Hi Guys,
Tried to post this a few minutes ago but got an error message!
Thanks for the kind words. I'm always happy to support Da Cheetah.
First things first: the academic credit for my work needs to be equally shared among my co-authors (both present and future, as there are more papers coming). They are among the best physiologists in the world, and we work as a team. I'd ask that if you label it with my name, please put "Skiba et al 2012".
Ok, on to the implementation. I'm a couple of revisions behind I think, so please excuse me if anything I mention below has already been addressed.
1) In terms of deciding on a CP and W'. I would suggest at least 3 tests. One at 2-3 min, one at 5-7 min, one at 12-20 min or thereabouts. (RaceDay Apollo will allow you to use as many as 2 (not recommended) up to as many as 5.) I'd probably avoid going under 2 min, however, I have made some very good models from field data down as low as 1.5 minutes in some circumstances.
2) You can also try auto-extracting CP and W' from your mean max power plot. You can get SOMETIMES get *serviceable* results if you ride REALLY hard with some frequency. However, you need to be really seriously riding across a wide variety of power outputs, and often. Otherwise it is way off, and leads to poor data quality and crummy models . In my experience, most people don't do this, particularly triathletes :-). The other important challenge is the
time windows...you don't want to pull a 5 min best power from 2 years ago if you haven't been training much lately, for obvious reasons.
3) I'd suggest taking out AWC and making it W'. Or maybe " W' (AWC) ". That's because AWC is old language at this point, and there is enough data out there now indicating that the W' is not strictly anaerobic in nature. (If you are interested, I recently co-authored a paper with Dionne Noordhof and Jos De Koning on the CP model and some other models that try to quantify "anaerobic" work. It's very applied and you might like it.)
4) We're calling the model the W'BAL model, for W' balance. The BAL is subscripted.
I've some more papers in review at the moment, and I'll pass along the details as I am able, as they suggest interesting interesting things to add to Cheetah. However, journals get very shirty if you put stuff on the internet before they have a chance to publish. It is really important to me that my work continue to be reviewed, critiqued and improved upon by my fellow scientists before it is publicly released. So, I just need the stuff to be in print first to ensure the best quality science.
I also see Mike's comment below, who I had the pleasure of meeting at ACSM last year. Hey Mike!
Best Wishes to All,
Phil