Please help me choose a training plan

[lucmen]

Alex, thank you for posting the video - I think I understood the principle and concept of use correctly. My opinion on when it might be useful.

1. When you feel tired and need to do a workout that is intimidating with its interval schedule - in this case it is convenient to look at the red line to realize how hard the workout will be.
2. When you have easily completed a rather difficult interval workout, according to the schedule, then you can again look at the red line and think about taking another FTP test. So maybe the rider has gotten stronger.
3. Ideal to use to create your own personal training with not very good knowledge of your strength and your body.
4. For training from Coach Jack’s training plans, this function is only useful for a preliminary assessment of your condition that awaits you after the training.
   If I am wrong about something or if you have something to add, I would be grateful for explanations.

[Alex]

So rarely will Coach Jack push you close to failure. We believe failure based efforts are better to do as your own personal dynamic training. Do 4 1 minute intervals as hard as you can for example and on the last one go until you can’t do any more. Ideally outside when it feels amazing.

You have to remember FTP (CP) and W’ are semi-independent and improve differently. So normally you start a season with base or lower intensity and right before a race or some time when you are ready to hit peak performance you do much higher intensity. The end being this “peak” period. During this peak period, you might want to stress yourself to the maximum. If you are doing VO2max workouts, in a perfect world you would design each one specifically to take your W’bal lower and lower until after about 4 weeks you are starting to fail the workouts. Coach Jack does not do this so you would have to do this yourself. You could take a single day a week of your peak block from CJ workout and design it for yourself.

Coach Jack is not about killing yourself with difficulty although you can crank up the sliders and make it super hard. This is more for the guys that love math and want to test their personal limits and see how accurate the math is or see if the math helps inspire them to go harder.

In a perfect world if you really want to go this heavy math route of training like this then getting more accurate CP and W’ you would use a 20 minute test for CP/FTP tests and use a 2 or 3 minute slope mode all out max effort to test your W’.

So I would ignore Coach Jack and W’. Our workout editor is more for the people that want to design their own workouts. Now over time I am happy to continue to try to add to your education that Coach Jack can just be an additional tool in designing part of your season.

It’s hard because there are many different mainstream ideas on how to train and they compete with each other a bit. Trying to maximize TSS is and designing everything around that is common and really does not make sense and proven it does not make sense yet it is still popular. It does not mean you can’t get faster but it’s just less efficient energy wise in the long term and comes with higher risk of burnout. High amounts of energy required and the benefits long term are not better. Now TSS/CTL/TSB/ATL are very useful and since you seem to be interested you should understand them as well…

[Alex]

So I did not exactly answer your questions but I tried to point you in the right direction because your thinking is a bit off here. Overall we believe each person needs to find their own way of training and usually what is best is what keeps them the most consistent, so in many cases that means what is the most fun or interesting. If you want to learn all this stuff about. PMC charts TSS and so on you should be using IntervalsICU also. There is a lot to learn there as well but managing over training is an important aspect.

[lucmen]

I agree with you completely and I entered into dialog with you with one purpose - to gain knowledge which I do not have yet. I can only reason in dialogs and get knowledge by means of requests. I am wondering whether the six-month plan from Coach Jack will be self-sufficient for me and what I can add to it or take away from it. I will be grateful for any hints. For now I think I will need help to determine a day to take the FTP test and which one? - you have a lot of them!!!

[Alex]

Yes, explaining in your terms helps me learn as well. I love engaging with people to understand how they think to ultimately improve our product. So I have a article why ramp test is the best. It is not the most accurate but it is very consistent and if you go consistently to 98 or 99% it’s not that painful so you can learn by taking tests. It’s just another workout. 20 minute and even 8 minute tests are painful and unless you are an expert in pacing they tend to be more inconsistent. It’s good to do some hard 20 minute efforts to understand what you can do. So do a ramp test and eventually try to do like 95% of FTP and see how hard that is for 20 minutes. This let’s you know if you need to adjust the ramp test. Last year my ramp test was about 230 watts but I know my real FTP would be about 200 watts because I don’t do that many longer rides (mostly MTB with my kids right now).

Generally indoor is harder than outdoor. Training is actually more simple than most people think.

