I’ve heard various places to pay attention to your body and hunger- but I got used to eating less and felt fine with a deficit so my body wasn’t asking for more. Now that I am accustomed to eating more my body asks for it, but I had to work on my appetite a lot. Some days are still a struggle to eat enough.
I was able to make an ftp breakthrough (330 to 355) with FirstBottle. It’s a pre-workout developed for endurance athletes. The vasodilation effect from the Citrulline should help with capillary development.
Or possibly just the caffeine and carbs are doing it 
.
Good point. I’ll clarify a bit. All three have a strong set of scientific studies behind them showing measurable performance improvement over placebo. Carbs and caffeine work acutely, while citrulline has shown both acute and chronic benefit. The chronic benefit may help sustain the breakthrough while the other two help push through the ceiling initially assuming they’re not already being utilized. Also, this stuff tastes insanely good!
I wonder what a few weeks of eating a bunch extra might do for you too. Because you said you don’t eat processed food, don’t eat high carb, and are mostly plant based. That’s all well and good, but 1) no processed and mostly plant based can make it harder to really eat at a heavy surplus, and if you’re low on carbs but also not fat adapted, that would make sense that you’re having a hard time going hard. I’m not here to convince you to go high carb or not, but just that: it’s agreed that, at the very least, even athletes who are fully fat adapted will have a hard time hitting those upper end numbers, and increasing your overall capacity is hard as well.
Eating ‘clean’ is good, of course, and a lot of us here would probably do well to adapt to your diet. I wonder if it’s holding you back, though; being somewhat either underfueled carb wise or just never really having the top end fuel. I’d be curious what would happen if you added in sweet potatoes and such. Just my 2c.
If everything is ‘correct’ and the results aren’t coming, start tweaking the inputs.
Hey Justin, really thought-provoking reply.
I don’t think I’m fat adapted fully because I never go keto, but I probably do have low glycogen stores for some of my workouts…
Hi,
3-4 times on the bike
2-3 times Crossfit
51 yo
Is there enough rest-time?
My ftp only increased after having to quit Crossfit due to injury. A 15W increase in ftp in 4 months after 1,5 years plateau.
thanks for the tag @Kuttermax; dude is beasting right now!
def hit a vo2max block; those will help with pushing out your FTP ceiling which is sounds like you really need.
I made a couple posts that may interest you, this one on just that, VO2Max, as well as this one which brings to question: but are you FASTER even though you have the same FTP? One metric does not tell anywhere near the whole picture, but it’s the one we all talk about.
Let us know how things end up!
AKA: “Build the table - lift the table”
With Cross Fit 3x week it looks like you’re overdoing it. I used to do CF 5x week and couldn’t improve due to inappropriate rest.
Decide where your priority lies and reduce the volume of the other type of training.
CF is mostly aerobic as is cycling.
I’d try reducing both by one day a week, adding strength training once a week, doing scaled CF workouts every other day.
Testing also should be done after 2 days rest.
Sleep, eat, train, repeat
Several points spring to mind, most of which have beed addressed
Have you plateaued
Why do you think it should have changed
Are you fully rested beforehand
Are you doing the ramp test that best suits you and your riding. I personally stick with the 20’ test for consistency and because I know it gives me a fair/realistic value.
Are you sufficiently fueled beforehand? N+1 story but I took a sachet of SIS Beta Fuel pre one test and that was the best test I have had. I just felt well fuelled !!
Are you changing your training around often enough. Some VO2, some SS, some steady some tempo
I hope some of this ideas help