. I may replace the round one with the one you show above sometime.
