About dPAC

dPAC was created thinking about the most demanding athlete that wants an easy but effective software to plan and achieve his/her goals. It provides the most important features related with workout and season planning: Fitness & form balance, personalised training tips and workouts based on the athlete's recovery metrics and detailed power profile.

Before you start

After activating your account you will be redirected to your settings page. It is very important that you insert the most accurate data for your current FTP, weight and heart rate thresholds, in order for all the calculations to be made correctly right from the start!

IMPORTANT: You should regularly update your FTP (either using the dFTP value or other formal testing method) in the settings page, in order for the TSS and all subsequent calculations to be as accurate as possible!

Main features

The main feature that separates this software from other training log and analysis tools is the ability to associate with each day or workout what we call the "External Stress Score". This is basically one empirical classification of your day in terms of stress outside your workout. Work, school, family, bad sleep, etc. We believe that the real benefit of a training log tool is to dedicate some time to analyse and reflect on your workouts, and thus we encourage the manual upload & edit of every single workout instead of a bulk upload. Paying attention to details like logging recovery metrics, inserting workout descriptions and observing different graphs related with training is almost as important as the training itself, because it is here that the athlete (or coach) can understand what is working and what is not.

DPMC

The main functionality of dPAC is an improvement upon the classic PMC from Trainingpeaks (or WKO). What it does is to take into account the "External Stress Score" and "Sleep Factor" and adapt your recovery rate based on that. The regular PMC just assumes your recovery day by day is perfect and not affected by any of the daily life stresses, like work, family, sleep, etc.

The graph is composed by three main lines:

• The blue represents the fitness, which is a rotating average of the TSS value throughout the last 45 days. The higher the volume and intensity of training the higher will be the fitness value.


• The purple line represents the accumulated fatigue. This is a rotating average of the TSS value throughout the last seven days. The higher the training load during the past week the higher will be the fatigue, which is quite intuitive.


• The yellow line represents the potential form (or freshness), which is a balance between fitness and fatigue. The higher the fitness and the lower is the fatigue, the higher will be the potential form at the moment, and vice-versa.


• The values displayed in the top bar correspond to the values of the three main lines of the graph after the last logged workout or of the present day if no workouts were logged recently.


• In the DPMC there are also two extra lines that correspond to a possible increase or decrease in training load, useful for an athlete (or coach) to see an estimated form value within a week when a possible event or important training is scheduled.


• One important thing to know about the main DPMC graph, is that it will only start to return accurate values after at least 40 workouts are logged. Before that, there is not enough data for accurate calculations.


• We recommend to upload the workouts either daily, or every other day, in order to maximize the precision of your analysis from your daily stress and also so that you can reflect and insert some description on your workout.

Dynamic power metrics

Based on your power peak performances the software estimates your main training metrics (dFTP, dMAP, dFRE and dPmax) to give you a better prediction of your actual training zones. This feature only works for the athletes that use a power meter. It is also important to have in mind, that these metrics are only as valid as the data the is provided for the calculations. Having a reliable and accurate power meter and making sure that any random power spikes that may exist are removed from the workouts, is paramount for the calculations to be accurate!

Virtual Coach

You can also get workout recommendations based on your current fitness and power metrics. More instructions about this feature are on the Help tab from the Virtual Coach page.

Workout uploads

• We advise you to upload your workouts directly using the .FIT file from your training computer. In devices like Garmin or SRM PC8 you can access the *.fit files directly via the operating system explorer located inside the "Activities" folder.


• However, for an easier "on-boarding" or in situations where you are using a mobile device you can synchronize with your Strava or Garmin account and edit the workouts later.

Coach Connection

If your real life coach has a dPAC account you can send an invitation so he/she can access all your training data and monitor your progress. In order to do that, just ask for the email address from the coach’s dPAC account and insert that address in the form on the bottom of your settings page in order to send an invitation. After the coach receives and authorises the connection, he/she can view all your training data.

If you have any doubts you can always contact us through the Contact link in the bottom of the page. Happy training!