Best Efforts (MMP)

What is MMP?

Mean-Maximal Power (MMP) is the highest average power you’ve sustained for a given duration. For example, your “5-minute MMP” is the best average watts you’ve ever held for exactly 5 minutes in a single activity.

MMP curves are the standard way to characterise a cyclist’s physiology — short durations reflect neuromuscular and anaerobic capacity; long durations reflect aerobic fitness and FTP.

Durations tracked

FitRepo computes MMP for these standard durations:

Duration	Label
5 seconds	Sprint peak
10 seconds	—
30 seconds	Anaerobic
60 seconds	1-minute
5 minutes (300 s)	VO₂max
10 minutes (600 s)	—
20 minutes (1200 s)	FTP proxy
30 minutes (1800 s)	—
60 minutes (3600 s)	Hour power

Calculation method

FitRepo uses a sliding window approach over 1-second power records:

1. Parse all record messages from the FIT file with a power field.
2. For each target duration d (in seconds), slide a window of width d across the power array.
3. Compute the mean power for each window position.
4. Store the maximum mean power found.

MMP(d) = max over all windows of length d { mean(power[i..i+d]) }

This is equivalent to the standard rolling-average method used by tools like Golden Cheetah and WKO.

Storage

Best efforts are stored in the best_efforts JSONB column on the activities table:

{
  "5": 520,
  "10": 480,
  "30": 420,
  "60": 390,
  "300": 318,
  "600": 295,
  "1200": 268,
  "1800": 252,
  "3600": 238
}

Keys are the duration in seconds as a string; values are watts (integers).

All-time bests via MCP

The get_best_efforts MCP tool rolls up MMP across all activities in a date range and returns the all-time best for each duration. You can use this to track personal records over time:

# All-time bests
get_best_efforts()

# Bests in the last 90 days
get_best_efforts(from: "2025-01-01", to: "2025-03-31")

Null values

A duration slot is omitted from best_efforts if the activity was shorter than that duration (e.g. a 10-minute ride won’t have a 20-minute MMP). Activities without a power meter have best_efforts = null.