Big frames usually lead to larger hearts, tendons, arteries, veins, etc, and that translates to big watts at threshold. The big frame cyclists like Filippo Ganna, Van Aert, Stefun Kung, etc are “small” because they are skinny, but they have massive frames compared to say a typical columbian or spaniard. Marco Pantani could have put on solid muscle until he weighed the same as Stefun Kung or Filiipo Ganna, but he would never be able to produce the same FTP as them.
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The main benefit of weight lifting, IMO, is making muscle fibers more resilient to hard efforts and improving ability to train harder more often with less down time. Secondary benefit is more power below 1’ by improving pedal force. It most likely won’t improve power at FTP or below by anything substantial.
Pretty safe assumption to me given he can probably afford it 10x over with the change found down the back of his couch. That’s if he wasn’t gifted it by Peleton anyway
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His upper body mass doesn’t help with power on the bike, generally. HIs lower body muscle mass would.
JJ Watt probably hasn’t lifted to add muscle mass since his second year in the league. He’s probably been within a kilogram or two of muscle mass for the majority of his NFL career, which allowed him to focus on… “power,” from his lower body. We can agree that power is measured in watts. So he has been training his legs for power, professionally, for 10 years. Sure, the focus was on explosive power in the sub 7 second range, but he had to have the cardio vascular fortitude to repeat those max efforts every 40 seconds for up to 10 minutes at time (the length of a long possession).
Then, he retired and decided to ride a peloton. It probably wasn’t his first ride.
JJ Watt can probably front squat my back squat max, except he does it for 15 reps. Maybe 35 if he feels like crushing. HIs ability to sustain silly-high raw numbers shouldn’t be surprising.
I still don’t trust peloton PMs, but the man is a genetic outlier in many ways, who has taken his physical fitness way more seriously than 99.95% of the population, and probably 99.1% of this forum. He made over $100mil in salary based in no small part on that outlier status and his work ethic which include attention to his legs and cardiovascular system.
He’s a 3.5 or 3.55 w/kg estimated FTP, where the estimate (471x0.95/127kg) we’re all making here fails to include any of the anaerobic burn-off intervals to start the ride that all the formal protocols call for… So call it 3.35 w/kg and realize we might have found the next Reggie Miller promoting “our” sport.
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I don’t know. I’ve seen American football. It takes half a day to watch the Super Duper Bowl, so a 10-minute play has to take like an hour with commercials.
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Yea. I used to be a pretty big Chicago Bears fan. I can’t really watch the sport anymore now though. It’s like 10 minutes of actually playing the sport, 2 hours and 50 minutes of watching players standing around, watching endless replays, or watching commercials.
It doesn’t scale.
The w/kg doesn’t go up, the w/cda doesn’t go up, and the watts over time doesn’t go up.
I think he would do well on the track.
It’s a 10 minute “drive,” broken up into somewhere between 8 and 20 max effort intervals of usually less than 10 seconds each, separated by no more than 40 seconds…unless there’s a timeout… from a fitness requirements perspective.
As far as “are you not entertained?” you can watch what you want to watch, and I won’t argue there are more entertaining things to watch.
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Whether his numbers are legit or not is irrelevant, he didn’t win so he needs to try harder 
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Jasper Stuyven burned 7,000 calories in total and raced around Glasgow for three and a half hours at a normalized power of 426W. For him, that’s 5.5 normalized watts per kilo.
If JS can do 426 for 3 and a half hours then it’s pretty feasible to think an ex pro athlete could grind out the same for 20 minutes.
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5 foot box jumps are a pretty good measure of explosive lower body power
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Would I be surprised if his peloton is off? No. His low cadence might add to the error. Or who knows, maybe low cadence makes peloton more accurate.
Would I be surprised if it is correct? No. Dude has been training his entire life. On his instagram he has pictures “wrestling” with his brother - one of the current best defensive players in the league. He has also probably been doing that his entire life. I can only imagine that improves one’s vo2max. Also, as someone who played football a large portion of my life, I can say I was incredible shape from it. Lastly, pro football players do need a base level of endurance to compete at a high level. If you are losing steam but the offensive line is not, you’re screwed. I also know that for these huge guys, cycling is their preferred choice to improve endurance to minimize injury. As such, I would not be surprised if JJ watt has been doing 20 minute HIIT workouts on a stationary bike throughout his career.
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Look at the video of EJ doing his ftp tests - lots of out of saddle grinding at low rpm, then resting for a bit before repeating. It’s a way of using some of your anaerobic power in what should be an aerobic test.
Also, look at how much even an average NFL or real football (soccer) player earns compared to the most famous cyclists of the era. It’s vastly better paid so attracts a vastly wider group of people to try it and will simply find more of the freakishly talented athletes.
Just because they’re far too large to be competitive in hilly cycling races doesn’t make their athleticism less.
Running at all at his playing weight of 288lb requires insane cardio.
There’s also the fact that the NFL is the least PED tested sport there is (that officially bans PEDs). 100% of them are on something as it’s trivial to avoid getting caught and the punishments are nothing. I doubt many are on EPO, but decades of HGH and other stuff won’t have harmed JJ’s power.
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