I’m curious if there’s research out there to determine how long and to what magnitude newbie gains last?
Most research I’ve read focus on trained athletes. So most of the stats thrown around have an implicit “for trained athletes” qualifier affixed to them. Like, “It’s not unreasonable to expect a 5-10% ftp gain per year with a focused training regiment [for trained athletes].” This comes from a study I read recently on ftp gains over a 10 year period. It’s like an average with the most gains in the earlier years.
So, when I say “newbie gains”, it’s referring to the period before you’re “trained” and should expect to fall into these more incremental gain patterns that most of the research focuses on.
If day 1 is “on the coach, eating potato chips” and “trained” is “I should now only reasonably expect marginal gains for my given volume of training” how long till you’re trained? Does it matter so much from where you start? e.g. if you’re 25kg overweight. . . is your “Day 1” the day you drop that 25kg and aren’t in a hard cut to lose it or is it the day you started working on losing weight…assuming you are consistent in your training.
I’ve heard a year, 2 years. In power lifting, 4-5 years.
Anecdotes are welcome, but it’d be awesome if there was some research that quantified “newbie gains” and how long to expect them.
I thanks it’s way to individual to have any kind of blanket statement. Dependent on age, genetics, level of fitness, carry over from training other sports, etc.
I started biking about 13 months ago while recovering from hip surgery. Before that I was a hobbyist runner, around 20-30 miles/wk off and on for about 5 years. Zero cardio before that, but heavy weightlifter for 20+ years (36 now). My FTP has gone from 222>280 in 13 months and I’ve gone from about 162>158 lbs.
My n00b FTP gains are over. I’m increasing my ability to manage 5+ hr rides pretty quickly, however. My FTP will still go up faster than someone with 10+ years experience, but nowhere near how it has. If I could hit 300 by the end of the year, I’d be thrilled.
There are many exercise physiology studies using relatively untrained undergraduates as subjects. I seem to recall that a large majority of noob gains come in the first 6-12 weeks, most of which is blood plasma volume gains.
Off the top of my head, there is the Hickson study (44% increase in vo2max):
Like others have said, it varies greatly by individual and circumstances. One thing that I find interesting is that the person with the greatest genetic potential doesn’t always show the fastest/largest gains coming from an untrained state (even with similar training). Your genetics dictate how quickly you adapt just like they dictate your potential. For example, if you look at 2 untrained 20 year old cyclists. One might have the genetic potential to have a 400w FTP and can get there in 4 years. The other might have the potential to hit 450w, but take 8 years to get there. And the athlete with the higher potential might be lagging behind the other for the first few years.
This is interesting, but a very short lived study. Small population too.
So it implies newbie gains can be significant for the first 10 weeks. Anecdotally, I think it might be reasonable to see them for up to a year or two even. Maybe more.
I think I’m finding more hits searching for “plateau effect”.
This one is with 1000’s of patients and analyzes years of work. But for very low volume resistance training. They found that improvement tended to level off after a year.
I think newbie gains are pretty fast at first, usually in the first 6-12 months, but then they slow down as you become more trained. Everyone’s journey is a bit different depending on where you start and how consistent you are.
And the Hickson study is not sustainable training. I recall that the participants were asked if they wanted to continue the training and they almost all said no. It was hard vo2 and threshold training.
I did my own experiment after taking 8 months off the bike. My FTP went down from 250 to 180. (I did stay in some shape with daily rowing and some running.) After resuming training at a much lower training load, I got back up to 220 in three months. The next ten watts took three more months.
You can’t get scaling gains every year forever, eventually the rider profile changes with aging and there are certain system changes that make it so that the best days are in the past in terms of stuff like EPO production coming from the bones themselves as well as max HR. That being said if you get on a program of structured training for 2-3 years you will be pretty close to riding around at your best critical power for noob gains, everything after that will require all the nuance like progressive overload, fueling, volume overload / training camp, altitude, specific peaking and specialization, etc.
Yeah, I get that. And it makes complete practical sense. I’ll try to clarify my curiosity and what I was looking for.
An ideal study would span about 5 years or maybe a bit more. Subjects would be ‘untrained’. The ideal subject would be people who are within their appropriate weight ranges, but do not lead an active lifestyle and definitely no history of structured training.
An initial FTP test is given. Then a followup test every 3 or 6 months. Or a titrated number more frequent the first 6 months, then tapering off and gains slow.
I think it’d be reasonable to think the individual gains would fall without a normal curve for each time point across individuals. And within an individual over time a right skewed, positive curve. Like this:
Ok, so there’s a study I read, .which I didn’t add to my archive and am having trouble digging up, that did a 10 year study of trained athletes. It was able to show that a similar skew curve for annual ftp gains for trained athletes. The average gains were about 10% per year of structured training. . . . but the first of the 10 years tended to be like 15% and the last like 7/8% so there was a slight tailing off.
So this “newbie study” would try to find the point at which our newbie populations curve started overlapping with the “trained athlete” curve. That time till ‘trained’ would likely be a normal curve too.
I just think that’d be super interesting data to look at. I bet TR has enough user data to take a stab at it with a few user surveys. . . though it wouldn’t be as powerful a study as a controlled one.
Would like to see that study. I think those trained athletes would need to be fairly untrained to begin with to get anywhere near those numbers. I can’t believe any trained athlete is growing their FTP by ~10% year after year for 10 years. Even if you started at only250w, that turns into a ~650w FTP after 10 years of 10% gains. After a few years into serious training, most athletes would kill for 3%.
It was totally the average and I can’t recall the taper. But the taper was significant. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was much closer to 2 or 3% in the 10th year.
/wastes a few more minutes looking for the paper again.
