FTP and Fitness going down, but why?

[Daniel_Mechanic]

Well Hello there,

this is my first topic here and i have been discussing it with fellow riders and colleaques (im a medical doctor in vienna) thoroughly, however i cant find a solution.

I have been working out with strava/intervalls and a power meter on my road-, gravel and mountainbike for about 2,5 years now. Other regular workouts are beachvolleyball about 1-3 times per week. Last year i was in very good shape when entering winter, in december i caught quite a bad cold and had to take off some time, then on the 1st of feb 2024 i started a new job in a new hospital on a hill making my daily commute a 160m climb on 10km. I expected this to be quite a good contribution to my workouts, however ever since i have been losing FTP (in Garmin and intervalls) constantly and also my fitness goes down, its almost impossible for me to get out of the risk zone. In the last weeks I have stopped riding my commute aggressively and have even switched to an ebike or even car but it doesnt change anything.

Do you have any advice as to why this is happening and how i could stop it from happening? Its quite frustrating since i am working out rather regularly and see only regression, both in numbers and also compared to my mates.

Thank you so much in advance!

Greetings! Daniel

The graph shows 1st of Dec. 2023 till today - you can see my cold in december when i took a long time of and then also in march when i was hit by another fevery adventure…

[Howie]

@Daniel_Mechanic, Thanks for posting your first topic and reaching out for input.

Without a more in-depth discussion it’s difficult to say for sure what’s going on. For example, I’d be interested in the types, duration and intensity of workouts as well as frequency. Fitness testing would help confirm that your training zones for HR and power are roughly correct.

My initial questions are:

1. How do you feel, especially in comparison to how you felt a year ago?
2. It’s difficult to tell from just a graph, but are you also getting adequate rest?

–
On a personal note, are you working up near Dehnepark? IIRC, there’s a hospital and clinic in a nice area on a hill there. I’ve visited Vienna a few times and enjoyed running in Geroldbachteich Pötzleinsdorfer Schlosspark past Neuwaldegg.

[MedTechCD]

My first remark would be to read this post, and scan through the entire topic, to understand a bit better why your numbers do not reflect what you’re experiencing:

FITNESS PAGE - a guide to getting started

FAQ Fitness Page: My Form number is not matching how I feel This is a remark that shows up regularly on the forum and there are multiple reasons why people have difficulties understanding this. A first thing that has a pretty big impact on the numbers, is the setting of how Form is displayed. It can be displayed as an absolute difference between the Fitness and Fatigue numbers or as a percentage difference related to the actual Fitness number. If your Fitness number is 100, both settings wil…

Check other topics in the Guide categorie to get more insight on how the numbres all come together.

A second remark would be to not do that commute aggressively every day, that will just induce too much fatigue. Do it twice a week at an intensity that feels challenging, but not exhaustive, and the rest of the week at an more easy intensity.
Third, make sure that all your other activities are logged with both fitness and fatigue. I don’t think that any of those you mentioned are by default set to only contribute to fatigue, but Weight training for example, will only contribute to fatigue and not to fitness. The reasoning for this is explained on the settings page:

[Neal_C]

I don’t know, but I wonder if you are regularly over-fatigued based on how often you are in the red. This chart goes back to the start of 2021 when I started tracking my cycling (before that, I was age-category competitive in Canada in Masters indoor rowing). Over almost four years, I have basically five dips into the red (and one blip).

[max-outerwall]

Why is it hard to get out of the risk zone ? Just do less and the problem clears up quickly.

One explanation would be that you lost form, being sick twice (assumed yellow peaks) and changed job (blue peak). Now you are overcompensating and its not working out for you. It would mean Intervals.icu is actually working as intended

Another thing to consider, since you said you got a bad cold, that you might have gotten an impaired lung function due to Covid-19 or something.

Caveat: random internet user giving medical advice to a doctor in vienna (lol)

[WindWarrior]

One possible reason is that your training load (“fitness”) - shaded blue - is flat-line and slightly declining:

It looks like your training is mostly consistent without much progressive overload.

Training load is a combination of duration and intensity.

Fitness gains for myself typically occur when I follow a more classic training outline, which I would expect to look more like this when my FTP increased to 275W during Build 1:

Something to consider.

Now a counter-example where fitness has a small increase, then declines back to beginning of the season:

That chart starts October 2023. This year I’ve been focused on strength training. FTP started at 250 - down from 275W in my first example - then increased to 260 during base3 (ending around the highest purple peak), and then a couple months later declined to 250.

Hope that helps.

[Daniel_Mechanic]

Dear Howie thank you very much for your answer - i am feeling less fit than i did a year ago, not in daily tasks or normal cycling, but when i hit the inclines i believe i can feel the difference especially compared to my riding partner who i have been riding with for years now.

