Fully agree, especially with sst. I would not relay on anything other than threshold levels to set FTP. Sst lvl 10 is 3x30@90 or 2x40. If you have ok muscular endurance and properly setup FTP this should be more than doable for many. And this has nothing to do with FTP bump. On the other hand threshold levels are so strange that lvl 7-8 would be indication that something good is going on, as threshold lvl’s are greatly skewed by bursts over FTP. When it comes to vo2 and short power - it’s so highly individual that I would even bother with finding some relation to FTP other than fully personal experience and feeling.
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Agree, and add that this mostly matters if knowing FTP is important.
The sweet spot catalog of TR workouts (especially) gives a very good training stimulus even with an over-estimated FTP since it entails a lot of work near threshold. If one were using TR, it’s better to over-estimate FTP input than under-estimate it, and I don’t think that is an accident at all for how it has evolved. Sweet-spot becomes threshold, threshold becomes VO2, and VO2 becomes anaerobic. As you progress up in fitness the PLs come back in line with labeled power zones, people then adjust up FTP input and the cycle repeats until a plateau occurs or more likely a training disruption comes in and forces a step back again.
My hunch is the whole ecosystem is most straight-forward to use if PLs are between 3-7 on the SS, threshold, VO2 depending on focus and time of year. The threshold workouts above level 6-7 are more for the TT specialist or someone who has an under-estimated FTP and is really doing SS type work in that case (which is fine).
Things can definitely get weird in general for the extreme ends of the PLs for each power zone. Beyond 10 in SS for example, several of the workouts start to have spikes and almost no break, making them more like threshold workouts unless FTP input is under-estimated. However, the 9-10 workouts are very doable if FTP is input correctly and one has reasonably well trained muscular endurance as you pointed out.
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yeah, so the reason I asked is for some perspective. The difference between when you stopped and breaking even is like 15 seconds. The difference between breaking even and ‘increasing your ftp’ by a similar amount is also like 10-15 sec. I say, don’t get hung up on it, 10-15 sec of a maximal effort can be explained by a whole bunch of things that aren’t captured in the test (fatigue, motivation, etc.)
Re: heart rate - This is all personal opinion, but IGNORE IT. Just go until your legs explode, you cannot turn the pedals any more or you have reached your limit for tolerating discomfort for that day. I had not seen my HR go over 185 for years and recently during a zwift race hit 191. If I had been paying attention to my HR or worse, limiting my performance due to HR, I would have been bailing before my body was ready to give up. Look at HR afterwards if at all.
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That’s an interesting link. I never thought of power curves in that way. It does bring up all sorts of questions like what if I do POL but toss in some blocks of SS or threshold. Then maybe one could get the best of all training methods. Furthermore, one could look at their power curve and target their specific deficiencies.
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That’s an interesting article and fun way to think about things.
Quick read, I think the author is optimist about how well HIT will perform at 60 min. My experience with HIT is that it builds pretty good fitness for 20-30 min but that fitness is fragile (you lose it quickly). I consider most TR plans, and most time crunched plans for that matter, to be HIT style. NOTE: There is nothing wrong HIT for a lot of folks
I think riders would see the separation shown at 8 hours, but more at the 60-90 min area, when contrasting the four approaches shown in the FFT piece
$0.02 and thanks for that link to FFT article.
Watch some WKO webinars! It is literally some of the basis of discussion in the sweet spot and the other progression threads.
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for example the Building FTP, TTE and Stamina WKO5 webinar on YouTube answers the “What’s the best way to build FTP?” question… Do longer and longer sweet spot intervals, or simply add time-in-zone, and then when you reach diminishing return on results push up the power on shorter duration FTP/threshold workouts. Then after a block or two, work on VO2max. First you are pulling the power curve to the right, stretching it out from 20 minutes and higher, then coming back to 10-20 minute duration and pulling it up, then pulling up in the 3-5 minute section.
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I’ve watched a ton of WKO videos! I had just never seen it explained that way.
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You will end up with pyramidal as any pro rider. The end conclusion of all training methods is that you have to train all zones to be better across all zones. And any singular training modality will end with stagnation so you have to shift them during the season to introduce new stimulus.
The whole series “annual training process” from Tim Cusick is basically about this:
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Sure, but at a certain point there is no more progression left, and you could equivalently train relative to a higher FTP at a lower PL.
Is it, though? That’d very much depend on your goals. And would more time at sweet spot increase duration? I find what gives me repeatability (= increase the number of matches) is endurance training.
Right now I feel I have pretty much maxed out, my next sweet spot workout will consist of 5 x 12 minutes at 93–97 % of FTP with 30-second breaks in between. After that TR adds 500 W spikes to my workouts to “keep things interesting”. From experience I am quite sure not only that my next FTP test will tell me I have increased my FTP, and I have a pretty good guess by how much. One sign, for example, was the time it took my heart rate to drop in between intervals.
I don’t know about that. An incorrect FTP will set your zones incorrectly. So if your FTP is set too low, your supposed threshold workout might be a sweet spot or even a tempo workout, and you won’t get the same adaptations.
Sure, compared to someone who rides with no structure, they’d probably fare better and get stronger, but I think you get vastly better results once you know your training zones accurately and train within them with purpose.
The vast majority of cyclists doesn’t have a power meter and likely don’t even know what FTP means. But when it comes to TR, if memory serves about 40 % of users follow a TR training plan(*). Since regular assessments are part of that, I would say that at least those have an idea of what they FTP is, backed up by regular assessments. And of those remaining 60 %, I think a good share of them just create their own training plans and assess their FTP, too.
