Hi, is there a reason why the trainer road workouts don’t give any improvements to your Strava fitness score?
It’s not the end of the world but after completing my first week and 5 workouts my Strava fitness has gone down even after a 90min workout which if I done outside would give me a decent increase. Is there a way to get the tr workouts to increase Strava fitness?
It’s a conspiracy, Big Strava keeping down the little guy
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Are you linking your TrainerRoad indoor workouts to Strava? If so, these should feed into the Strava fitness number.
Also, Strava fitness is basically just accumulated TSS. So, you could ride a ton of junk miles and get higher “fitness” but not see improvements in on the bike performance. My fitness score always jumps up after a century or other big event, but this isn’t a measure of fitness so much as a measure of work done.
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Yes my workouts sync to Strava I see all the stats and it gives me mileage but no fitness.
I know the fitness score isn’t great on Strava it seems to be on distance more than effort I think it has to record an hours activity for anything to register. I get the relative effort scores although this seems off too a 90min workout gives me a score of 120 whereas my regular 90min road ride is worth 220 points.
It’s not a major issue but a bit annoying seeing your apparent fitness and effort going down whilst your putting in the work
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I would just completely ignore Strava’s fitness and freshness scores. It is horribly inconsistent between HR based scores and power based workouts, and biased towards duration to an insane effect.
I had 3 months off the bike resetting my score back to single digits. Doing a training plan was building the fitness score by about 3 points a week, but then a random 4 hour fun group ride would add 10 points. At this point mine will be stuck in the mid 60s on 10 hours of training a week, and it takes century rides to actually make a meaningful change to their metrics.
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Guess il just completely ignore the Strava then.
Thought it was pretty broke as when I was doing the mini sprint races could do 4 of them in an hour flat out but my fitness would drop
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I wouldn’t worry too much about strava’s fitness score. These “fitness scores” are just numbers. You can hack them any which way you want to go. The question you really want to answer is, are you achieving your goals? If so, who cares what stravas score is.
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Mine do, but I’ll get maybe a +1 bump for a 1 hour or more threshold/sweet spot/VO2 max workout. I had a rest week last with 3 1:15 endurance workouts and while it didn’t decrease, it didn’t increase either. As others say, I’d ignore it as it’s primarily to my eyes a bragging rights metric. From my personal perspective, I feel I’m in better shape in every way after 6 weeks back on TR with a Strava score in the high 30s that I was in early July on the back of several big efforts on the road and a score over 60
Strava fitness indicator is based on progressive overload. If your rides pre-TR were harder than what you’re doing during structured training then this could be why you are not seeing fitness increase on strava. Is Strava also saying you are training lighter loads than normal etc? You’ll likely only start to see it when you progress to higher FTP and strava can see you are getting more bang (power) for your buck (HR) over time (volume/intensity).
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Why do you want to increase your Strava fitness score? Is your goal to achieve a high Strava score, or is your goal to increase your speed and endurance? Those things may be correlated, but they certainly aren’t the same thing.
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Shhhh… THEY don’t want people to know that.
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Think this could be it as it always had my outdoor rides as a tough workout even though my Strava estimated power isn’t much higher for outdoor rides. I think even some hard workouts I’d done previously never increased my fitness score so I just guess it doesn’t like indoor rides
My goal is fitness on the bike.
The reason id like an accurate Strava score is so could look back over 12 months I can see if iv improved easily.
Strava is basically the TrainingPeaks Performance Manager Chart (PMC) if your rides have power. Its not identical, but close enough. You also need to update your FTP.
Look at the shape of the Strava curve:
vs TrainingPeaks
see how they look almost identical?
And to be clear its tracking training load, and the use of the word “fitness” can be confusing.
Where I find the most value in ramping training load (“fitness”) is while developing base fitness.
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Strava is pretty good, if you’re feeding it consistent data as Wind Warrior indicates.
The best thing is it automatically adjusts your FTP so I think it’s actually more reliable than TP or Intervals ICU. BIG caveat being it’s only FTP adjustments seem to come from 20min efforts (or longer) so you need to feed it those efforts 
.
The Strava fitness score isn’t really a measure of fitness. If you simply want to see your Strava fitness score increase, you can game it through higher TSS rides and skip TR. On the other hand, if you really want to increase fitness, increase ftp and your ability to hold power.
I’m pretty sure Strava fitness score requires either:
Heart rate or an RPE measurement. When I don’t have HR data on on my TR rides, I’ll add an RPE assessment on Strava and it will count toward the fitness score
