Hypothetically speaking what would be the downside to declining an increase in FTP and doing progressively harder workouts rather than having PL’s reset?
This thread might have the answers Accept AI FTP increase or decline to further advance progression levels?
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Your FTP looks / sounds a bit less impressive?
Other than that silly reason, probably not much? Taken to the extreme you’d be working the wrong zones eventually, I suppose.
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Another worth a look:
Overly broad, but pushing up FTP early in the training plan seems a common TR focus. Then moving to focusing on growing Progression Levels is their goal. This is all implemented with the latest update to using the “Auto FTP Detection” tool changes they added not to long ago.
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I’d just use the best estimate of your power at MLSS and not overthink things. As long as your PLs are in the fat part of the PL workout distribution (3–8), I wouldn’t even think about tweaking my FTP.
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Not overthinking. Asking a hypothetical to spark a discussion.
Depends a bit on how big a bump you’re declining, I guess, but if you’re talking 10 watts out of 250 or 300 then I’d leave it where it is if your goal is endurance.
It only really matters for threshold work, right (which includes sweetspot)? Much better to be 10 watts below FTP for 100 minites TiZ than right on FTP for 50 mins
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Agree with @OreoCookie that if all your PLs (or at least the ones you’re actively training) are in the ~3-8 range it really doesn’t make any difference either way.
If you were bumping up towards the top of that range for some of your PLs then declining an FTP bump could mean you start to run out of room for progression in that zone. Or at least become limited on workout choice.
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This is what I prefer. I think the lower end workouts are not enough stimulus. intervals too short. rests too long. I’d rather be slightly under-FTP’ed but able to do workouts on the higher half of the ranges. SS and VO2 6-8. Threshold 4.5-6.
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Depends heavily in the size of the increase. Less that 8 watts, probably doesn’t matter. More than 10, you shortchange yourself by not training harder.
How so. You’re doing harder workouts by not having your PL drop, and even if the workouts weren’t as hard the survey response/ Adaptive Training would make them harder?
Nevertheless. I could only dream of adding 10 watts in 28 days. 
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I guess this is true but I suspect AI is confined to extend time in zone and reduce rest periods, not actually higher wattage in the intervals.
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Am I misunderstanding your statement? AI certainly increases %FTP as your PL’s increase.
I think his point is that your zones could actually change. I think the only one that is really in question with this approach is that a Threshold workout could be only Sweetspot if you were sandbagging too much with your FTP. I do think the key is working at the top of the zones with this approach rather than the bottom. 100% could be +/- 15 watts at 300 watts and still be threshold, so there is plenty of room for error in my mind.
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Agreed 
The solution in that case would be for the athlete to i) acknowledge on the fly based on RPE that they’re doing a SS ride, and extend TiZ on that ride accordingly; or ii) increase intensity by 5% on the fly; and iii) manually bump their FTP by 5% or so post-ride.
And if people can’t tell the difference btwn SS and Threshold - I can’t help them.
@AussieRider It depends a bit on where you’re at in your training and how close you are to your next event. Updating your FTP and recalibrating your PLs will generally prompt Adaptive Training to feed you productive workouts with the aim of increasing your FTP and PLs, whereas setting FTP aside for the time being will allow you to continue to work through higher-level workouts that often aim at sharpening your sword, if you will, in preparation for an event.
This is something that we’ve thought about quite a bit recently, which has sparked some of our most recent updates to AI FTP Detection in Early Access.
With this enabled, FTP detection is going to work in tandem with PLs and recognize when we want to have you focus on increasing PLs rather than adjusting your FTP.
While following a Plan Builder plan, we won’t run FTP detection during Specialty to allow you to grow your PLs to really specialize your fitness and work on that time in zone or repeatability.
During Base and Build, FTP detection is going to continue to monitor FTP changes, and PLs may adjust in response to those changes. This will make sure your FTP is being adjusted to keep your workouts scaled at the right difficulty. Then AT will continue to adapt your workouts to fine-tune your PLs inside of that FTP.
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Starting a separate thread. My PL’s have never gone above 6.1 most likely as I accept the increase in FTP each month. What are you thoughts on ignoring FTP bump to do higher PL’s? More productive? Less? No difference?
I can assure you, they are not “easy” 
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I doubt there’ll be much difference to you the end of the day but say to someone outside of TR you have a Tempo/Theshold/VO2Max/ etc PL of X and a FTP of Y. They might have an understanding of FTP and hopefully be impressed with it 
TL;DR: We can’t generalize this, the individual must figure out the correct answer for themselves.
I very strongly disagree. I did exactly that for about three years, and found myself constantly exhausted, unable to progress very well, and frustrated. For some people, accepting every FTP increase they get will work well! But it is NOT, repeat NOT, a universally helpful strategy.
Both the ramp test and AIFTPD overestimate the FTP of people with strong anaerobic responses. This was my case… the FTP assigned to me by both of them was fully 10% too high and It. Was. Hell. Sweet-spot workouts were really threshold, threshold workouts were bloody murder, and then VO2max/sprint workouts were actually fun because I have tons of anaerobic capacity.
It is essential that EVERY athlete come to understand how sweet-spot and threshold work FEELS, and what their HR should be like in both of those. One needs to KNOW whether one’s FTP is accurately set, because FTP should reflect your capability and not the other way around.
I hired @kurt.braeckel to review my performance, and we concluded that my FTP was set fully 13% (25W) higher than it should. Dropping my FTP by 25W suddenly made sweet-spot comfortably difficult and threshold work difficult-but-doable, as they should be. I’m now progressing. I’m not as sore. I’m sleeping better. And I’m improving more quickly.
Also, if you’re riding fondos (for example), you may well benefit more from a higher PL (longer intervals and TiZ) at a lower FTP than a higher FTP with a low TTE and low PL’s. So unfortunately, neither AI nor any other tool has yet come up with a foolproof way to set your training zones: you still need to do some learning about how your own body feels and performs, and think about this choice intelligently.
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