(*) I think this was mentioned on the TR podcast when AT was announced.
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Let’s not beat that horse to death today, shall we. FTP ≠ 60-minute power for most people. Nor is threshold work the same as sweet spot work. Even TT specialists don’t need to be able to hold their power for 60 minutes, they train to hold their power whatever time it takes for them to complete e. g. 40 km.
At this point I have enough experience by now to tell whether and by how much my FTP has increased. The proof is ultimately in the pudding: how do workouts feel? Do I get good workouts in?
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https://www.jssm.org/mobile/fulltextmobile.php?id=jssm-18-708.xml
And many more. Basiclally a lot of endurance, and then specificity.
That’s the theory, but I don’t think it works like that for a lot of people. It works probably very well when you are young or untrained, and any sort of training will make you stronger. However, once you’re close to your limits (how strong you can get with the amount you train), FTP simply doesn’t increase fast enough anymore to keep up with the progression, and you end up tired and frustrated because you can’t complete the workouts (AT will then likely put you on a plateau).
Also I don’t think vo2max workouts ever become anaerobic - they just becomes a very hard version of vo2max. The intervalls in vo2max workouts are just to long, and you usually go into them too fatigued to actually use much of the anaerobic system.
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My short response to everything you just said is “power zones are descriptive, not prescriptive”.
My long response: If you can only do 5 min efforts in a “threshold workout” that TR gives you, which would be something like a low PL threshold workout, you are not doing threshold work even though it is called threshold work.
AT is built upon starting at a low PL - which is very possibly not in zone, or at best on the fringes of a zone - and building into that described zone. It’s exactly what I summed up - and people get that type of schedule all the time taking a ramp.
There is no such thing as you can’t do threshold, it’s just that what one is calling threshold is not threshold. You still get a training effect, because you do varied workouts from the library. You just don’t get the training effect in the exactly the way the workouts are tagged until fitness is built up.
The PLs cover a much broader range of power zones than classically defined. And that is ok. Because it doesn’t need to be perfect to get a really good training stimulus and it becomes counter productive at some point trying to pin those down really well all the time for a vast user base.
And I fully acknowledge TR users are assessing fitness regularly, and still stand by the fact that the vast majority don’t know what their FTP is. My running point is that’s ok, and one shouldn’t worry about it much at all. If one wants to know you can get that info, but you don’t need to be super precise or necessarily worry/get frustrated about a test fluctuating within normal uncertainty.
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You’re maybe misunderstanding my point. I’m saying what TR calls a VO2 workout is actually more of an anaerobic workout, or at least has a higher anaerobic contribution. It is the lower PL VO2 max workouts that would be higher anaerobic contribution if you find them hard to do. All the low ends of PL in the workouts are fringing up a zone, if not being squarely in the zone above. If you find low PL workouts hard, you have over-estimated your FTP input. And that’s fine, because you will slowly progress your fitness up to that input. That’s what Nate means when he says “expressing FTP”.
Power zones are not hard defined lines, fitness assessments don’t give an accurate or precise measure of FTP, and so AT has workouts that are widely defined and different workout bins overlap at the fringes of the PL. and that’s a great way to handle the challenges in ambiguity in power zones and fitness assessment. Especially when dealing with a highly varied user base.
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With the exception of Threshold, all other TIZ distribution models have Endurance (Z1/2) as the largest % split. So if the majority are doing threshold training, then your answer would be no.
Bingo. A 1x60 minute effort at FTP should be extremely hard. While doing sweet spot should be quite a bit easier, I don’t think this should be a Easy–to–Moderate effort in the post-workout survey.
That’s not accurate: with any form of periodized training, a detraining period is essential where the athlete takes 2–6 weeks off the bike. Their FTP will decrease over that period.
That’s not correct: AT will start with the progression levels it is initially given. Now when we all started with AT, our PL were all set to 1.0. But when you have done more than one season on it, you will start at different PLs.
Also, AT rests on your current FTP being in the ball park of the FTP that your workouts are based on. If they diverge too much, your training will not be optimal, because you will train in different zones than prescribed.
Yes, workouts are prescribed that target specific power zones. And power zones describe power regions where certain physiological processes take place. But I don’t see how this rebuts anything I have said.
Which is exactly what I wrote: you train differently than intended, which usually means you aren’t training as well as you could.
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Everything I said is correct, and not really in contradiction to your responses.
I’ll end my arguments with the following summary:
People seem to think they’re training in a given zone because of how TR calls it. But even if following the system exactly as told to, if you dig into it, a good portion aren’t. And yet they’re still very likely to get substantially more fit and that is the most important thing. Most of us are probably not training optimally, for a wealth of reasons, but AT greatly helps to get most of us near a Pareto optimal front. So let’s stop worrying about most of the minutia that won’t move the needle much anyways.
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Sure: not riding < unstructured riding < random workouts (without any strategy or forethought) < structured training with incorrect FTP < structured training with correct FTP
And AT can mitigate an incorrectly set FTP somewhat. Agreed here.
But I think the difference between training with an incorrect and a correct FTP can be quite significant.
Every coach uses zones, too, and most use the same 7-zone system that Coggan has established. (Some use the 3–4-zone system propagated by Seiler.) If I had a personal coach, they’d pick up on the fact that I should reassess my FTP when necessary. So I don’t think TR is any different.
179 → 175 = 2.2% drop, thats nothing. Dont get frustrated about such a small change.
Use the indoor FTP for indoor training. Many people see a (slightly) higher FTP when riding outdoors.
Just follow the plan and stop stressing out about something so minor (i do it too 
)
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