I am confused by your response here, because by virtue of what you say, it is exactly why mFTP would be more accurate in my case. For instance, my entire 2018 season (training and racing) was focused on 10s to 5m power, because 95% of my racing was on a velodrome…therefore I would not perform well on a CP20 because I was not training or racing in that time band, so my body was not adapting physiologically do those types of effort demands…yet, I felt just as fit as the 4 years before when I was doing primarily TTs, and WKO4 was correctly projecting a similar FTP, even though my TT performance suffered while on the track. This is one of the underlying points in the article from TrainingPeaks, and why it suggests other test protocols besides the CP20: The Physiology of FTP and New FTP Test Protocols
…which leads to my other questions, if you are a steady state/TT cyclist, then why would you be spending your time improving your 1-5m power and everything in between? For instance, if you are a time trialist, then isn’t your training regiment reflecting that? Aren’t you out doing 40K TTs so that WKO4 is drawing on that data?
Because Sweet Spot is quite close to threshold and the ramp test is probably the most inaccurate way of estimating threshold, I’m of the opinion that you’d be much better using one of the other test protocols in this case.
All this talk about the ramp test. I’m going to try it this coming season. I am very curious and intrigued. Painful but quick so it appears – sort of like having your leg severed with a razor-sharp axe, vs. by a rusty serrated blade (CP20).
For reference, my Ramp Test result, the TTE test from the TrainingPeaks article, and my WKO4 mFTP were all within 5 watts of each other. I did all of my pre-season testing this past week so I’m not cherry picking numbers.
If you are rider that only focuses on one type of very specified riding, YMMV, but the Ramp Test is very accurate for me.
I guess you’re right in the middle of the bell curve.
Interestingly, I just listened to the ‘That Traithlon Show’ episode about 80/20 for time crunched athletes (talked about on one of the other threads) where the host stated that FTP is typically 10% higher than MLSS (I think that was by 20 minute test). I’d like to know where those numbers come from as it doesn’t say much for the work of Hunter Allan (and maybe Dr Andy Coggan) and the correlation he found if it is overestimating by that much.
I think the accuracy or inaccuracy of all of the various tests is sort of irrelevant in that we all should test slightly differently on each test based on our past training and our strengths and weaknesses. Some people will test very similarly on each test, some will show great disparity.
The idea behind having a single number that all workouts are based upon (the model Trainer Road uses) has recently (past couple of years) been challenged not because of the accuracy or inaccuracy of how we assess that number, but instead because that number doesn’t mean the same thing in different types of workouts or to different types of riders.
For instance - you can have two riders test out to an FTP of 300 and one of them will absolutely crush over/under workouts and fail very hard at VO2 max workouts while the other will have the exact opposite situation
All of this to say - holding your FTP for 60 minutes depends on how you determine your FTP and what it means to you. Many of us (myself included) tend to think of FTP as a defining metric, but it really is just a point on a curve. If you can shift your paradigm (I swear that’s the right word, not just corporate jargon) such that FTP is your 60 minute power then it becomes much less important and not a thing that you have to flop out on the table and compare to everyone else
Therefore, I think the traditional, general, definition of FTP as the power you can hold for an hour is fine and doesn’t require refinement as long as you understand that it is far from the only thing that matters - and that training your long duration power benefits everything else (still the foundation of the Trainer Road style of workout building)
I think they are getting critical power confused with FTP and MLSS. The “critical power model” that uses the 3 and 12 minute test generally estimates critical power to be around 10% higher than FTP.
Coggan has confirmed that he meant FTP to mean “work rate at MLSS”. FTP is the work rate, TTE is the duration. You can push up the workout and you can push out the TTE depending on your goals.
Under threshold, we are all mostly the same in terms of aerobic development.
Over threshold, yes, there requires more specificity and although TR explicitly states in the workout text to fine tune/adjust the VO2 workout intensity, there is probably an opportunity to more directly tailor some of these workouts.
Given the number of posts on this forum about VO2 workouts, I’m guessing most people have a hard time adjusting appropriately.
It is the VO2 workouts that break you. Apart from the fact that we all physically different and some cope well with intervals at 120% and others fare better with longer at 108% the VO2 workout is often pushing our limits. That is not a FTP issue per se but quite often a ‘how you are feeling on the day’ issue. Your FTP needs to be reasonably accurate for the vast majority of the workouts you perform which is why it is some important to have a standard (for each person) method of calculating that number.
In my case I had a well rounded set of training that gave me a mftp of 258 which was identical to my CP20 calculation. In the last few months I have not done as much of the shorter max efforts and as expected my mftp has dropped to 237 as they have rolled out of the 90 second window. So by not doing them as a time triallst my mftp has gone down. My sftp for CP20 is probably still ~250 so there is a variance there which was what I was pointing out - perhaps not very well.
I agree. It’s absolutely a useful tool and I also agree with you and @trpnhntr that it doesn’t really need a precise definition to have that utility.
However over the time I’ve used a PM it’s been variously described as
The power you can hold for exactly an hour
The power you can hold in a quasi steady state for approximately an hour
“Some people can only hold their FTP for 40 mins” (with the advent of WKO4?)
Yours was simply the first time I’ve seen somebody reference sub 30 minutes. What I do smile at given this disparity in definition is seeing people worry over whether their FTP is 240 or 250 when we can’t even decide over which duration they should be holding that effort.
Yup. Although other points on the Power Duration curve may have as much or potentially more significance depending on your goals.
I mostly said 25 minutes because I think most ‘untrained’ athletes can hit that at their respective FTP. I wouldn’t expect them to stay there for very long. There is a reason the sweet spot intervals range all the way down into the 12 and 15 min range. That’s hard for some people.
The progression of these statements relate to how our understanding of physiology has evolved over the past 10-15 years. Given that we have more data that is easier to collect at a decreasing cost, our understanding of a particular concept has become more refined.
Minutes are ultimately an arbitrary unit of time to the body, so its quite logical that the length of fatigue at a maximum steady state workrate will differ between individuals at various states of training.
Has the definition of MLSS changed over the same period?
I think though your second point is on the money though and is at the crux of the issue. We are trying to measure a physiological response with the human construct of minutes and seconds.
The same discussion can be had on the polarised training threads as well. Discussing whether the 8 minute (why not 7 mins 53 seconds?) intervals should be interspersed with 4 or 6 minutes of recovery is really a moot point. The intervals should be as long as you need to elicit the desired physiological effect and the recoveries long enough to recover and go again, which while similar for all, would all differ slightly between individuals.
I guess if we were able to measure these sensibly outside the lab this would be the advice we would all take to train optimally. I fully appreciate this applies to the FTP concept as well as you point out, but I’m not sure that nuanced view is well enough understood. It also isn’t helped by the desire of people to have an exact number to define themselves by based on a single data point.
the whole ftp kerfuffle seems to be a result of the confusion a physiological response that requires a lab environment for testing, and having multiple ways of approximating/estimating that in the real world.
All of that is laid out in the beginning of chapter 3 in Training and Racing with a Power Meter.
The confusion is understandable when you realize the ftp concept has been oversimplified and ‘dumbed down’ in magazines and online articles. It is hard finding a clear online explanation of the fundamentals and how to apply them.
He clearly states that they are comparing to 0.95 x 20 minute power. Whether he meant to say that is another thing!
I’d definitely be interested in finding out more about that because the papers that I’ve read about the subject suggest that the correlation is much better than that.
It’s more focused on comparing LT versus MLSS measurement methods though. I’ll try to find the other study that references all of the various FTP-esque measurements.
