Sufferfest new FTP test - is it new cycling standard? (Half Monty)

Training
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I don’t think this is good advice for anyone but a very small subset of people. Depending on your type of riding, training hard so that you can hold your FTP for about 60 minutes may be useless or even detrimental. If you are a crit racer, this ability, which needs to be trained (body and mind), will do you no good. It would not accurately represent your ability that matter to your style of racing.

If you are doing 40k TTs, then yes, obviously, this would be an important benchmark. But even then, I wouldn’t set the time to 60 minutes, but roughly the time you need to complete 40k.

60-minute FTP tests also incur a massive amount of fatigue and lead to, I reckon a lot of failed attempts. Just watch The Chase, even for experienced, highly gifted, seasoned athletes specialized in TT, if you really go as hard as you can for 50+ minutes, it is excruciating.

No, especially not in the contexts we use FTP for, namely to scale workouts. It is really a bad idea to suggest that this should be what most people are using to gauge their FTP.

These 60-minute and time-to-exhaustion tests do have their place, but only if your TTE is important for the riding you do. But even then, the recommended testing protocol for TTEs is that you start with a more conventional FTP test first (like a ramp test) to allow you to meter your effort more accurately. You’d still need to rely on your experience to decide what power you can hold for, say, 60 minutes.

In my mind what you get, though, are two separate numbers. I could either raise my 60-minute power by raising the number I get from the ramp test or by training to work more closely to the number obtained from the ramp test. Or, in case I rarely if ever do sustained 60-minute efforts at 100 %, that probably wouldn’t be important either.

Unless you are doing your FTP test in a specialized lab that determines your lactate levels as you go along (i. e. you define FTP as the power at your lactate threshold), all you do is either test for correlates with FTP (e. g. a ramp test or an 8- or 20-minute test).

To facilitate testing, the testing protocols should be simple and preferably to exhaustion. That’s why a lot of researchers on cycling use ramp tests: they are simple to understand for the subject, simple to administer, do not incur a lot of fatigue and therefore do not require changes to your training plan. Of course, they do not call the number FTP, but MAP. Going from any power you determine in these tests (be it 20-minute, 8-minute or ramp) requires a conversion. E. g. Coggan initially subtracted 5 % from your 20-minute power to get your FTP now the recommendation is 15 % unless you are an experienced athlete. All methods come with uncertainties, because correlations are inherently statistical.

Cheating on FTP tests is an option, and we know that many people just don’t want to I accept that the correct power to scale their workouts is a lower percentage of their MAP or 20-minute power.

170

“Many coaches and athletes define functional threshold power (FTP) as 95 percent of the average power from a 20-minute, steady-state, all-out time trial.”

Doesn’t exactly win me over by stating something that isn’t true in his opening sentence :joy: I don’t know any coach or training product that doesn’t at least try to deplete the anaerobic contribution prior to the 20min effort during a “20min” test.

Interesting article other than that though cheers :+1:

171

The problem, for many athletes is that hard effort before the test causes more harm than good. 20 min test is extremely hard by itself, as it is 2 test in one. In one of the recent podcasts was a nice a nice discussion about 20 min test:

So the conclusion is - do 20 min test and take a lower percentage and then it is a good predictor of your functional threshold. Simple as that.

172

My hunch (and it really is just a hunch) is that just taking 91% of a 20min all out isn’t going to correct for different types of athletes the same way as taking 95% of a 20min performed after a 5min all out effort.

Truth is that non of these FTP figures are ever going to exactly match each other as long as different athletes have different power curves.

But I have no reason to doubt that the Trainerroad ramp test is adequate to provide a number to base Trainerroad workouts on especially with progression levels now catering for different power curves.

173

There is always variability among athletes and you ultimately run into the exact same problem as many people have with the ramp test: a few “over perform” (i. e. their FTP is a higher percentage of MAP) or, more likely, they “under perform”. I reckon that the early 5 % recommendation is the same reason why in early studies FTP was 74-75 % of MAP: the test subjects were fit, serious athletes from a very specific subject pool rather than a more representative slice of amateur athletes. That‘s IMHO one test isn‘t better than another per se, athletes have to learn where they lie on the spectrum and correct the test result manually as necessary.