Help me make sense of my recent VO2 & Lactate results

How’s your power profile look? Are you more of a short power or long sustained kind of rider? Keeping in mind you can’t do both, would you prefer to shift the power profile to be more of one than the other?

Assuming your VO2max stays constant, if you train to lower VLamax, you should expect FTP to rise, while your anaerobic power decreases. If you wanted to raise both, you’d need to increase VO2max, but yours is already fairly high. And while you may very well still get it higher, it might not be the easiest get.

My (very rough) estimate of your VLamax based on the numbers you provided is 0.75. A TT specialist might get theirs down to 0.3 or so. If you keep the same VO2max, but lowered VLamax by that much, you could see FTP rise to (very approximately) 345. That FTP gain comes directly at the expense of your anaerobic power.

To get an equivalent increase in FTP from VO2max with the same anaerobic power you have now would require VO2max to increase to (again, approximately) 85.4.

IMO, the later sounds like a much more impressive performance gain, but also MUCH harder to attain.

To get better and more accurate numbers, you’d probably want to get your VLamax tested also. That’s probably overkill though. I had put together a rough equation to calculate the numbers, but I’d need to get ahold of a nice dataset to fine tune the equation more accurately. As it is now, it’s probably good enough to get an idea of the magnitude of change you can achieve by targeting either a lower VLamax, or a higher VO2max.

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