Anyway as you get closer to race day you are supposed to increase intensity and reduce volume and then keep intensity up but reduce volume some more during taper. It would be nice to have an intensity measure on the fitness chart to see this.
One option is CIL:
It would also be possible to do something simple like just plotting intensity per hour over a rolling 7 day average or something.
Both would be nice. Personally I would give CIL a try as the article was quite interesting. But it’s more a feeling than based on some kind of knowledge
This sounds interesting. Would it help for example pick out when I’ve been doing intensity but “hiding” it inside activities? For example, doing hill repeats then 2 hours steady.
@martinheadon Normalized power is good at picking out the intensity inside the rides — hence the intensity factor too. If you are doing hill repeats and then 2 hours of riding, that does not look to me like “keeping the intensity, but reducing the volume” At least, I would recalibrate my expectation of how high the intensity factor should be
As David mentions above, “Keeping the intensity but reducing the volume” is a training technique for getting close to race day.
However if you’re doing an FTP build block, then you might increase intensity AND volume (or at least keep the volume the same). This is where I think intensity can get hidden within a session.
For example, I did a 3 hour ride at 0.81 IF. But within that, I did 44 minutes at 1.0 IF, when I did 30/15 intervals. I spent a lot of time above 90% max HR, reaching 95%. It was a seriously intense session - but the CIL method wouldn’t pick it up because all it would see is “0.81 IF” for the whole ride.
That’s why it’d be interesting to see the time, or possibly the Kj, spent each day/week above your set FTP, on a rolling average. It would show you just how much time and energy you spend going into the red.
That makes sense to me and would really be a good thing, if there would be some single number, that could take that into account. Veloviewer has “points in red”, but I think this is heart rate based. Power above threshold or in zone 5 and above or something like this could be better.
You can set the chart to any duration you choose and save multiple durations on the home screen of the app. Really great at a glance type of summary.
Just being honest I do miss the simplicity of the TP iOS app and hope that intervals.icu doesn’t go down the rabbit hole implementing every suggested metric. Having data is great but too much just becomes noise.
My fear as well. Maybe not noise, but just too much, too cluttered and too hard to find or extrapolate what you actually need, or what is most relevant.
Could you have a metric indicating the amount of time spent underneath a certain number of W’?
After all, one issue is that cumulative time spent above threshold is very different if you’ve gone on a 3 hour ride and pushed it to 100% FTP every now and then for a hill, and a hill repeats session where you only have 2-3 minutes between hard efforts to recover. The W’ should be able to pinpoint those times where you were really emptying the tank / burning matches.