Circling back around to this concept for myself. I did Kolie’s Baseline test today, and admittedly my TTE is pretty short: I dropped off just after the 11th minute of the second phase (the 102%). I did feel like I held back a bit and could have probably gave it a couple watts more throughout the main portion of the test, so there’s definitely room for improvement.
However, my question is this: essentially, because I did 10min at 98%, then 11min at 102% (with some extra W above 102% for a few minutes before crashing), in practice, this doesn’t seem any different than a standard 20 min FTP test. However, if I take the raw average of those 21 minutes (236W) via the Kolie way, I’d be skewing my true FTP high since i’m not multiplying by 95% compared to the 20 Min Test.
When I did a ramp test 6 weeks ago, it returned a result that was about 220W, 10-13W lower than I’m comfortable doing workouts at, so I overrode that and manually bumped it up to 233W, and have been completing all the workouts appropriately (as well as this Kolie one). So, TTE aside (something I’ll work on), should my FTP be ~220W (Traditional 20min & Ramp) or 236W (Kolie)? I wouldn’t lower it below what I went into today’s eval at (233W) as I’m a threshold and sweet spot focused rider - setting my FTP around 220W makes most program workouts too easy, versus now (at 233W) where only the VO2 max efforts are exceedingly tough. It would just be good to know what my “true” FTP should be.
