Recovery Thresholds

As much as I like FTP for standardizing workouts across different fitness levels, I never use it! Here’s why: Structured workouts generally have intense work intervals followed by recovery intervals. As my fitness improves, I want my work intervals to become harder. I don’t want the recovery intervals to change. As such, I end up editing all my workouts to increase the work intervals independent of recovery intervals.

Have you ever thought of implementing a “Recovery Threshold” setting that allows recovery values to be locked when changing FTP? It would look something like:

When Increasing FTP, every value above the “Recovery Threshold” is raised like normal. Values below the threshold stay locked and do not change.

Intresting idea! I was only using FTP before to set my intensity for Endurance rides. But now I’m using DFA-a1 to stay below VT1. And intensity for all my interval workouts is based on the PD curve and not on FTP.
Basically I set my interval intensity target based on the last succesfull one and then use a spreadsheet to convert that watt number to a %FTP.
The FTP number that I use comes from the Xert IQ field and is still needed to calculate correct TSS. But for workout design, I’m completely independent of FTP. I haven’t performed a true FTP test for months…

It is an interesting idea and I understand it and can partially relate. Meaning I just got back into cycling about 5 years ago and started with indoors and my recovery periods were at 50% of FTP and after I started getting stronger I have evolved to 40%. I am not experienced enough to understand the nuances of small FTP gains and being able to feel the small increase in rest intervals which is why I said partially relate.

I was also just thinking the same thing as we added an intensity slider to our workout creator and I was thinking of not increasing or decreasing the rest periods. That said this is a bit tricky and to some degree might cause problems with public workouts. If you have the concept of fixed watt rests obviously for 150w FTP guy and a 300w FTP guy they would not need the same fixed watt rest periods. Trying to make semi-fixed rests could get rather complicated and confusing. I will keep thinking on this and see if I get any ideas. It is interesting.

I also agree with the problems related to such an FTP focus. FTP is a good startig point as you guys are saying but for two different riders different testing methods can mean two totally different things regarding performance and training.