Those in the beta may have seen me whinge about this decoupling from FTP as a universal measuring stick - and I still am kind of baffled by the need to do this - but even as I type that I find it hard not to acknowledge that even in the best of testing environments a real world FTP test is perhaps only marginally better than AI if it’s even better at all. How did you sleep? What is the temperature of the room? If you were outside was there traffic on the road? Did that shitty conversation with your spouse ruin a few minutes of focus? And so forth. Every single testing technique has slack in the system and to pretend like it doesn’t is kind of silly. There is just no scenario where your FTP can be considered perfectly accurate to what your fitness actually IS. It’s a guide albeit an important one I suppose. Or to some at least.
Additionally - and this is the one place where I am 100% in agreement with turfing the whole concept of “FTP” entirely - is the difference between different kinds of fitness. Endurance, raw power, sustained threshhold, etc. These have different physiological effects on the body and different people have different strengths and weaknesses that can’t really be captured very well by 3 digits. My FTP has gone up quite a bit over the last 2 years - I think I started my TR relationship at about 230 and now I’m up around 300. I can certainly see that progression in my Sweet Spot efforts in particular - my legs seem to be able to handle a lot more sustained muscular load now - but I’m not as comfortable red-lining it as I used to be. So this is supposed to be measured by one single number? Its not possible.
All that said its nice to have a simple metric to gauge roughly where you are in the cycling fitness universe and I think - given the universality of “FTP” as a metric - I think it probably feels alienating to athletes for TR to dissociate from it. And I still can’t see why they would have to but I’m growing less and less attached to the old way of doing things.
Not only did I get sucked in here but I think I’m talking myself into the new world order of FTP-less training 