Sawtooth power curve

Been wondering this for a little bit now. I think there must be an easy answer. Why is my power curve sawtoothed? It indicates that I have more power, for a greater duration, then a shorter duration, which isn’t making sense to me.

Difficult to explain but this comes from the interval structure of your workouts. It has nothing to do with your abilities

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easy to think of it as a 1 min interval at 100%, 1 min rest at 50%.

1min will be 100%, 2 min will be 75% (1 work 1 rest), 3 min will be 83% (2 work 1 rest). There’s no 2 minute window where you’re doing a higher average than the 3 minute windows containing 2 work intervals

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Exactly

Do a 1hr workout at 225w with no warmup and no cool down (or a time equivalent with warmup and cool down) if you want to make it “pretty” :joy:

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This is just an indication that you’re relatively new to keeping track of your workouts our your fitness is progressing rapidly. The peaks are corresponding to various “intervals” that you have done in your workouts, and while the peaks are closer to your true curve than the troughs, the entire blue line is likely below your true curve. It takes a long time to fill out a curve because we rarely do all out efforts over varying periods of time. Probably the best way to get a more true curve is to do time trials at varying lengths and connect the dots, but that sounds miserable.

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