1. Slowly increase your duration
2. Get proper recovery
3. Get proper nutrition
4. Get some variety (long ride, Threshold and SFR are excellent and totally different)

if you do that you get 90-95% of the benefit. Beyond that is squeezing out small differences that are very individual. Generally if you are cycling 10 hours a week (with proper ramp up) you will almost always be faster than 5 hours a week. Again assuming you are getting proper recovery.

You need a goal for say 6 months from now to be in top performance and then you can either maintain that and eventually drop back off to start the cycle over and get to new levels of performance.

[lucmen]

I like this explanation of yours. Can you please recommend me some particular ramp-test from your library that I need to do in the coming days. I want to do that. I need a specific workout. There are just too many of them.)))

[Alex]

Thanks, I like you questions if you are in our app just select the free workouts and do the first one on the list.

[lucmen]

Today’s practice was not without its difficulties in keeping track of stats((((. I had to restart three times because the ERG mode did not want to work correctly in the initial warm-up block. It seemed to work - it reacted to the increase and decrease of the cadence, but at a stable cadence, for some reason it underestimated the power by about 10 units in relation to the target value, which was constantly reported by the clock.

On the third attempt the notifications disappeared, but the target power was not reached, but after the first change of load in the training program from the second block and onwards everything worked correctly, even after reducing to the same values as in the warm-up block. Today everything worked fine on the cooling block as well.
And one more strange thing - after the end of the workout, the watch sent all the statistics to garmin connect except for power.

The target power graph is present, but the actual registration is not. Strange. I wonder if it’s only me and I should look for the problem myself or if it’s the incorrect work of the application?

[Alex]

We are working on an improvement that should fix your issue. If it does not and you are willing to work directly with my developer we will get it fixed.

[Alex]

Regaring the power being 10 watts too low. You are using power meter. Do you have power match on? Power match is not great for short efforts though.

[Alex]

The watch issue and power is something on your side, this has nothing to do with TrainerDay. If you are using Garmin watch and TrainerDay this is frequently the cause of ERG not working correctly but this is what we should be able to improve.

[lucmen]

I’m not really sure what this is about(((. What’s a power match? Where can I view, find and enable/disable it?

[Alex]

You are using 2 power meters. We show your external power meter but this is not the same as your power meter from your trainer. Your trainer is setting power based on it’s power not your external. Power match tries to match your trainer to your power meter.

[lucmen]

[quote=“Alex, post:33, topic:36296”]… Power match tries to match your trainer to your power meter.
[/quote]In my settings of your app, this feature is not enabled. Thanks for the clarification - now I know there is such a thing!!!)))))

[lucmen]

Alex, I have a question for you. Perhaps you have already answered this question. My Garmin Fenix 7X pro watch and your app take the effort data from the Wahoo Kickr v.6 exercise bike. Cadence and Power both the watch and your app take power data from the Assioma Duo power meter. The cadence, power and HR are exactly the same, both in your app and in the data sent from the watch to Garmin Connect. But distance and speed have different values - they are different, but the exercise bike is the same. Why are the values different and is there any way to fix or calibrate them?

[Alex]

Your kickr outputs fake speed and distance based on the speed of the flywheel which makes absolutely no sense, especially in ERG mode. Wheel speed indoor in general does not equal wheel speed outdoor. We use a much more accurate method that is based on converting power to speed and distance. It’s still a very gross estimation because we don’t know if you are going uphill or downhill, how much wind there is, are you drafting behind someone… So there is no way to make our version match exactly what is coming from the trainer but you can go to your profile in the website and change your drag coefficient to make ours slower or faster related to the way you are sitting on the bike, the type of bike, the clothes you are wearing and the size of your body… (how much wind drag you created)… So you can get them closer with trial and error. Generally there is a fairly common understanding that indoor speed and distance makes no sense in training because you are not going any where but many people just like the metrics and that’s fine…

[lucmen]

What site are you writing about? Your app’s website? Analyzing statistic your app data my Ego likes it better - more distance traveled and at a higher speed - I would like to see these results in Garmin Connect stats, not the ones sent there by the watch))).

[Alex]

You could try using rungap and using it to sync your TD workouts to garmin connect. Yes go to our web app and your profile at the bottom is CDA.

[Alex]

Also if you shift to a harder gear on your bike it should increase the distance in Garmin in ERG mode even though the effort will be the same.

[lucmen]

Alex, thank you for your detailed response. I will look into the program.