Originally Posted by
burnthesheep
Again, my example above. Your comment may work if analyzing a race. Doesn't matter for workouts. In a race autopsy it might be great to see as a gauge of how a rider raced.
For "exercise physiology" it's possible the rider with the lower NP did the proper warmup and cool down for the workout. I don't log three different workouts for one session.
Even if you do, all you need to do is zoom in on the sets you're concerned with anyway. Most tools out there give you the data for the current time selection.
Workouts should be planned around the time you want an athlete to spend in the zones necessary to cause the adaptations you want. The targets are set by benchmarking through testing or looking at recent PRs for given time durations. Looking at NP and going "hmmm, that looks nice" or "hmmm, that looks low" doesn't given any credibility to the effectiveness of a workout.
I've logged 240w NP for an hour workout just chugging along at some tempo. I've also logged the exact same NP for VO2 workouts. So, that would say the NP for the VO2 workout is low and bad, right? Wrong. I did a full 12min warmup and 12min cooldown and maybe tossed some Z2 at the tail end of the workout.
What if I cut the VO2 workout shorter and don't do any cooldown or Z2 at the end? The NP jumps from 240w to 280w. Whoa, that must be great right?!!!! No. Not necessarily.
I'm not talking about stats padding strava.
I'm talking about using NP when assessing an intervals.
The OP is asking about his best 20 min effort, producing 303w avg and 335w NP, within this 20 min effort. I assume that when someone is asking this sort of question, he is doing a hard effort, and would like to understand what 303w indicate, and what 335w indicates. There is a discrepancy of 32w in his Avg and NP, that means that there are some higher highs and lower lows (and indeed he said rolling terrains). And since 335w is NP, then there are times that he would need to go way harder than 335W, perhaps with many short bursts of 500w efforts.
Is this what the OP wants to do? Is this what he should be doing? Maybe he want to train his out of saddle attacks and then still be able to sustain high effort after such attacks. Whatever is his goal, I'm saying that he needs to look at both numbers to fully assess his effort. If he's looking to train to simulate hill attacks and still be able to "tempo" away after the attacks, then NP is definitely an important metric to study, because perhaps he would better off aiming for 280w Avg but with an even higher 350w NP for the 20 min, which would probably cost him more physiologically, but he won't know this until he actually does the exercise at different intensities and do a post-analysis. And depending on his goals, he may put more weight on looking at Avg power over NP. But to say NP is not important or even not as important as Avg is to not understand its application beyond Strava padding.
I'm not talking looking at NP on strava and stats padding or warmps/cooldowns. I'm talking about using NP as a postworkout assessment tool for the intervals of interest.