7 straight days of indoor trainer and my fitness goes from 31 to 34!
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I call and I’ll raise that by 4: 89 to 96 
I have gone from 69 to 63 and am normally mid 70s. I am just doing 4 x 1h per week Z2 with 3 x 30s @ 160%+ to get my HR up to 95%. That should keep some cardio at least. Plenty of time to get back into it after lockdown before races resume. I hate the trainer. Watching a cool Netflix WW2 show and even with that the last 10 mins drag on and on and on and on and on. Indoor is not for me!
I’m also getting out as often as I can, but with real feel temps of close to 0 Celsius, I’m now waiting for the weekend, with temps up to close to 20 degrees… Indoor, I keep my sanity by using challenges, like BigRingVR and Rouvy offer, while watching the footage on a big screen. Draining myself to the max, which is anything but boring 
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The trainer is not suitable for the base. 
On the trainer only intervals !!!
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Guess I’m lucky I’m already well adapted to life indoors… over 400hrs on the turbo in 2019 and should be more this year.
Getting a smart trainer and zwift changed everything for me. I typically do at least one 4hr tempo ride/week plus a few longer Z2 and race quite a bit rather than bother with intervals. Keeps things interesting enough.
Once weather improves I’ll do big rides outside on the weekends but still hit my weekday rides inside. It’s proven the best way to squeeze in the training hours around “real” life responsibilities (wife, four kids, job, farm chores…).
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So here’s a different one then. I did a ramp test March 3rd - upped from 282 to 301, pretty pleased with that. Fitness score went from 54 to 66 over the next 2 weeks following a trainerroad plan. Did 2 pretty awful 10 mile TT’s in this period - which surprised me. From March 15th to now ,my fitness score has declined back to 55, but I did a ramp test last night and my FTP has gone up to 321. Am I getting fitter , or not? Or am I taking the fitness score as a marker of fitness a little too literally?
I’m sure @david will explain this, but I would think your short term power may have gone up, but your training load has not. I.e. you get better at sub one hour (power) workouts, but you did not increase your weekly training load, in hours… Fitness is a metric that takes your load into account and that, in turn, usually increases most by putting in more hours, less by increasing intensity…
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That would make sense Cyclopaat as my ramp did decrease although the intensity increased. Does that by default infer a ceiling based upon how much time, rather than intensity , I can put in?
Yes, basically capped by the amount of time you can put in. You can only increase intensity by so much, without over-training yourself in the end.
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Bummer - best recalibrate myself! I suppose that this does coincide with UK lockdown and I have had to forgo my Sunday spin which is a bummer. I substituted this for Disaster-1 on TR the last 2 Sundays which was a good hard workout but maybe not the same training benefits.
Chris_Hanson-Jones:
I’ve said this before, but your case is a really good example: “fitness”, aka chronic training load, is a measure of the amount of work you have been doing [relative to your FTP]. Two observations:
1 load is effort relative to your FTP. So when you raised your FTP, you had to do more work for the same load, or TSS in TR-speak. So, when your FTP was raised, then you had to do more work just to keep the same load / TSS;
2 CTL / “fitness” is simply a measure of the work you’ve been doing relative to your FTP, over the past 42 days. It is an inference to call this fitness, an inference that is not always justified.
So my general view of this matter is that we should think of CTL / “fitness” as simply a measure of the medium term workload [relative to FTP], or the amount of exercise stress that we are putting our bodies through.
As to FTP and getting fitter, I would have agreed with Cyclopaat’s original response to you – your short term power [5-10 minutes in the case of a ramp test] has gone up. But then you added that you did Disaster-1 twice. If this was at your 301 FTP, then that implies that you have a normalised power for 3:20 hours of ~240 watts. If you can do DIsaster-1 at your new FTP, then your normalised power for 3:20 hours will have risen to ~255 watts. I would think it safe to conclude in that case that your performance has improved.
Finally – and I know that this is getting long – use TR’s personal records function – you can see your best powers for a range of durations for time periods [seasons] that you specify. It’s worth learning how to get the best out of this feature – TR has good blog posts about this.
Good luck.
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You may be taking it a bit literally. CTL is just the amount of training you have sustained in the relatively near term. That’s why it’s “chronic” and ATL is “acute”.
Most people are training at low or moderate intensity in base periods to get CTL to a peak and then allow it to fall as they do more race oriented intervals. Typically you will see your best numbers at longer durations and your best FTP test results in the beginning of this phase and short power peaks once you’ve dropped a lot of fatigue and are “fresh” and have been more focused on sharpening.
I think the most important thing to remember is to not chase a higher CTL if you don’t need to and if you want to increase load, do it with low intensity work and more volume. I do a fair bit of volume AND intensity year round, but I’ll add on Z2 and drop some intensity when I’m doing a CTL building block.
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Just to clarify:
Fitness doesn’t have a 42 day cut-off. The training load from a given day actually decays exponentially with a time-constant of 42 days, this means that 42 days is when the load (from that day) is reduced to 1/e, or about 37% of its original load. So a given training session will still have some contribution to your fitness score even after 42 days have elapsed.
This exponential decay of your fitness is seen most easily when it’s projected into the future.
The same is true of your Fatigue, however there the time-constant is shorter.
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