Hi @brucelaw, that’s Intervals.icu. It’s a really cool platform. We’ve done some other videos on its features, and I use it almost exclusively now.
Thanks @ryan , looks interesting. Between Intervals and GC, might be everything that anyone could want.
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I’m going to post here, as I think the answer to the question is here, but perhaps there could be a collective response to the group (which I can do) on the subject.
Question:
Does NP and AP need to be the same for an interval to be considered “pretty perfect”, as per the assumption by one person?
On intervals.icu there is a discussion about NP and AP being equal (on TrainingPeaks) versus not being equal on Intervals.icu and even WKO. It’s the way NP is calculated from the start of the workout vs being able to see the NP for each interval. You would have to read all the comments to get a feel for what is being discussed.
I only have a free TP account, so can’t see the interval data to be able to compare with Intervals.icu and WKO5.
The answers to a well-executed interval session seems to be “consistent average power” across all intervals, decent recovery between each interval, similar heart rate response to each one as well as feel, or RPE, being consistent too across all efforts. I don’t see much in the way that NP would have to equal AP for it to be the perfect interval.
NP will be slightly different from AP for an interval for one reason, the NP is a rolling calculation that takes into consideration a period (30 seconds) of prior data, that means the time before the interval starts (which is at a lower power is included). So it is likely to be slightly lower but should be really close to AP. The longer the interval the less the effect I would think. The likelihood they match is not great unless the interval is really long then the 30 seconds of prior to the interval data has little influence on the calculation.
The NP vs AP is not a concern for me, but I thought it a bit odd that someone’s definition for the perfect workout would be if they match. I have looked at some of my athlete’s data, since my last post, and I have found that when they do workouts in ERG mode, the NP and AP for 8-min intervals is equal.
Both my 8m threshold (3-6 sets) and 5m VO2 efforts (4-6 sets) would show 3-6W difference in NP vs AP, depending how I’ve felt on each one. I even found one where it was as high as 10W difference over 5 minutes… it was a hard day according to the note (lots of sitting and standing).