Yes I do rest - the problem with the fatique beeing overly taken into account by intervalls has been clarified by medtechCD in his post…

No i dont work near Dehnepark, but in Penzing, all the way on top of vienna its the old “Otto Wagner Spital”, very venerable place…

[Daniel_Mechanic]

Oh ok - seems there are no threads here so i will answer for everyone participating.

First of all thank you so much to all whom have answered and taken their time and put thought into this.

Second, thank you medtechCD for your hint concerning the fatique/fitness setting. Indeed it was set to 0% and since i track my beachvolleyball sessions with this, being around 2-6 hours a week it had some massiv impact on my fatique. I have changed this now and the graph now looks totally different. Thank you for clearing that up.

The FTP of course doesnt change with that setting and still kinda of worries me. I understand that FTP will rise with progressive training and as i said i understand the basics of training physiology both technically and from a medical perspective. It still confuses me why my FTP is going down in such an unstoppable manner, while it seemed to be set in stone for the year before.

Of course i had the same thought about the cold having had an impact on lung function or other issues (and no, its not only Covid that does this ;)), i also took a lung function test, it wasnt great, but then again i dont have any measurements to compare it to from before.

I know my work scheme isnt perfect from an efficiancy perspective, but having a stressful job a child and a pregnant girlfriend i try to combine workouts with social rides so im not missing out on the latter…thus i have a very full week and try to work out when i can…

Since the “fatique issue” has now been solved there maybe two things to do

1. take some rest and do a real ftp test, maybe even combined with ECG and lactact testing by a sports physiologist to see how accurate everything is and if, maybe, there actually is something wrong with my body.

2. try to structure my workouts a bit more for efficiancy (i think i can do this better of season on the kickr)

3. not take all of this too seriously since its still a hobby for fun

Greetings!
Daniel

[Howie]

@Daniel_Mechanic, thanks for you continuing inquiry. You mention a few things that answer what would have been my next question, what else is going on in your life. Stress has a huge effect on well-being and the ability to absorb training. This could very much be a reason for feeling less fit than a year ago. I find that people underestimate the effect of stress, of any type. What’s more, it’s very difficult for any model to take your life stressors into account. This is perhaps one reason why Intervals provides the ability to adjust fitness and fatigue (Set Fitness on the Activities Calendar tab).

I find interesting your statement about feeling a difference compared to your riding partner. This speaks to me of lack of capacity, which may be due to your system trying to deal with your stressful life.

Regarding FTP, the numbers gurus will have to explain how the built in value decline and rebuild works.

@MedTechCD suggested not riding to the very top of Penzing every day. (It was the Otto Wagner Spital I was thinking of. Wonderful location!) I agree with him, but I’ll add a caveat. There are different ways to ride that climb—fast or with bursts, or slower to build durability. You can do it with high cadence (cardio) or low cadence (muscular power).

Testing is a great idea. You can even do it at home so that it’s regularly repeatable. And, as Nils van der Poel (‘How to skate a 10k’) has pointed out, it’s not necessary to do all-out tests that cause breaks in training. There are ways to check readiness and improvement while training.

[Gregson13]

Hye Daniel,

Great to see you like to play volleyball, I did it for 20 years myself!

The updated graph gives a better insight in your cycling progression, and I guess you already figured out that you:

• Overemphasized on the ‘red markers’ in your volleybal combined graph, which might have given you an overdefensive approach towards your cycling.

• You have a decline in eFTP, which is heavily influenced by the model. If you don’t have enough max efforts in the short durations, the eFTP might be underestimated. So head out and do the 20’ test!

What is more: jumping and sprinting in the sand is a lot of fun, but the beach volleybal might fatigue the legs too much to really have recovery days on your ‘hill commute’. This and ‘life in general’ might be just too much to dig deep in the all out sessions.

Doing the commutes might also give you a ‘false positive’ on your cycling hours. You might need a long easy ride (1h30 isn’t long, 4 hours is) in the weekend to really get a boost.

Here’s my approach:

I don’t care about the fitness stats and the fatigue graphics, I only care about my “RPE recovery score” on the day of the workout itself, which is subjective but more accurate than a ‘colour coded line’.

Then, I compare my current PDC to my PDC of previous season. I just started to ‘rebuild’ for Challenge Roth 2025 triathlon and did an outdoor FTP tests last Friday.

As you can see I did a true max effort sprint and true max FTP test. The other ones are yet to be ‘discovered’ whilst training.

I add some custom time stamps in the above table to see where I was previous seasons compared to my current fitness level, and then I decide on which part of the PDC to focus my training on.

