Isaiah is awesome, last 90 days I’ve snagged a lot of new power bests (red)
that includes all rides since December 11, 2017 until now. They all share Frank’s basic philosophy but every coach is different.
Maybe Intervals.icu users (especially in your age group) just don’t sprint much. Also, remember the Coggan power profiles include data from elite track sprinters and BMX riders which skews the first two columns for most endurance riders (including road sprinters).
Idk why this thread popped up again for me again , but I checked my numbers for this year and they’re uh no bueno compared to last year.
Interestingly though, based on the amount of KOMs and PRs I’ve taken lately I feel significantly faster out on rides than I did in prior years despite my watts telling me I’m slower. Go figure. 
Idk what to believe now.
these numbers are only representative if you have done all out efforts at 5s/60s/5m durations. I very rarely do all out efforts at 60s/5min durations, so my charts dont look very good, until I do an effort that happens to be exactly that long, then it bumps me up
Remember, as stated above.
The Coggan chart is madness for road sprinters. If you can pop off a 24w/kg sprint you are NEVER reaching the end of any proper road race on Earth.
It’s track sprinters and BMXs that need to focus on 5s power.
Really, just ignore it totally. Use the fantastic Intervals.icu comparison to compare yourself to other actual road cyclists.
In fact, the owner very nicely added the one metric that matters for road sprinters…
15sec power
That’s the best metric for road sprints, bunch kicks in crits etc.
I’m a road sprinter myself, my 15sec is 15.3w/kg. Good for a 47y. Pretty average for a sprinter across all ages.
18w/kg for 15sec is exceptional for a road sprinter. 20w/kg ish is world class, Caleb Ewan.
Interestingly, it’s also the most valuable metric for winning a majority of Zwift races. Basically, a long painful sprint.
Your MAP is higher (but for a shorter duration) which makes some sense if your KOMs/PRs are on shorter segments? Your data isn’t that different to last year really either… There’s also the question of how many ~5 min efforts have you done recently?
It’s mostly just the w/kg has gone down due to higher kgs. 
I agree the power numbers are very similar though.
Just to add a little amateur perspective on the Coggan charts, I think or at least IME what is way more important is your power metrics say after 1000Kjs or 2000Kjs etc…I don’t recall if I’ve ever set a power PR in a race but, it’s far more usual that I don’t and I think this is the norm for most amateurs. So, perhaps someone has a much better 15 second sprint by the numbers, fresh than me. But, usually their 15 second sprint after a couple hours of over-unders (following wheels in a race) is much lower. At least this is my theory as nearly everyone reports these crazy high power numbers but, they are never there at the end of the race.
Or… they are just lying to themselves with a bad power meter or scale.
Always a possibility. I do think the majority can do what they say fresh but, it just doesn’t seem to be the determining factor with respect to results. On the flip side, the guys that crush me (that I know/race against) have slightly better metrics but, literally are the freaks that attack when everyone is gassed. Not only attack but, hold it for 5, 10, 20 minutes.
I posted this in the doping thread:
Moral of the story is do you, and don’t worry about where you stack up, because there are measurement errors all over the place in all of these metrics.
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Right, if the sample size is large enough, but it’s still self selected by those that use that site.
I’ve looked before, and TR said they don’t record what is measuring the power. That seems like their data set could be rife with error.
I got lapped in a crit where people that finished in the pack were the same / similar reported w/kg due to bad draft choices. There is more to it than just power.
In the motorsports world, we call engines that make a lot of power on the dyno but go slow on the track “dyno queens”. I can take the same engine to 10 different dynos, all “calibrated” and the same brand, and have power 5-15% different.
Unless their is a bias in the data. If people routinely underreport their weight and power meter errors trend to the high side (they are clamped at zero… so they would) then your data set is trash.
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Or your power meter reads super high and your scale reads low 
Yeah exactly. The chart is PR numbers. What matters is your ability at the end of a race. World tour pro’s sprint after 3-5hours of riding and usually average 1000-1200w for 10s or so. They also are part of a lead out train, so its not like they are going fresh then killing it for 10s, but instead they are hammering hard for maybe 5 mins leading into it with increasing intensity.
Despite this fact, I still think the absolute watts (fresh for the PR on the chart) is an important indicator of your ability to put out a percentage of it after a few hours in the saddle. For example, if rider A’s all time 10s is 1000w, and rider B’s is 1350w, then I would put my money on rider B if they both are lining up for the final sprint at the end of the race (of course, assuming rider B wasn’t dropped beforehand)
I’d say that it’s not necessarily true about road sprinters. They probably can hit numbers like that fresh on a training day they want to PR / test on. No, they aren’t hitting 24 w/kg at end of the TdF stage (prob more like 18-20 w/kg avg for 5-15sec), but I’d bet the likes of Marcel Kittel, Andre Gripel, Peter Sagan, etc can avg 1500-1700w for 5s fresh
Absolutely.
I’ve looked at tons of World Tour sprint data, as well as track sprinter data here in NZ. Road races are often won at surprisingly low power numbers. Being able to produce a high percentage of your fresh sprint, while fatigued, is often the deciding factor.
From my own experience, it’s not really the general fatigue of riding. If you are well trained, particularly if your yearly average hours are high, you should be able to deliver a solid final sprint.
What really taxes a final sprint is either a truly maximal long anaerobic effort or many hard neuromuscular efforts. Keeping these to an absolute minimum during a race is the art of road sprinting. Your entire goal is to never accelerate faster than the absolute minimum required, during the entire race.
If you do this better than your competitors, you’ll likely reach a higher percentage of your best effort when it matters most. At the end.
Interestingly, my best ever sprint was actually at the end of a road race. It was for the win of my own little A race. So, I imagine the adrenaline / excitement helped. I’ve not matched it since.
Hi Nate, just came across this and I found it really interesting so thanks for crunching the numbers. Although this was some time ago I find some of the comments a little strange. I assume if people are on TrainerRoad they are looking to improve their fitness and be more competitive? A lot of my cycling friends are on Strava and are pushing for a good placing on the hills. This to me is no different as I would like to be on the right hand side of the graph rather than the left and for me this just adds an additional incentive.