Regardless of your VO2Max level, the difficulty (or ease) in doing VO2Max workouts depends on the relation between your FTP and your VO2Max power. TR assumes the latter is 120% of the former; you could be higher (making VO2Max workouts easier, since their level is based on 120% FTP), or lower (making VO2Max workouts harder).
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exactly. So if your FTP is 250W, and (5-min) VO2max-power is 300W (= 250 * 1.2), then TR vo2 intervals at 120% are perfect for you. If your vo2 power is higher then you should be adjusting workout intensity up, and if your vo2 power is lower then you should be adjusting workout intensity down.
To reduce confusion it might help to say “zone5 intervals” instead of vo2max intervals.
@TRusername if I’m following our previous conversation about age, your vo2max (max aerobic capacity) of 42 ml/kg/min is at top-end of Fair for your age group so there is room for improvement.
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That.
There is a strong correlation between VO2Max and FTP. Someone’s “low VO2Max” will be reflected by a “low” FTP. Since workouts in TR are set based on FTP, the workout level depends on your VO2Max to start with.
As for trainability, the old view that VO2Max did not respond a lot to training has been overwritten since a couple of decades. But it’s still fundamentally an individual limiter (you cannot take anyone off the street and hope to bring them to 60-70 ml/kg/min).
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Post of the year! Thx
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Well - it tells me my VO2Max makes me somewhere between excellent and superior (and will make me superior if I hang on to it for 2 more years), but I still get creamed on the road and on Zwift. Oh well.
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I had my VO2max lab tested last year and it lined up almost exactly with my Garmin number.
Like most of these calculators, I assume it typically gets pretty close for folks within the bell curve. I would guess that the biggest variable they struggle with is knowing an individual’s efficiency. If a person has “typical” efficiency and can provide power and HR data with some representative Vo2max efforts, it should become a pretty simple math problem at that point.
As far as the data in the chart, it looks like those numbers probably represent the general population, not a bunch of cycling-crazed endurance junkies.
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Yes, the vo2max standards by age are from the Cooper Institute and for general population (Ken Cooper came up with the 12-min vo2max running test in 1968!).
Well trained endurance athletes with years of experience, or naturally gifted, are at the high end of the chart.
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So if aerobic fitness were a house, and VO2max were the ceiling of that house, then my ceiling is possibly higher than what TR is estimating? Someone posted an awesome illustration from WKO4, I wish I could find it again.
But if that were true, wouldn’t that mean that I have a lot of room to grow my aerobic endurance? I must be doing something wrong. I can ride all day at 230 watts but anything above that, and I feel like I’m at threshold which for me is 263 watts. But then I can hold 120% of FTP (315 watts) for about 3 minutes for multiple intervals without too much issue. Does that mean the ramp test is underreporting my FTP?
That’s a good point. My BF% is 21.5% and I weight 95KG. I looked online for a calculator so I guess my absolute VO2max is 4.275.
What about someone who started structured training 8 months ago and cycling less than 2 years ago? Serious question.
If you’re riding all day at almost 90% of your FTP, I’d bet that your FTP is set too low. Even in race efforts, most folks struggle to maintain .8 IF when you start getting 5,6,7 hours into an event. That’s some serious diesel power at that point.
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OK true, I haven’t gone 5, 6, 7 hours at 230 watts. That said, I can hold 230 watts fairly comfortably for 30 minutes after a 0.85 IF hour workout, heart rate is in mid-zone 2 for that half hour.
Slide 21-25? http://storage.trainingpeaks.com.s3.amazonaws.com/assets/pdf/WKO4-Building-FTP-TTE-and-Stamina.pdf
75% doesn’t work for everyone. See figure 1 & 2, Individualized Training: The What, Why, and How Of the New WKO4 iLevels | TrainingPeaks. Before WKO4 & iLevel, the recommendation has always been to based off your power duration curve for training level above 4 (aka, Zone 4) or just “all out” for the duration in question.
There’s a bit of confusion between VO2Max and power @ VO2Max. TR never deals with the former, and estimates the latter based on your FTP (pVO2Max = 120% FTP). Your VO2Max itself is a measure of your aerobic capacity, which can be correlated with your FTP (and with pVO2Max, for that matter).
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to be more precise, TR ramp test is a max aerobic power test and therefore is really measuring power @ 1-min VO2Max and then using 75% of that to estimate FTP.
Absolute VO2max = 3982 ml/min or 3.982 l/min (which is 41.92 ml/kg/min * 95 kg)
My weight is about the same and estimated vo2max is 42 right now. In my 2nd year of cycling (2017) vo2max hit a high of 45 ml/kg/min before a double century, and then I got sidetracked with fixing non-cycling issues and haven’t consistently followed plans throughout the intervening years. The vo2 in 2017 was built on 5-10 hours/week of all outside training, loosely following CTS plans that were part of Strava Premium at that time.
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Thank you! That helps to clear things up a bit. So basically you can have a “low” VO2max but be able to put out relatively higher power at that VO2max.
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Hey clydesdale buddy! Good to see another fellow with a similar weight.
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You can have a “low” VO2Max but have a pVO2Max that’s more than 120% of your FTP. The WKO pitch (with the house image) is that base training increases your FTP without much impact on you pVO2Max (a simplification), so you then run out of “headroom”, which is then addressed by training in higher intensities/shorter durations, raising the ceiling, and so on.
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