2023: IM Klagenfurt prep
2024: Sabattical with focus on short durations and only 1/8th triathlon races

→ I’ll start to add some short duration repetitions as I didn’t feed the model yet. Getting some short intervals done will certainly add to my capacity and will push the FTP up to where it was.

On the other hand, I will do some longer rides with extensive intervals to push up my long duration average watts.
Just keep on choosing 2 or 3 days a week to push one of those data points in your curve as you see fit, depending on your felt fatigue, time restrictions etc…

You’ll soon enough find out which durations are a limiter and which ones are the easiest to progress…

Either of them might get your FTP up, however, bear in mind that it’s hard to progress your FTP (eg. 250W) when your 5’ max is only at 290 (then you might prioritize some VO2 max work first).

[MedTechCD]

@Daniel_Mechanic

The FTP of course doesnt change with that setting and still kinda of worries me. I understand that FTP will rise with progressive training

Intervals will detect a newer (higher) FTP based on efforts done. If you ride a lot but never do an all out effort during that period, your FTP may have gone up, but the software suite can only know that if you do a specific test or an all-out effort during a race for example.
The settings for the minimal effort length are here:

The method used by Intervals is to put that result on a curve from a very large database and see which PDC curve corresponds best to yours. From that model curve, eFTP is estimated.
There’s also a decay factored in which will slowly lower your eFTP in Intervals for as long as you don’t do a new effort resulting in a similar or higher eFTP.

[Howie]

@MedTechCD

Intervals will detect a newer (higher) FTP based on efforts done. If you ride a lot but never do an all out effort during that period, your FTP may have gone up, but the software suite can only know that if you do a specific test or an all-out effort during a race for example.
The settings for the minimal effort length are here:

@MedTechCD , when you say “settings for minimal effort length” do you mean that using 300s allow Intervals to set FTP based on short sections/timelines in rides, i.e. 5’, rather than have to rely on longer durations, i.e. say, 20-30’ (1800s)?

[WindWarrior]

@Howie

when you say “settings for minimal effort length” do you mean that using 300s allow Intervals to set FTP based on short sections/timelines in rides, i.e. 5’, rather than have to rely on longer durations, i.e. say, 20-30’ (1800s)?

Maybe, maybe not.

Here is a NOT from last Wed:

I estimated that 5.5 minutes at ~110% FTP, based on doing 80-90% tempo intervals at 200-225W and seeing the same Power-to-HR response that I see when doing tempo intervals after a field test (or indoor 8-min or ramp test).

[JASON_C_WILLIAMS]

I’ve been on a personal journey this year to upgrade my cycling ability, specifically FTP. I measured 160 on Zwift last October (I weigh 70kg).

I’ve been doing 2 group rides a week, in March a 29 mile ride on Mondays (started out 17 mi-ish) and in May I added a 46 mile ride on Saturdays. Both primarily contain riders who are completely beyond my ability. Getting dropped particularly in the back half of rides has been a fairly normal thing.

Looking at my NP numbers over the year, I see that I have progressed from 150-160 in March to about 180 now. Ride eFTPs were in the 150s to start and are now regularly 170+. I know my VO2 max has gone up a ton. I measured in the mid 30’s last year - I’m now at 49.

The number that doesn’t make sense to me when I look at it over time is the “eFTP” - for some reason that is showing values of almost 200 in March and only about 185 now.

FWIW, Garmin (FTP) and intervals (eFTP) agree on my current FTP (187-188). I had an older bike computer in March that did not measure my FTP so I have no comparison there.

Why would my eFTP go down over the course of the year when all other metrics show upward/forward progress?

edit thanks Gerald for putting my post in a better place.

[Jcmiii]

In another post you said, “ Looking at my NP numbers over the year, I see that I have progressed from 150-160 in March to about 180 now. Ride eFTPs were in the 150s to start and are now regularly 170+. I know my VO2 max has gone up a ton. I measured in the mid 30’s last year - I’m now at 49.”

That is freaking huge! and a cause for celebration.

Cycling fitness is a marathon. I don’t see any point in belaboring that. I suspect that once you have learned more about the fitness end of things that your expectations will become more reasonable. Personally I am enjoying the journey so much that my expectations take second place, but each to his own. There are no judges.

[michael217]

Intervals calculates eFTP with the highest average power over a certain time duration in a Session. In Standard min. 5min is required. When you e.g. Have a lot of on off situations in your grouprides your NP Watts might be high, but your average is much lower. I would Not care about eFTP in a normal Session. If you want to use it, maybe incorporate a 5+ min allout effort once a week to get a better estimate.