Everything that follows is on the basis that my power meter is accurate…
I have been doing a lot of 4 plus hour road rides recently, nothing structured just blasting about, and my IF for the ride is consistently over 1.10, sometimes as high as 1.3. VI is usually about 1.30 and NP is always well above the FTP from my last test. There are no long coffee stops or anything, just ten minutes to refill bottles and so on.
Is this an indication that the FTP I am working off is set is too low and it is time to reassess?
My outside FTP is like 10-15w higher than my inside one. But even taking differences like that into account I would say your FTP is set too low.
An IF of 1 is an effort that generally involves tears, cursing and not being able to connect more than 2 syllables at a time if done properly for an hour. Should be impossible for 4+…
I haven’t tested for a while because I haven’t been doing anything structured, just riding a lot and having fun. I took a look at some of my data recently and was really surprised by what it suggested my FTP should be. Time to test I guess.
Honestly that seems so far off that I wonder if you haven’t just got a wrong setting somewhere. What do you use to measure power and look at the data? All of TR, TP, Garmin, etc have their own FTP settings and they don’t automatically update each other. So if you did a TR ftp test, but are now looking at garmin connect for the IF, garmin might not have your TR FTP.
if you ride 1+ hour with an avg power that’s more then your FTP, then it’s time for a new test, if you can ride 4+ hours with an avg power above FTP, your test is WAY overdue
Easy math
(in addition to what @splash is saying… look at your avg power of the ride and compare to what you think your FTP is set too… IF is calculated based on those numbers, but if the input is not what you expect because of garmin, tr, strava settings… your can be misled easily)
This makes mostly a difference if the variability of your ride is high. Also because of the “rolling average” of NP, it (and IF with it) can be unreliable for short rides under half an hour, or if you do a lot of short hard accelerations.
…however, over 4 hours, even if you have a lot of short hard efforts, NP shouldn’t be over FTP.
Have you set your cycling computer to include zeros in power recording? If you have this excluded, just like with cadence recording, it will significantly inflate your average and normalized power.
