In a lot of cases your FTP probably doesn’t change all that much, rather your willingness to suffer declines when you don’t do it. As long as you’re riding enough, your physiology probably isn’t getting worse… it’s largely psychological in many cases. So when you do those 9 hard workouts in two weeks, it’s not your fitness really improving much in the near term, you just remember what suffering feels like and are more willing to do it.
Introduce enough intensity, like a long, hard climb every so often in your unstructured outdoor riding and my guess is you won’t see a performance decline and you wouldn’t need the “workaround”. You might not improve, but at least you’d be maintaining. If you’re just out noodling or doing only short burst efforts, you “forget” how to do the longer hard stuff.
I’d like to believe you, but for me, the drop in FTP is real. I usually lose 10-15% over the summer.
There’s simply no way I could complete an under/over session at the start of winter at the same level I was riding them at the end of the previous winter - despite a summer of consistent riding in hilly terrain. It’s not just a loss in the ability to suffer (although I do agree that’s an important part of fitness), it’s a physiological difference. Heart rate backs this up.
I either need more summer outdoor volume (maybe via more all out efforts) or a sprinkling of indoor ‘quality’ workouts (hence my interest in any minimal effective indoor dose).
I am not noticing a drop like you but there is a definite drop in FTP…more like 5%, I actually think my problem is that I just accumulate fatigue as I end up with too much intensity overall.
The losses are definitely not largely psychological, there are significant physiological losses as well. It’d be easy to think that just because you are doing some punchy climbs at VO2max or some longer climbs at sweet spot or FTP, with ordinary riding you will lose a combination of fitness and power. But it is the structure that makes the difference. Before doing TR, I did a few outdoor workouts by feel (mostly hill climb repeats) without any structure (think Train Now but with a library of 4 or 5 workouts, chosen by a random number generator) and “hard riding” on the weekends. When I switched to TR, I rode less (in terms of hours), but my fitness gains were massive (277 W —> 309 W, and due to weight loss, my specific FTP went up more than the 10ish %).
And not all losses are in the FTP: my family and I went on a trip to Europe to see my family and close friends for the first time in three years. Apart from commuting on bike for two weeks and one gym session at the end, I did not do any sports. My FTP did not decline nearly as much as I thought — my “power bar” (in video game terms) didn’t decrease much. But my “life bar”, my endurance was shirt. My heart rate spiked to levels I had not seen at specific power level.
You and I aren’t even discussing the same thing. I simply said maintaining volume with adequate intensity is fine to maintain physiological gains - it doesn’t have to be structured, and then pointed out that 9 TR workouts in two weeks aren’t causing a noticeable short term physiological gain in someone who is already trained.
You came at me with anecdotes about how you improved with TR structure.
Can you improve with structure? Absolutely 100%. That’s why I do it and coach.
Can you maintain without structure? Absolutely.
Do you lose physiological gains by not riding structured training? It depends.
If it’s working for him. Great! Do it. You and I can argue all day about why that is, but honestly I’m not interested in doing that on this forum (at least not in this particular thread).
The TR suggestion is to drop down to low volume, nail the workouts, and add outside riding.
But how to add outside riding? That was always a big question I had.
First year using TR my off-season break was July thru the 2nd week of August. Over a month with only:
3 rides
1 hike
going to the gym to lift weights
FTP decreased from 245 to 229 because of the large drop in riding - only 3 rides in 5 weeks. For context during two years on TR my FTP went back and forth between 220 after an off-season or reduced riding, and 250 after consistent training.
After that mid summer off-season, I did the block below and saw a 7% FTP bump doing my first base block. Can’t recall for certain but believe I modified MV plan and tried to mirror weekly TSS increases to ensure a certain level of progression.
Reason I bring this particular block of training up - it illustrates a few common themes I see in my data. And it happens to be the best % FTP increase on TR. This is what I did:
The TR workouts were done in a very warm garage - about 80F in the afternoon with hot air from fans. HOT rides were 95-102F outside.
