Why are workouts quoted as %FTP?

Despite the focus on 4DP, then many workouts describe the steps as %FTP rather than as a % of the relevant 4DP metric. E.G. sub-threshold with starting surge says the starting surge is at 180% FTP. I would have thought this would be a % of AC - the colour of the bar suggests that it would be.

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Agreed. That would add clarity since after weā€™ve done FF we are provided the 4 metrics. Sometimes, Iā€™ll open a workout, just to see how high the yellow, orange or pink bars go. Then Iā€™ll ā€œfinishā€ and delete and have a better sense of what Iā€™m in for.

This kind of goes hand-in-hand with a feature request to be able to mouse/hover over the workout profile to see the power targets without having to fake start the workout.

And, welcome to the forums @mattc

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Thanks, my FTP is really high compared to my other metrics (or, more likely, my other metrics are really lowā€¦ ), so 180% of my FTP would be 110W higher than what is actually set during that workout. It undermines the point of the 4DP approach to not simply describe accurately what the software is going actually do. Surely this is an easy thing to fix!

When you ā€˜fake startā€™ is there a way of seeing what power the upcoming intervals are without moving the bar across? Once ive started a workout itā€™s hard to tell what Iā€™m in for next!

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By fake start I mean I do this before I get on the bike. I donā€™t do this while actually riding a vid. By then, like you, itā€™d be too late and I just hunker down and hope I survive :+1:t2:

So what I do before getting kitted up to ride is open the vid, press play, then pause. Once paused, I move the slider to the different points in the vid that Iā€™m curious about to check the watts required.

Edit: Iā€™ll add that in my case 180% of FTP is 183 watts higher than my FTP or 85% of my AC. So, yeh, if itā€™s an AC surge, then why not say itā€™s X% of your AC? :man_shrugging:t3:

Edit 2: I looked at the workout you mentioned and itā€™s a No Vid. Those descriptions were written so you could do them outdoors. And this was before they offered the export to headunit outdoor ride option. So, in that context, it makes sense to describe these as relative to FTP cuz headunits typically donā€™t have workouts created using anything but FTP.

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To add to your edit 2, I canā€™t think of any other platform that offers NM, AC and MAP numbers. As such, when in the past taking a written down workout to outside, it was easy enough to scribble down a number relative to FTP as it was offered as a %.

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There is a trick that can be used in some browsers. You need to open Developer tools (F12 in Edge, Chrome, Firefox), switch to Elements (or Inspector for FF) tab, then click the button I marked with red and click the bar on the workout graph.
image

Youā€™ll see a rect element in the code with height attribute. The value of height is the target watts. The width means duration in seconds.

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Thatā€™s cool! But looks like more work than just previewing the vid.

Edit: fiddled around with it. Pretty cool! Thanks for the suggestion!

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