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Power zones in suggested workouts seem all wrong

I tried some workouts suggested by my Edge 1040. They feel way too easy. My FTP is 203. The prescribed power zone for a "Threshold" workout is 156 - 182. This is ~85% of my FTP, so a tempo zone, not a threshold zone. It does not make any sense to me, can anyone explain it?

I double-checked that my FTP is set correctly. In fact, after executing the workout, I can see in Garmin Connect that my "FTP Setting" is 203. And the zones in the "Time in Zones" tab also seem correct. It's just that I record zero time in the threshold zone (starting at 183) when I execute a perfect "Threshold" workout (up to 182). And it's not only the threshold zone, my "Tempo" workouts target 70% of my FTP, which is an endurance zone to me.

I'd think it's some kind of bug, but the suggested workouts in my Forerunner 965 show the same problem. What am I doing wrong?

0 simondaw over 1 year ago

Hmm. Not been my experience; I have a threshold intervals session scheduled for next weekend, for example, and it's correctly showing 3 x 15 mins at zone 4, 252-294w, where my FTP is set to 280. For a threshold session you should be looking at zone 4 - can you confirm that that's how it's described in the workout plan?

Garmin are not very good at syncing between the mobile app, Connect on the web, and devices, in my experience. My guess would be that somewhere, somehow, something has a different FTP setting, probably of around 173.

0 Marcin over 1 year ago in reply to simondaw

Thanks for sharing your experience. I don't see any workout descriptions in my Edge. Note that I am not using a prebuilt plan, just looking at suggested workouts (an ad-hoc plan built by Edge for today and the next 6 days).

The name of a suggested workout is "Threshold". But as you can even see on the graph, the intervals (tall blue boxes) don't reach the threshold (the white line). How does this make any sense?

0 Marcin over 1 year ago in reply to Marcin

I think I know where this might be coming from. If I look at my recent (last 4 weeks) power curve, 20 minute power is ~180W. This is because I am doing ramp tests and not classic FTP tests. So it seems Garmin thinks my FTP is ~170W based on my power curve, despite the fact that I entered a different value explicitly. This then explains why my threshold interval target is ~170W.

It still does not make sense that suggested workouts ignore my measured FTP and try to determine the FTP on their own, but at least it's explainable :-) I'll probably report a bug in the Beta Program section.

0 simondaw over 1 year ago in reply to Marcin

Sounds possible, but what does the actual device report as your FTP? (Not Connect.) It seems incredible that the device might be showing one figure, but calculating using another!
You can always disable auto-calculate FTP (or whatever it's called).

0 Marcin over 1 year ago in reply to simondaw

My "Power" glance very clearly states that my FTP is 203. Disabling FTP auto-detection didn't immediately change anything - the threshold intervals in the suggested workouts are still far from my FTP. Even after restarting the device. Maybe I will wait a day for the plan to update, but I am not holding my breath. I think this setting only disables the option to update my FTP, which I have seen at the end of some of my workouts.

I can manually create identical workouts and choose power zone targets (like Z4 for threshold) which are then spot on. But I'd prefer to just run suggested workouts. And ideally also be able to choose those for the next days - it's a really dumb bug that as long as there is a workout for today, you always get it after choosing "Ride" - whatever you select from the calendar. Oh, and I wonder if anyone at Garmin ever tried the workout forward/backward navigation feature after they implemented it - as soon as you return to a repeat step, the workout screen goes completely out of sync for different parts of it - I reported it in the Beta forums ("Going back to a "repeat" workout step with "skip last rest" breaks the workout page") with detailed instructions how to reproduce, but nobody seems to care (no status updates).