Always hard to prove cause/effect, however my data suggests a pattern of fitness increases (or maintenance) resulting from:
gradually increasing hours riding (and/or CTL) riding either inside or outside
weekly hard outside rides OR hard inside workouts, where unstructured hard outside rides have frequent above threshold efforts and relatively high IF (something like 0.85 IF for 90+ minutes or 0.8 IF for 3+ hours)
long 3-10 hour rides (these have all been outside)
training in the heat (inside or outside)
In other words, fitness decreases happen with some combination of the following:
decreases in volume
decreases in intensity
decreases in the number of monthly long rides
after heat acclimation, significant drops in temperature which in this area happens around the end of October
I’ve had a one coach for coming up on 2 years, and what he does is manipulate the above (except heat, lol) in a gradual and sustained way. I’m lucky to live where its possible to train the same inside or outside, although its a lot easier for me to hit targets and add volume outside.
Hope that helps your own thinking in how to balance inside/outside. Not saying you should follow it. Simply one example of what worked for me, that might give you ideas to adapt in your situation.
Hey guys, I want to clarify some things after my last post that was admittedly a little bit snippy… so here goes:
If we’re talking about performance measurements that decline after going off of structured training, and we’re on a TR forum, we are likely talking about FTP, as both @tag and @OreoCookie brought up.
My guess is that you guys are using ramp test results as your estimate for FTP based on the fact that at least one of you is a TR user, this is a TR forum, and ramp test (until recently) was king.
The ramp test has a large anaerobic component, and for some even more than others. The anaerobic component will absolutely be affected by structured training intervals. (Anecdata examples: one of the largest “FTP” bumps I saw in my time on TR four years ago was after short power build… I happen to be a pretty strong anaerobic athlete with a high FRC/W’ even before I train it.)
If you don’t effectively train that anaerobic component in your unstructured riding (which very few people do), you will likely see a decrease in that anaerobic capacity over the course of time.
It is possible to improve the anaerobic component in a relatively short period of time with structured training, as little as a few weeks with the right workouts.
Further, there is a fatigue component here. Unstructured riding often means no planned recovery and/or riding harder than you should… fatigue leads to performance declines, obviously.
Thus, if you’re a TR athlete in the winter, and do TR plans with some heavy anaerobic training components (as many of them have), and then you stop doing that, you’ll see a performance decrease that can be traced to a physiological change.
Now, we can really get into the weeds of “what is FTP?” and the drawbacks of using ramp test data for, well, anything, but that’s not the discussion I care to have in this thread either way.
If we’re talking about aerobic fitness, which is what I was thinking about, then what I’m saying is accurate - with enough volume at adequate intensity, there should be no decline in an athlete’s aerobic physiology that leads to a 10-15% decrease in FTP simply by stopping structured training. In all likelihood, that drop is due to a loss of anaerobic fitness and subsequent decline in ramp test performance. But physiological markers (such as MLSS/LT2/anaerobic threshold/whatever the heck you want to call it) simply don’t decrease that much that fast if you’re actually riding your bike.
It is far more likely that your ability to tolerate lactate production, clearance, and the metabolic byproducts therein has decreased, and that’s what’s actually being borne out in your performance decline.
Talking about over-unders specifically, this would almost certainly bare out, and especially if you’re doing them based off of a ramp test result. There’s at least a decent chance your true, physiological threshold is somewhat lower than what the ramp test gives you, and thus the work you’re doing “above threshold” in over-unders becomes more and more anaerobic, meaning you produce more lactate, you don’t tolerate it as well, and (as mentioned above) your anaerobic capacity is already diminished.
When I talk about FTP these days, I’m talking about power that is almost entirely maintained aerobically and for longer periods of time, rather than the FTP numbers I got when I was a TR user which were usually values that I could sustain for 30-35 minutes and had a somewhat larger anaerobic component than what I think of as FTP now.
Hopefully that clears things up as far as how I see them, and I apologize for being snippy above. There are plenty of people out there and on this forum who are smarter about this stuff than me, and I would be happy for someone to teach me more!
But I will stand by my original statement that if an athlete is doing adequate volume at an adequate intensity, the will not see a marked decrease in their aerobic fitness over the course of the summer without structure. If they are noodling around, doing 3 hour rides with 45 min coffee stops every time, then sure. So, as always - it depends.
And then make sure you can nail intervals. My own personal experience is that when riding 6+ hours/week, I only need a small number of intervals (vs a lot of TR workouts) to drive fitness gains. But I’m an older rider, if I was twenty it might be different (although the local cat3 and cat2 guys moving up, getting podiums, are doing a reasonable amount of endurance and some intervals just like I’m doing).
