Handling Indoor vs. Outdoor Power Discrepancies and the Need for Hybrid Power Zones

Feature Requests
1

Hi everyone,

I’m currently facing a challenge that I think many of you might share: a significant difference between my power output indoors (Home Trainer) and outdoors.

For context, my FTP on the Home Trainer is around 260W, whereas outdoors it sits closer to 240W. When using a single FTP setting in the app, I run into a major issue:

  1. If I set my FTP based on my outdoor reality, high-intensity sessions (like VO2Max) on the Home Trainer feel way too easy and I don’t reach the intended physiological strain.
  2. If I set it based on my HT power, my outdoor endurance rides become too taxing, pushing me out of Zone 2 and risking overtraining.

It seems that the physiological response isn’t linear across the power curve when switching environments.

I’ve just worked with the AI coach to implement a “Hybrid Zone” strategy:

  • Keeping Z2/Z3 targets lower to protect outdoor recovery and volume.
  • Significantly bumping up Z4/Z5 targets (non-linear increase) to ensure indoor intervals are actually effective.

Has anyone else experienced this? It would be great if the platform could eventually support two distinct power profiles (Indoor vs. Outdoor) or allow for a “non-linear” scaling factor for high-intensity zones to account for this discrepancy.

Curious to hear your thoughts!

2

Though I’m not a cyclist in the sense of sports (I am Dutch). But I also see the same challenge for indoor and outdoor running.

3

“I think” this kind of dynamic adjustment would require having:

  • two profiles, with a way for the training of one update the other (individualized*)
  • Creating two different workouts for each day with different power/pace targets
  • Either:
    • Always just pushing two workouts
      -or-
    • Some sort of tool/toggle/gear on the workout widget to select indoor/outdoor with the values defaulted based on regression model* to determine if the workout should be switched indoors/outdoors

If had the spare tokens with an AI service I’d ask for that, you could integrate with the AIE MCP server.

* Regression model?
** Weather forecast, season, day of the week, default vs. non-default daily availability, etc.

4

Understand the need but having two profiles is a) a lot of change/work on the platform and b) a lot of work for you to maintain/check too. I wonder if it would be easier to have an indoor check mark for a workout that you can activate and then you store some instructions on your indoor vs outdoor power preferences (for example 10W higher/lower for each zone) so it can apply that quickly on a per workout basis. Will think about it…

5

In fact, yes, i have already speak with @MarkusRummel about running especially when i’m using Stryd power few years ago between treadmill and outdoor.

6

Currently, i modify using chat the training if I will do indoor instead outdoor.