First time user of Athletica - subscribed for a month and first post.
During the trial period enough data built up for the platform to assess my Z4-Z7 ranges reasonably well, which was a positive sign that the power ranges for workouts might be useful.
Then I rode today and those numbers were updated again (well suggested, obvs I have to accept it). All good - they dropped a reasonable amount but if that’s the right ranges then so be it.
What was weird is this continuous (pointless? Or am I missing something) text about how ‘your improvements are impressive’ … when there are no improvements…
Is this just a standard text for every workout irrespective of achievement? Do I just ignore it.
Dear @nee , thank you for posting the comment and I hope Athletica will be useful for your MTB preparation. We are glad to hear that you find your thresholds well set.
In this specific case, I think the AI-coach/comment is referring to your Workout Reserve. In brief, we are looking at your averages across different time-windows, and when we detect an improvement, we take note. During this ride, your Workout Reserve went negative a couple of times, and it means you did your best effort (considering a 6-week history) for your 30" effort and for your 2-hour effort.
Translated it means: your rolling 2-hour average has never been higher than this in the last 6 weeks. It is not enough to trigger a change in your thresholds apparently, but it is worth highlighting in our opinion.
I attach screenshots to make my explanation clear, I hope.
Does this make sense?
I’ll look in to that and understand more but having used another platform once, I think I understand this. I’ll go read up on workout reserve.
Is there a place for suggestions at all?
(I might be a use case of 1 of course). Where there is an improvement - summarise the improvement in that sentence (for example it could say well done in your improvements - you went past your rolling 2hr workout reserve today by 2.78%)
I totally get it @nee. In our opinion these kind of info would be “too much” for many athletes, so we decided to keep it generic (e.g. in your case “new record in the short-explosive domain”, i.e. 30", etc). Soon we will be able to let the athletes set the “tone” of the AI-coach, and receive more detailed information about their sessions if they want. Meanwhile, if you’d like and you have a consistent training regime that can keep your Workout Reserve up-to-date, you can check that in the data analysis and in the charts.
This is all useful for a first timer to Athletica (probably even more so after using maybe 4 other platforms over time as it means I’m used to certain ‘things’ being visible and that may not be the case here so I need to get used to it).
So just in case someone else out there is wondering the same thing ..
I am currently in the app.
I am looking at my session yesterday.
I see the summary line that initiated this thread about improvements (which you’ve helped me understand is specifically because I went negative in workout reserve on a rolling 2hr period).
I can see a longer summary which mentions a ‘new benchmark with your explosive effort’ but I cannot see anywhere (I’ve checked the analysis tab but it’s just a list of averages over the whole workout) where it was what that actually was.
I could guess it’s the 30s effort from what my bike computer told me, but where is it in the app?
And a second question - I can see a chart for workout reserve .. green dotted line.
Workout reserve drops really quite rapidly when in Z2 power .. is that something that the science says is common to bike riders (MTB or otherwise)?
Hope it’s ok to keep this in this thread as it keep these ‘new to platform’ questions in the same place for me.
@nee, those are very good questions indeed. Of course, you’re welcome to keep using this thread for other questions—just tag me here if you need help.
For a number of reasons, Workout Reserve (WR) isn’t intuitive for everyone, so we’ve chosen to only display the minimum value reached during the session (minWR). In the comment, the AI coach may also mention it, especially if WR went negative multiple times. However, when athlete profiles aren’t up-to-date or athletes haven’t gone deep in recent weeks, a table listing all negative WR points could quickly become overwhelming.
I have to say, your flexibility and openness to learning and reflecting on new metrics, especially when moving from one platform to another, is not very common. WR is unique to Athletica, and not everyone is willing to explore it in depth. That’s why we try to keep WR-related information to a minimum.
My suggestion would be to refer to the graph if you want to check your WR. When you hover your mouse over the graph, you’ll see the WR and the time window in which a new record was set. Like I did for the screenshots I sent.
Not really. This behaviour is more a function of how the algorithm works. WR drops quickly because it’s calculated as a ratio. For example, if you’re averaging 200 W after 5 minutes and your maximum 5-minute power is 400 W, then WR will fall rapidly toward 50% (200/400). But this doesn’t mean your “energy reservoir is at 50%” or that your “battery is half full.” It simply indicates that you’re currently operating at 50% of your max power for that specific time window.
in the data analysis and in the charts.
WR is unique to Athletica, and not everyone is willing to explore it in depth. That’s why we try to keep WR-related information to a minimum.