First of all, no worries about sounding snippy, that happens quite often when you argue on the internet, you lose all nuance that is conveyed by your tone of voice, mimics and gestures. Please take that into account when you read my reply.
No, I specifically talked about power and endurance at that power level with the power bar/life bar analogy in my posts. When you are detraining, it isn’t just your power bar that is decreasing, but he life bar. Depending on the kind of activities you do, your fitness and body type, power bar and life bar can decrease by different amounts.
Conversely, you can train to increase either one of them. Like you I did short power build, which raised all my power numbers. I made my power tower taller. Other training approaches like polarized training (in my experience) focus on the life bar at the expense of smaller gains in your power bar — your power tower gets broader. That’s why IMHO the answer to the question whether to increase the height or widen the base of our power tower, my answer is both! Just do one the one year and the other the other year. Or do a polarized block within a cycle when you had a training interruption.
That’s not my experience. People “who ride a lot” indeed build a power tower with a very, very wide basis. But the height is very low and they have few matches. We have 60±year-olds in our team that can hang with the fast guys on long rides. They know how to pace, how to use their energy smartly, they replenish carbs, drink enough and are tough as nails. But for example, what they cannot handle is when the trained people on our team try to keep up momentum by e. g. powering up a rolling, short hills repeatedly to keep momentum.
The FTP test protocol has nothing to do with this. No matter what protocol you use to test your FTP, you should always validate it with workouts. With experience that isn’t very hard, especially when you do threshold workouts, on longer, repeated intervals my sensation at 98 % lactate threshold is very different than 103 % lactate threshold.
While you can change the ratio between lactate threshold and MAP, the changes are fairly small, 1–2 percentage points is what I’ve seen. What doesn’t happen is that your maximum aerobic power decreases by 10–15 % and your FTP decreases only by 5 %.
You are conflating FTP, lactate threshold and TTE at what you think is either. Time-to-exhaustion-at-lactate threshold is a different performance metric that can be, indeed, has to be trained. You can use a TTE to validate an FTP to some degree, yes, but I’d still say TTE is a very different metric. If I go back to my power bar/life bar analogy, you are testing the length of your life bar at a specific power.
How do you define aerobic fitness?
Personally, I don’t think there is a single, simple definition. If you define it as Z2 endurance, then “just riding” can give you plenty of stamina, albeit at a lower power level. Still, depending on what floats your boat, this could be what you want. I know a 70-year-old doing 300–600 km endurance events, and I would smoke him the first 200 km. But I’m sure he’d overtake me on a 400 km ride, because I had given up.
I think you are a bit cavalier about the losses. E. g. during a regular training cycle, my FTP increases by something like 10 %. I have to work hard for every percentage point. At the lower end of the W/kg spectrum, losses are likely higher, though.
I think you are doing it right: you mix some structured workouts with regular rides, and make sure to get sufficient recovery. IMHO that’s the way to go.
And I share your observation that when doing endurance rides you don’t need to strictly adhere to power zones. That’s why I prefer pacing my endurance rides by heart rate: it corresponds much better to my RPE. Plus, in reality not everything is flat, and slavishly sticking to a power zone during a climb can disrupt your flow and pacing. E. g. for some short climbs I might need to do I’d have to turn my legs ridiculously slowly to stay in Z2 power. It feels much more natural to just smoothly increase power for a brief moment and then let off when you are at the top.
The only thing I’d avoid on endurance rides are repeated sharp accelerations that take you way beyond 120 % FTP (e. g. at traffic lights to get going).
Hard to say, since the pandemic started we rarely go on training rides any longer. But I’d say most of them train about 10ish hours/week, and then you’d have to add races or long outdoor rides in the summer. A lot of training is indoors since most of us have families, although there are exceptions. Power-to-weight-wise, I think the top end is at about 4.7ish W/kg (which was my peak last season). In absolute terms, I might have the biggest engine, but I weigh about 7–10 kg more than other fast team mates (I’m living in Japan). The people who are faster generally have more endurance at high power than I do. To be better, I’d need to spend more time in the saddle, time that I currently don’t have.
Personally, I’d love to spend half a day to a day per weekend in the saddle, but I love my kids and my wife more than riding.
Some team mates are snappier, although I am not sure whether this is age (I’m 41) or just my abilities (at high school I was a pretty good mid- to long-distance runner, but a really, really bad sprinter).
