@Prof I use Athletica solely for crew (rowing) training. I row 3-4 days/week on the water and complement this with land training. My Athletica row power zones used to be higher until for some reason Athletica started to continuously and incrementally decrease them. I believe that Athletica has my row power zones ALL WRONG!!! AI wrote “it’s fantastic to see that you hit perfect compliance with your heart rate load”—I did not even push my max heart rate of 181 on the 1hr22min (4x9x1min main set of 30on/30off) VO2max. My average HR was 132!!! That is ridiculously easy/low and I assigned an RPE 2/10. AI wrote, “It’s crucial to challenge yourself during these sessions to maximize adaptation.” If I “challenge” myself by pushing the power zone to what I believe should be my VO2max power zone (see prior zone from the past, approx 230-290W), then AI criticizes me for pushing too hard. I can’t win with Athletica. I really wanted to like Athletica. Considering switching to TrainingPeaks, which is what USRowing promotes.
Hi @cullenarcher ,
Sorry to read of your challenges with Athletica. One of the settings in your profile I changed for you was that of “Automatic threshold updates”. I changed this from auto-update to ‘ask me’. In the future Athletica should prompt you for any changes detected and you can dismiss or accept accordingly. I’ve also reverted your thresholds back in line with your rowing critical power values (Charts => Rowing Power). You can adjust these yourself to your liking also in ‘Overview’ => Zones. I hope this resolves your issues.
Thank you. I’ll give it a try. I appreciate it.
Dear @cullenarcher thank you for your message. I am sorry to hear you’re not having a good experience with Athletica threshold estimations, and I’m sorry @Prof I’m chiming in without being tagged.
I would like to apologise and try to find an explanation for what is going on, and hopefully find a solution that can leverage Athletica profiling without too much manual intervention from your side.
I then suspect that maximum efforts were “exiting” the time-window of 6 months for which the profile is computed. By looking at your rowing power profile, I noticed that MAP (boundary between Z5 and 6) is not correctly estimated from the power profile (MAP=0), which means that in your overview tab the MAP is estimated from the CP. This means that the profiling algorithm does not recognise 2 or more maximum efforts shorter than 5’ (this is also highlighted by the AI coach comment in the profile) (see attached pic).
As you can easily understand it’s difficult for the power profiling to estimate your zones if no maximum efforts are included. This is why we included tests blocks at the beginning of the training programs. Not everybody is digesting tests to the same degree, so therefore we use them sparingly. In this case, I think they might help refining your zones.
In case of rowing, we have a few tests you can use to improve the threshold estimation: 100 mt AO, 1k AO, 2k AO, 6k AO. The tests that can last <5’ are contributing to the definition of upper zones 5, 6 (delimited by MAP) and 7 (determined from MPP), whilst the tests that last between 5 and 60 minutes contribute to the definition of the lower zones, particularly Z3 and 4 (delimited by CP).
Now, we feel that the AI coach should prompt you to test again if thresholds are not aligned with your expectations (no correspondence between feeling/RPE and prescription). But again, prescribing a max test is not something that every athlete is willing to do.
To date, we are working to include tests in the Workout Wizard, to allow the athletes to select a test instead that a key high intensity session. For now, my advice would be to test every time a zone seems off, and select the test appropriate for the zones (shorter or longer). You can replace key high intensity sessions with a test by leveraging the “Global Library” ( To do so: go on the selected day → Add from library → Select Global Library → Filter for “Testing” Session Aim and Modality → select one available and insert in the chosen day (e.g. Wednesday). Remove the existing session.).
Again, I fully understand that this is not the behaviour you might want to see and expect. It pains me to hear that Athletica is getting in the way of your preparation when it should be helping you. If you think you already included max efforts and you still think thresholds are off, then I might need to look specifically at the data you logged. I thank you for your patience.
Andrea