Hi, I’m pretty new to Zwift, a little over a month. I ride frequently, outside as much as possible, so Zwift doesn’t think I ride very much (Zwift syncs to Strava but not the other way around?) I probably have 2-3 rides outside to every trainer ride. I like the ‘next ride’ feature, but all my rides so far have not been very challenging. How do I adjust my level? I suppose I could do the FTP ride one of these days, would that help?
If you’re doing structured workouts and they’re not hard enough, then yes an FTP test will help or just upload a heap of hard ride power data to intervals.icu and it will give you a reasonable FTP estimate. You can also link that to Zwift on your intervals.icu profile and it will import all your future Zwift rides. If you have some idea what your FTP is then you can manually set it on your Zwift profile: Manually Adjusting Your FTP
The Next Up thing is a beta feature so you should not expect that much from it yet. If you want an adaptive training app that reads power data from your rides and pushes a recommended workout to Zwift, you could also try Xert which has a 30 day trial and is more mature than the Next Up feature.
It’s a one-way ticket indeed, Zwift can share its data with Strava but not the other way around. However, if you track your outdoor rides on Garmin’s or Wahoo’s platforms (in addition to Strava) for example, you can funnel those numbers back into Zwift. This in turn will hopefully provide Zwift with a more complete picture of your fitness level (and thus result in better ‘next ride’ recommendations).
Here is Zwift’s FAQ for tracking outdoor rides/runs: