The purpose of training is to improve performance. If you are focused on Fitness (CTL), you’re doing it wrong. The Fitness/Fatigue/Form is a good way of following up on planning and checking if you’re not going too hard. It isn’t telling you anything about performance.
Once you reached your max for available training time, Fitness will plateau. There’s very little you can do about that. But that doesn’t mean you will no longer increase performance. Fitness is based on Load and Load is the result of effort done referenced to FTP. If FTP goes up, you’re doing more work and get more performant. But that isn’t reflected in the Load number because that Load number is related to a % of FTP.
In the end it means that 2 athletes with the same Fitness/Fatigue/Form numbers, can be very different performance wise. Like one having an FTP equal to 150W while the other has an FTP of 350W. If they both have a similar training program and time-availability, that’s perfectly possible. The one with the higher FTP will normally have a much longer training history and has build to that FTP over several years of consistent training.
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