It looks like you went straight to progression 3 because you start at or near 100% FTP. This is the end progression because it assumes you have a good target. It’s probably not great to start off with in ERG as you’ll end too quickly if it your target is too high. I think you want to get to 35 mins to feel more confident in using the value to set workouts.
Try again with the baseline format? Make sure you are well rested?
At the very least, you had a good 20 min effort.
Fascat coaching, “We take the average 20 minute power and subtract 5 – 10% to arrive at an athlete’s 60 minute “Functional Threshold Power” or FTP. As a generally rule of thumb we use 5% for slow twitch aerobic athletes and 10% for athletes that have a well developed anaerobic system. We’ll subtract 7.5% if we don’t know about the athlete’s anaerobic capacity.”
Unless you’re off the couch and just started cycling this week for the first time ever, or you just did a really hard build block and got a big jump in FTP at the expense of TTE, then you should be looking for a 40+ minute TTE, absolute minimum. In the case of someone brand new or with a serious FTP increase, still 35 minutes or more.
I feel like we need to sticky this fact in this thread somehow…
Substract 5% from your ftp and try again. Really the aim is to feel when you’re at ftp, and hold it there for as long as you can. For durations of up to 20 mins or so, you will still have a sizeable anaerobic contribution to your power, so you want to go past that duration by quite a bit to make sure you are actually only measuring your aerobic capabilities.
It does take a few goes to get right though! Unless you’re an experienced TTer I guess.
Did 310 watts for 10 minutes then raised to 330 watts based on couple of efforts I did in the end of last block.
Some people seem to think these longer test are extremely brutal and should be done sparingly. Is there physiological reasons or is it mostly mental? I don’t race and train hard only 15% of the time, so I’m not really concerned.
I think the aversion to 60 min tests is more psychological than physiological. It’s not like you are redlining the engine or tearing muscles. I still find them unpleasant, but it’s worth it since the estimate inspires greater confidence.
Fascat coaching site said they tried having athletes do 60 min tests but it didn’t work out well overall. They find 20 min tests with a different calculation a better solution. I think I saw a post by KM saying his athletes test quarterly usually instead of monthly.
It’s probably analogous to pain (eg eating spicy food), the amplitude of the signal can vary but extended duration above a certain threshold is more unpleasant. Your tongue isn’t actually burning, your nerves are just firing. People may prefer slightly more pain for shorter durations.
Optimize sleep and cooling, take in carbs before and during the test (I make 2 bottles with 60g carbs and try to sip every 5 mins), play some hype music to reduce RPE.
Make sure the ramp at the end is very long so that you have ZERO chance of making it to the end of the test. If your end ramp ends at 10-15 mins as described in the training peaks article, your final estimate will just confirm your pre-test FTP and won’t give you opportunity to improve if you lowballed your estimate.
Nice! Makes more sense with the 8 min power you did prior. I like intervals.icu set to 1800s for eFTP, the power curve might tell you your 1hr number is closer 285 but that’s a small difference. Since you did back to back tests, you might even test higher in the near future. The question is whether you want to repeat baseline versus try a progression to lengthen the duration. I think baseline’s SS phase 1 could be helpful in terms of warming up. Progression 3 might need a little more warmup since it gets to 100% really quick.
felt good, the real test was the middle 15min section. felt sustainable. made sure to keep the breathing in check. Really like this testing format over the ramp test. legs don’t feel totally destroyed! plus have a TTE I can work with
It seems like the very helpful workouts created by @alexgold123 have some problems with the new TR app. I tried to do both the “Prog 1” and the “baseline” variants today, and they both repeatedly crashed on my iPad and on my iPhone. The crash occurs immediately after the segments that, for some reason, are only 1 second long (i.e., at 13:00 and at 20:00). My guess is that the old app could handle this but the new app can’t.
I’ll drop a note to support, but given that most workouts don’t have intervals that last only 1 second, it may be too fringe of a use case to fix at the app level. We may need to polish the workout to eliminate these artifacts. We can each do it in Workout Creator, but I’m not sure the best way to distribute it through the TeamGold team.
