There’s an interesting discussion over on the Trainer Road forum about how someone was able to take the iLevels from WKO and use them to tweak intensity on vo2 and anaerobic workouts so they suited their particular strengths.
In fact I think it’s widely acknowledged - even by the TR guys themselves - that the higher the intensity, the less that FTP is a reliable metric of your ability to complete a workout.
Is there any way that Intervals could help self-coached athletes set their own optimised targets for intervals?
Do you mind posting a link to that discussion. Tx.
I have just done a little reading about iLevels as I haven’t used WKO myself. So its basically more fine grained and individualised training zones for Z5 and up? Intervals.icu has the power data so if someone figured out how the iLevels are calculated I could do the same. They are proprietary to WKO so that might be tricky, assuming the algorithm isn’t published anywhere or described in a paper.
Below is a screenshot of the kind of thing you get from WKO. I’m trying to find out how the person applied it to tweak Trainer Road targets - whether it was a bit of trial and error or if there was more of a formula applied.
Sorry I can’t add much more information! It might be that the iLevels are a bit of a red herring. The meat of my query is more - can the power data and curve collected by Intervals in some way be used to predict your ability to perform intervals at Z5 and above?
Sorry to revive a dead thread, but I was searching for an answer myself to these questions and settled on my own take, so I thought I’d share.
I wasn’t able to figure out how iLevels are calculated, though Tim Cusick admitted on a podcast that somewhere online someone per much figured it out.
I did determine that there’s a per simple way to figure out how to guide your training.
-First of all, make sure that your power-duration curve has some max efforts of several short durations, like 5s, 30s, 2min, 5min.
-Pick what zone you want to train. That tells you what duration you need (3-5 min for VO2max, 0.5-3 min for Anaerobic Capacity, <30 sec for Pmax). Use the lower end of the time duration for the zone you are targeting.
-Then use the PD curve to check your max power for whatever duration you are trying to train. Use 85-90% of that power as your power target for intervals.
-Work on progressing (increasing the duration) that you train each workout (TTE).
To expand on the comment from @Erik_Huyghe , workouts at L5 (power) and above are best done as maximal (sustainable) efforts across the intervals, using feel/RPE as a guide. Whatever the power ends up as, is then what it is. Setting a power target, even if it’s in a range, is not optimal as you could be feeling good and go harder, or feel a little off and go easier but still in the range of power.
By the end of a set of say 5x5m efforts, you should be totally done. If you dropped power on the last interval, you went a little too hard, and likewise, if you feel you could do another interval, then you didn’t go hard enough. The PDC can guide the expected effort level, but learning the sense of feel is much more beneficial than looking at a number on screen.
