So I’m looking at my prs on garmin connect and all but my 1 and 2 second power were set last year in 2019. I raced cat 2 mtb and cat 5 cross last year. I used a power meter last year on my training bike only and garmin estimated ftp of 239. I got sick for 3 weeks in December and only did some weekend rides. Directly after being sick I started trainer road mid volume mtb Olympic plan in the beginning of January. My first ramp test was 189 ftp and now in august is only up to 211 and garmin just estimated 214. I did loose 20lbs between November and May. I’m trying to figure out why I’m so much lower than last year and haven’t picked up much since January. As a note my training was consistent about 4 days a week until I got sick in December. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated!
There’s a ton going on in this post, and really I think you need to provide more details to get more information
One potential - if you’re training exclusively to a training plan you will rarely, if ever, touch your all time power PRs. You would hit those when you go race and use the fitness built up on an interval based plan and since you’re likely not racing at all this year, you might just not be pushing things as hard (this also applies to the Garmin estimated FTP stuff)
I did the cross country Olympic plan mid volume 5 days a week. Base build and specialty. I had gotten a nutritionist in November and I started eating healthier. I do have Crohn’s disease but this has been under control. I had lost about 6-10lbs when I was sick for 3 weeks but the other 10 was slow and consistent. Everything in my life outside of cycling has been pretty calm and my bike setups have not changes. I was not using trainer road last year and 90% of my training was outside rides. Now I have a tacx neo 2 with my road bike on it. I’ve been doing more of the TR outdoor workouts the past 6 weeks but before that was a lot of indoor workouts.
Yep, I didn’t race very often even prior to races being cancelled, so my PR’s are mostly sitting at where they were last season even though my performance in other respects indicates I’m a lot fitter.
The only data that you have that’s been obtained in relatively consistent conditions is your FTP value (assuming all the tests were done indoors with a similar setup) so that’s the only value that really stands up in comparison- and it looks like that’s increased a sizable amount since starting indoor training. (25W is a solid increase, especially if you’re a fairly experienced cyclist already!)
One idea might be to set up a strava segment and compare your performance over time- sort of like a time trial. It’s far from a perfect science, but it’s about as an objective a measure as you’ll get outdoors. 