Newbie says hello and some questions about cold air and performance

Hi everyone I’m new to the forum but I’ve been suffering for over 10 years now. I started off watching a copy of Downward Spiral on the tiny screen of my 1st gen iPod video listening through a pair of holy-waterproof headphones. I live in the north east of Scotland on the edge of the Cairngorm national park and most of my outdoor riding is on my MTB up into the mountains and downhill all the way home.

Last month I finally splashed out on the tech to upgrade my suffering by using the app to take advantage of 4DP and training plans. I did the full frontal prep plan at the end of November which identified MAP at 239W as my primary weakness because it was less than 115% of my FTP at 209W. Although this could possibly be because I started too hard and had to recover and ramp up again to make it to the end of that effort. I did a 4 week MAP building block plan, where I was able to complete all the intervals relatively easily, compared with how I used to feel based on RPE, except the 9th Hammer. I retested last night using Half Monty, MAP was up to 245W but my FTP was down to 196W. Although I think this might be because my cadence was too high for the first 10 minutes of the constrained effort, after changing up a gear my power jumped almost 10% for the same HR.

I was surprised to make so little gains after 4 weeks focus, why?

a) Is the cold air affecting me? It was below freezing last night where my turbo is set up in a detached garage, I train with the door open and barely had to use the fan.

or

b) Have I been undertraining? Up until mid October when it got too dark to ride my MTB in the evenings, I’d been riding outdoors 6-7hrs a week since March and had seen a steady increase in fitness. My PB up a local climb dropped from 52mins to 35min for the same HR of 170bpm. ( Half Monty set my LTHR at 167 is this too low?) According to Strava “relative effort” my outdoor rides were much harder than any of the Sufferfest workouts I’ve done. I also linked Strava to Intervals.icu and that show that I spent most of the time I was riding outside in the “green” zone I spent most of the 4 weeks of the MAP build plan in the “grey” zone.

Hi, look at percentages you improved by 2,5% roughly that’s already quite good for a 4 week training! on this thread already performance improvement was discussed a bit.
Keep training! :slight_smile:

Giving it some thought also of course if you’re cold or too cold some of you energy will be used to keep your body warm! so that could affect, also what type of trainer you have? if not direct drive, (a wheel on turbo) then temperature has more impact on the power readings, maybe you need to calibrate the trainer.