FTP test maths musings

Training
21

But isn’t that essentially what that protocol is? A 5m all out, then push 20 minutes as hard as you can, with whatever portion of FRC/W’ has been reconstituted. You’re already doing 2 near-maximal TTs.

Everyone will recover differently in that break between the 5min and 20min effort. To me, it makes more sense to recover fully between efforts.

Ideally, yes, you’d perform multiple TTs during the testing week.

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22

You can field test anaerobic capacity replenishment. But you can also do longer 30+ minute time trials. You can learn a lot about yourself by doing 5-10 minute time trial intervals.

23

You’ve took the effect and made it the cause. (But you’re not the only one).

The point of an FTP test is to find your FTP. If you pre-calculate what power to ride at based on your expected FTP, how did you come up with that expected FTP?

  1. You had a lot of power data already and can pretty accurately determine FTP from your power curve without needing a specific test as long as you have a few all out efforts of a few durations.
  2. You don’t have much recent data, which means you’re taking a rough guess. Which means you’ll blow up early or not go hard enough. Which then means the formula for converting the results to FTP is invalid. Even a perfect test is still assuming you’re “average” in converting the result to FTP. Again flawed.

The ramp test at least tests to failure, so there’s no need to properly estimate anything, just to not give up too early.

All models are wrong, some are useful but they’re all garbage if you feed them garbage.

Really, FTP tests should never be done in erg mode nor utilize any shortcuts. If you’re not doing a TTE at FTP test, then you’re very likely to set yourself up for failure with a bad FTP. Just do the Kolie Moore protocol or use your power curve with good data feeding it. It’s that simple.

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