Dear @Toaster,
Apologies for the long silence on this, and thank you so much for your thoughtful message. I truly appreciate the time you’ve taken to listen to the podcast and share your insights.
Honestly, everything you’ve written is spot-on, leaving little room for debate. At present, we aim to understand the “phenotype” of our athletes by analyzing the ratios within their thresholds and comparing them to common patterns. However, we don’t fit the CP model for different durations, as we need to keep it standardized for meaningful comparisons. It’s always a trade-off.
You might notice that we’ve recently updated the period during which a maximum effort is considered “valid”—it’s now six months. In the future, athletes will have the option to select their preferred period, but again, this is another trade-off.
Your point about the logic prompting athletes to perform efforts to “complete” the profile is excellent. As we mentioned in the podcast, the reason we don’t follow this approach is that there isn’t strong evidence to suggest that a more complete profile necessarily translates to better performance. The primary goal of the training plan is to keep athletes on track and to develop the characteristics we know are reliable proxies for performance.
We’ve only recently transitioned from an FTP-based approach to a power-profile approach, and there’s still much to be done to fully integrate this seamlessly into exercise routines. Establishing CP reliably requires a sufficient number of maximal efforts, which makes this methodology more sensitive to fluctuations in training load and regime. With Athletica, we’re venturing into new territory; this kind of practice isn’t commonly found in other AI-assisted training apps. Hopefully, as we continue to learn and refine, we’ll all progress together.
Thank you again for your thoughtful feedback. Please don’t hesitate to share more—your input is incredibly valuable! 