Hi everyone, I have a few questions about data syncing and training metrics between Athletica, Intervals.icu, and Zwift. I hope someone from the team—or any experienced users—can help clarify the following:
HRV & Resting HR Sync Timing
My HRV and resting heart rate usually sync to Intervals.icu around noon. At what time does Athletica pull HRV/RHR data from Intervals.icu?
Training Plan Sync to Intervals.icu Calendar
I enabled “Automatically sync workouts to Intervals calendar.”
When the AI coach adjusts my planned workouts, does the Intervals.icu calendar receive these changes in real time?
Data Source Priority (Strava vs Intervals.icu)
I connected both Strava and Intervals.icu to Athletica.
Am I correct that:
Cycling workouts are synced only from Strava, and
HRV and resting HR are synced from Intervals.icu,
even if “Automatically sync workouts to Intervals calendar” is enabled?
Cycling Metrics: Critical Power & Critical HR
In the cycling settings, does Critical Power (W) correspond directly to FTP?
And for Critical HR (bpm), should this be my max heart rate or my lactate threshold HR?
FTP Testing with Zwift
I prefer doing my FTP tests inside Zwift, and most of my training sessions are also done there.
Which FTP test format does Athletica recommend (e.g., Ramp Test, 20-minute test, etc.)?
When I complete an FTP test in Zwift, how does Athletica calculate FTP—does it use a CP20-based estimation or another method?
Experience Level Setting in Athletica
I’m not sure how to judge my own “experience level.”
How should I decide whether to set it to “Performance/Competitive level”?
It seems that changing this level increases training volume significantly—what criteria should I use to evaluate this?
Thanks a lot for your help!
I want to make sure my data sync and training setup are configured correctly.
No, they are similar but not the same. For a start, see the i.icu power page and the different ways to fit your power-duration curve. i.icu also links to further info right there.
threshold HR – again, more a functional THR than your true lactate THR
There is the atheltica.ai test week –> MAF + power profile (15 s … 10/12 min) + 20 min test.
Although the a.ai 20 min test misses the pre-load to reduce anaerobic contributions to the 20 min value. This might be partly compensated by (normally) having the power profile test directly the day before, but it is still not truly an aerobic capacity test they way it is prescribed in a.ai.
You could still replace the 20 min test with a Zwift Coggan-like test protocol with the 5 min VO2max interval before the 20 min test while keeping the other tests of the test week the same.
It computes CP, vide supra, and APR (anaerobic power reserve). And it will constantly update these based on your max. power PDC in your profile. So the new 20 min value will be fed into updating this computation.
However, I personally find the AI-coach computations/suggestions of power targets too noisy, with a way to large change-amplitude, and even worse HR targets completely off pretty much all time for me. So I set the CP and THR values in atheltica.ai from the intervals.icu values (vide supra) manually and dismiss all suggestions atheletica.ai makes for changing them.