Curious training situation

General Discussion
1

Hi everyone.

Today I encountered a very curious situation in my training and I’m interested how you would proceed, if you were in my position.

My FTP is about 225 W and this value felt about right so far, if I compare it to my recent rides and especially races, in which I went to my limit. I use custom workouts for base training and recently pumped the FTP up to about 253 W value in the workout selection screen, so that the workout for the day would rather be in the upper areas of Z2, closer to Z3 (just out of laziness not to go into the workout editor and adjust the values there or create a new workout).

I was not aware that this permanently increased my FTP value on Zwift. Today I wanted to try out and start one of the fitness plans (build me up) to get a bit more variety into my training. I did the “Red Unicorn” workout, without noticing that it was scaled to the higher FTP value. The workout felt very very hard, as you can imagine, but I managed to push through without any breaks, fulfilling all the Watts-requirements although I was not able to achieve all the cadence goals and especially the second half of the workout was for the most part a low cadence grind. But after finding out that the workout was scaled too high, I was also quite proud that I managed to finish the workout and even felt decently well afterwards.

I’m not entirely sure, how I will proceed from this now. Considering that the Unicorn workouts are supposed to get harder, I don’t think that I will keep the FTP that high because I would probably not be able to keep up with that amount of training load. Going back to 225 W seems also a bit too extrem, because even without doing a FTP test again, it feels that I have outgrown that value now. So I will probably settle somewhere in between at 240 W as a reference for my further training and see how it goes from there.

I’m not planing on doing an FTP test to get a new value for my training, because in the past my FTP test results seemed to vastly overestimate my abilities. I rather adjust it on the go, based on how training feels/how my previous training sessions felt.

Have you encountered a similar situation in your training? How did you/How would you proceed?

Ride on!

2

You can just reduce that FTP value in the workout screen, and your workouts will be based on whatever you set that to.

Alternatively, or additionally, you can alter the difficulty of the workout while you’re doing one by adjusting the bias value. There’s a button for that in the horizontal action menu in the main Zwift app, and also a button in Zwift Companion in the workout screen.

3

The cause could be a pollen allergy (hay fever). Now there is no pollen in the air and I can perform better IRL without medication. If I take cortisone for the allergy, my performance also increases by about 10 percent. Maybe you have also overcome a virus or the late effects of an illness. More Watts should be no bad thing.:+1:

4

Use the same screen to let some air out of it down to 235 or 240.