Just wanted to check if someone could clear my doubts with this.
I have just started week 5 in the Dirt Destroyer training plan and I am feeling the workouts not as hard as expected and advanced by the comments . I had the same feeling in week 4 compared to week 3 where I was hitting higher bpm.
In summary:
Week 3: Hitting 160bpm in the last and averaging 140 or so (my max is 185)
Week 4: Hitting no more than 138bpm and averaging 125.
Week 5: (24 shots to fire) Hitting 151 in the highest effort and going a bit over the set power and just for 1-2 minutes. Averaging 114!
Before starting I made an FTP ramp test and got 170W, which is currently set for the workouts but the feeling is that I should increase that, maybe for all the workout or maybe bias when the efforts comes?
Additionally I have notices that my fitness score is actually decreasing because the training impact I having is extremely low compared to previous weeks. That also happens in my outdoors runs which somehow confirm that my FTP might have increased, right?
Have a read of the reply I got from Matt Rowe (he created the plan) when I was concerned that my heart rate was low during the first weeks of the plan and see if it helps, cheers Andy.
Thank you so much for your input, it really has cleared things out for me.
I understand now that we can say, in principle, HR means “nothing” in this kind of effort.
If I think about the perceived effort, as Matt Rowe explains, we should feel our legs burn and it’s not my case completely. I guess that I should try increasing bias little by little to find out that point.
Of course, I need to push but I don’t get that feeling really.
Just as a comment, I was checking my power curve yesterday and it has increased in the short effort part of the curve quite a bit but not in the long effort. Therefore, after finishing the plan, I will rest a little and re-test my FTP and see what happens. It kinda has a weird shape now.