Sorry for writing this long post. I have been doing some experimentation that I need help with and thought maybe some people on here have a little better insight into these metrics. I spent end of summer/early fall doing straight zone 2 with a hard session once a week as popularized by people like Dr. Peter Attia. I decided to do an all purpose wahoo fitness plan starting in October. It kicked me off with a Half Monty and of course ended with a Full Frontal. My Fitness Score increased during the fitness plan period but my MAP and FTP actually decreased. I did the plan as laid out. As a further data point, my Garmin VO2 max basically was level. I’m thinking that the impact might have been recovery in that my Training Capacity wasn’t always strong and somewhat correlated to other recovery scores like Heart Rate Variability. I may be getting into some advanced physiology that I have no hope of understanding but am trying to figure out the best training approach with some of the available metrics. Does anyone have any thoughts on why these metrics actually decreased while fitness was increasing? Supposedly Wahoo sets targets based on the Half Monty so why would fatigue be the culprit?
Welcome to the forum. If you are comparing your HM results to your FF that is the likely explanation. For those of us who are more anaerobically inclined, the HM will give higher scores than FF. In my case the HM is about 8% higher than FF for FTP so I subtract that from the result otherwise I wouldn’t be able to finish workouts. Another possibility is that you weren’t adequately rested for the FF, which is a very taxing test.
Same here. Half Monty gave me 357 W MAP, 282 W FTP last time I did it. Full frontal 332 W MAP, 260 W FTP a short while later. Practically the 8% that Mecons mentioned.
There is of course the pacing aspect of the full frontal, but more importantly it drains your anaerobic capacity before doing FTP and the MAP effort is long enough that you cannot push through on willpower for another 1-2 minutes like the half Monty. If you are a very punchy rider that is strong in short bursts, the Half Monty will overestimate your values (like the popular 20 minutes FTP test would).
Look at your values during the 20 minutes effort of the full frontal. Your heart rate should ideally be mostly steady and not drift by more than 2-5% percent. If that is the case, you were likely close to your true FTP. Also ask yourself: could I ride at or close to my FTP value for an hour? If the answer is no, you are likely overestimating it.
Also note that if your values are overestimated, you might be training in the wrong zones as well, depending on how close to the limits of each zone you are training.
So if the full frontal result feels disappointing, maybe you can try the Half Monty again and then compare those values. Then after the next training block you can compare the two full frontals for a more accurate result!
The FF is a much harder test than the HM - to perform well, you have to figure out how to execute mentally as well as physically. From a metrics reliability standpoint, I think FF>HM but as others above have said it’s more important to measure trend on a consistent test. Personally, I hate the FF because it is painful.
IMO it’s better to pick the test you will (be able to) consistently do rather than the one that might be objectively “better” but you despise so much that you’ll avoid like bubonic plague.
These are good thoughts. My results on the FF were around 8% lower. This is also probably why The Violator and The Model felt almost impossible. HM probably set my metrics a bit too high for the plan. Maybe I can figure out levels that allow me to improve but don’t accumulate so much fatigue.
Aside from the issues of comparing results of two different tests, pacing the ff etc., there’s also the question of if your training was effective and your fitness improved. I’m not saying it didn’t, sounds like it easily could have been testing issues in this case, but here’s how you could evaluate it.
i think easiest way is just to look at your training sessions in the weeks leading up to the test. it should not be a mystery or black box before FF day if thigns are going well. Like, if in week 1 you did 4x8 minute FTP intervals and were tired, and in week 6 you did 4x15 at the same power, or 3x20, you know you’re fitter, and you don’t need any metrics at all (or advanced physiology :)) to tell you that.
Frankly though that is one of the disadvantages of SUF, it’s harder to compare apples to apples. As boring as it is to use trainerroad and do like 50 variations of the same thing all the time, it makes it a lot easier to track improvement between e.g. Signal Peak (or whatever) and Signal Peak +5, vs. if you did Violator in week 1 and cobbler in week 5, you can’t really compare them.
if you improved over the course of the plan, then probably means test differences, pacing, or you were tired. just run another half monty and see how much your performance improved!
if you didn’t, then you’d have to look deeper to figure out what’s going on.
This is a side note. I compare my previous history doing the same workout to check improvement by looking at the virtual km’s travelled and my max heart rate etc between workouts.
Changes to the workout targets obviously mess with this somewhat, but I don’t feel any software is ever going to accurately give day to day fitness improvement metrics anyway. Each person’s “good enough” Measure of fitness in this regard will be different.
I have addressed some of thee questions in an FAQ here: Wahoo Training Metrics FAQ