Breakthroughs is the part of WattPlan that keeps score, across twelve quests and seventy-one milestones, on a page that is usually already partly filled the first time you open it.
It looks backwards before it looks forwards
The first time you open Breakthroughs, WattPlan works through your entire ride history in order and awards everything you have already earned. If you imported three years from Garmin or Strava when you signed up, the page reflects those three years rather than the fortnight since you installed the app.
After that it evaluates each new ride as it arrives. A milestone can only be unlocked once, and the notification you get is tied to the specific milestone, so the same achievement never arrives twice.
The twelve quests
They fall into six groups.
Power
- Power Personal Bests. Eight milestones, one per duration from short sprints to the full hour, tracking your best power at each.
- Power-to-Weight. Seven milestones on watts per kilogram, which is the number that matters when the road goes up.
Endurance
- Endurance Duration. Seven milestones for longer and longer rides.
- Endurance Distance. Seven milestones on distance.
- Climbing. Eight milestones on elevation gained, and this one is outdoor only, for the obvious reason that a turbo has no hills.
Improvement
- FTP Progress. Six milestones measured against a baseline. The baseline is set once, the first time, and never moves, so this quest tracks your total progress from where you started rather than from wherever you were last month.
- FTP Assessment. Four milestones for actually doing tests, because the rider who tests occasionally trains with correct zones.
Discipline
- Training Consistency. Six milestones for consecutive weeks at eighty per cent adherence or better, which is the hardest group here to fill.
- Structured Workouts. Six milestones for completed planned sessions. A ride counts only if it was planned and you completed at least eighty per cent of it.
Competition
- Event Planning. Two milestones for setting target events.
- Event Completion. Four for finishing them.
Foundations
- Platform Mastery. Six one-time milestones for setting the app up properly, such as connecting a service or completing a first workout.
Why some rides do not count
A few rules exist to keep the scoring honest, and they explain most of the "why did that not register" questions.
- Rides shorter than five minutes are ignored entirely.
- Climbing milestones need an outdoor ride.
- Structured workout milestones need a ride that was planned and at least eighty per cent completed, so a planned session you cut in half does not count.
- Power milestones need power data, taken from your stored bests first, then your power curve, then the raw ride file.
What it is for
Nothing in Breakthroughs changes your plan, and no coach ever wrote a programme around badges, so treat it as a record rather than a training tool.
What it does is make slow progress visible. Fitness gains arrive on a timescale that is genuinely hard to perceive from inside them, because you feel the same on Tuesday as you did last Tuesday and the improvement only shows across months. A page that says you have now ridden further than you ever had, or held eighty per cent adherence for twelve straight weeks, is a record of something real that you would otherwise not notice.
Of the twelve, Training Consistency is the one to aim at, because the rest tend to follow it.