This is a good post. There’s a lot I agree with and a lot I disagree with.
But most of what you wrote isn’t germane to the discussion. And that discussion was about physiological adaptations that you lose through periods of unstructured training.
Various measures of performance decline during unstructured training - I am on board with that.
My statements have been that there are a number of reasons that that happens. At powers over threshold, that could be physiological as you don’t train anaerobic capacity… but it’s also likely very much psychological as you aren’t able to tolerate lactate and “suffering” if you don’t do it.
Physiologically, and again I’m going to emphasize a key qualifier here - with adequate volume at appropriate intensity - there is no reason why someone’s anaerobic threshold/LT2/MLSS/whatever physiological marker you choose - should decline by 10-15% which is what @tag talked about. The FTP protocol absolutely does matter for all the reasons I mentioned. You have talked a lot about performance… and I am not arguing that point. I am talking about what actually accounts for that decline in performance.
I’m not conflating anything. I understand the metrics and their meanings. My argument is that someone’s “threshold” is not “functional” with a 34-minute TTE. I think it is a fallacy to have an FTP with a 34-minute TTE, simple as that.
Simply put, it seems we’re talking past each other. Cheers.
The 10–15 % figure that @tag mentioned jives with my experience: I usually lose 10 % loss in FTP and endurance during the off-season. (The latter is much more difficult-to-quantify.) In the off-season I typically would still ride regularly (e. g. to commute to work or do weekend rides just for fun.)
I think that the timing of stimuli and adequate recovery is what makes the difference. People who do unstructured outdoor rides typically ride for long times, i. e. they accumulate massive amounts of TSS in a single ride.
But why?
Your claim as I understand it is that the ramp test does not accurately estimate your power at lactate threshold.
I’m saying that no matter what method you use, you should verify — and correct if necessary — your FTP to match your power at lactate threshold (as best as you can). You should do the latter no matter how you measure FTP. So if the ramp tests overestimates your FTP, then correct it according to your experience. The amount by which you need to modify the ramp test result is likely not going to change much over the years since the ratio of MAP-to-lactate threshold isn’t changing a lot and very rapidly.
Measuring your FTP means inferring your lactate threshold power in a field test. Lactate threshold can, in principle, be measured. But there is no duration attached to that. Coggan wrote in his early works that people are able to hold lactate threshold power for 30–60 minutes. His early test subjects were highly trained cyclists who (apparently) regularly trained for TTs, which is why many people to this day conflate FTP with hour power. But TTE need not be a meaningful metric for you, e. g. if you are a crit racer extending your TTE from 30 to 60 minutes is likely not what you should be focussing on.
Since training with power zones is all about stimulating the right adaptations, your FTP should match your lactate threshold power (and not whatever power you infer from a TTE test) as best as you can. Over-unders should really be over-unders, not under-unders. Likewise, threshold workouts should not be sweet spot workouts.
Because the person saying they have a 10-15% reduction in FTP is likely using a ramp test to estimate that. A ramp test puts far too much emphasis on anaerobic contributions and thus after a period of anaerobic training, “FTP” goes up, when the reality is the physiological parameters actually behind that threshold likely didn’t change at all.
It’s literally THE major problem with TR as a training platform - everything comes back to FTP (and now “progression levels”), even stuff that has literally nothing to do with it.
Except that I have emphasized that I am not taking the ramp test at face value, but verifying the results with key workouts and outdoor rides — and modifying it as necessary. Why do you ignore this important qualification in your arguments?
Others have a handle on their fitness, too. FTP is just a number, but you can tell in so many ways how fit you are. You can use Strava segments or compare yourself with your favorite frenemies on group rides. Can you hang with them on the flats or in the climbs? You could also use heart rate elasticity if you want to get fancy. So I’d take people like @kosmo886 or @tag seriously when they tell you their performance has declined.
You are right that some capabilities last longer than others, and that a little bit of structured training can get you very far.
That makes much more sense. I assumed the original statement was accurate. Apologies.
I think the confusion is that a percentage of riders train very effectively indoors with TR etc. They then stop structured training and ride outside for summer. If these riders aren’t very experienced with guiding their own training, they very likely will have drops in fitness metrics.
This is for a million different reasons.
However, is it isn’t because it’s outside. This seems to be a common misconception.
