Had a Tacx Neo plus a gaming PC and a big screen for a few months (had a RTA, missus thought it'd cheer me up). Along with blood lactate testing and getting my zones right, then signing up with Training Peaks, then Today's Plan, I feel like doing more than just hurting myself. Maybe I'm getting stronger. Got follow-up blood lactate test in the new year.

What I did find is that the 20mins you have to bury yourself on the FTP test protocol Zwift uses can lead to inflated results. I managed 20m of 306w giving a FTP of 291w., making me a mid pack cat3 racer. Ha! I'm an audaxer. The 238w that blood lactate testing gave seems more like it.

On an annual training plan with periodization from a month's Training Peaks, then using Today's Plan to give me the daily workouts to hit the TSS numbers. Love that it exports the workout to whatever platform you are using. I get a fresh Zwift workout every day. Beyond that, I'm pretty platform agnostic. I liked Training Peaks, but it was expensive. Strava Premium is pretty good, but then Stravistix gets you most things.

DrMekon wrote:
What I did find is that the 20mins you have to bury yourself on the FTP test protocol Zwift uses can lead to inflated results. I managed 20m of 306w giving a FTP of 291w., making me a mid pack cat3 racer. Ha! I'm an audaxer. The 238w that blood lactate testing gave seems more like it.

Those comparisons to cat 3 racers entirely depends on your weight though? My numbers are nothing special but even now with my, erm, 'winter layer' I'm only 65kg I'll be sub 60 when I need to be next year.

Yeah, I didn't post up the conversion to w/kg - that's for me at 70kg. Puts me at 4.16w/kg, high cat 3, low cat 2 on the Hunter / Coggan chart.



I'm not an exercise person, but I suspect it's down to how Zwift protocolises the 20m test. Making the assumption that chopping 5% off is sufficient to make it equivalent to an hour when all the encouragement is to go balls out for 20min seems like a stretch to me.

I used to think that there was no way the Trainer Road method could come close to being accurate, but as I get nearer my potential (and develop even better pain tolerance) I'm surprised at how close I can get to it. My actual 1 hour record output from this last training block is only 8% off my FTP... and if I'm honest, I could have given more (but probably not much).

That said, it's more accurate for some than others. I read a particularly complicated article on it recently that said the whole concept was largely useless anyway. :)