Sometimes we refuse your good news
You set a power PR. Most apps bump your number on the spot. We occasionally hold it — and tell you exactly why
2026-06-24 · 4 min read · Brevet · AI-assisted
Drafted with AI assistance and reviewed by a human. The science is sourced and real; the article isn't medical advice.
The short version: A power PR is great news about your legs and an ambiguous signal about your load. The week you set it is often the week you've been training hardest — so bumping your FTP right then raises every future target and ramps you up even faster. When your recent load has outrun what your base has absorbed, we hold your number steady and say why. You can override it in one tap. We just won't pretend the timing is always good.
The confetti is the problem
You finish the interval, glance down, and it's a number you've never seen. New best. Most apps throw confetti, nudge your FTP up on the spot, and quietly make every workout from tomorrow a little harder to match.
It feels like progress. Sometimes it's a trap with a party hat on.
Because a PR tells you two things, and only one of them is unambiguous. Your legs are strong today — true, congratulations. But why are they strong? Often because you've been on a hard run of training, and the fitness is real but freshly bought. Raise the number in that moment and you've just signed yourself up to chase it while you're already climbing fast.
Load isn't one number — it's a ratio
Here's the piece most dashboards flatten. What matters isn't only how much you trained, it's how much you trained recently versus what you've been doing all along.
Put your last week of work next to your last month or so of it. When the recent week sits close to the longer trend, you're absorbing the load — that's the sweet spot, where fitness sticks. When the recent week shoots well above the trend, you're doing more than your base has had time to take on board. Sport science calls that ratio the acute-to-chronic workload, and a sharp spike in it is the pattern the research keeps tying to riders breaking down rather than building up.
Look at where the PR lands on that curve. Not at the bottom, calm and absorbed. Near the top, in the steep part. That's the tell: the very ride that earned the new number is evidence your load is spiking. Reward it by raising every target and you pour fuel on the ramp.
Why "raise it" can be the wrong reflex
A higher FTP isn't just a bragging number — it's the anchor every session is scaled from. Bump it and your sweet-spot watts go up, your threshold work goes up, your "easy" goes up. So at the exact moment your recent load is already running hot, the automatic FTP bump quietly ratchets next week harder too. The number chases itself, and the rider underneath it pays for the spreadsheet's optimism.
A veto, not a vote
So we built the ramp-rate check as a veto, not an override. When the math says "new PR, raise the number" but your recent load has outrun your base, the guard wins: we hold your FTP where it is for now, and we tell you the actual reason in plain words — the number's earned, but your load is spiking; let the base catch up and we'll move it. It's the opposite of confetti, and it's the more honest call.
Two things keep that from being the software bossing you around. First, it's never a hard stop — every hold ships with a one-tap override and the rationale right there, so if you know something the model doesn't, you decide and we log that the choice was yours. Second, it's a delay, not a denial: when your recent and long-term load come back into line, the number moves. We're holding the door, not locking it.
And the honesty this one demands: the acute-to-chronic ratio is a population heuristic, not a law of your personal physiology, and there's genuine debate about its precision in the literature. So we treat it as one guard rail among several — never the sole reason to do anything — and you can always overrule it. We'd rather be transparently cautious than confidently wrong with your training.
The bravest thing a training app can do is sit on good news for a week — and tell you it's doing it.
A note on what this is
Brevet is a training and coaching tool, not a medical device. Training load and its ramp rate are used here only as training signals, described relative to your own recent history — never as a health assessment, and never as a hard stop. Every recommendation, including a held number, carries a one-tap override with its reasoning; you make the final call. Our methods, and the limits of the load-ratio idea, are written up in plain language on the Science page.