I had decided to join the fun this year. Long story short, In trying to calm down my anaerobic system I did not do any intervals above 105% of FTP from about October to March. MAP suffered, and I noticed that my FTP dropped about as much as MAP. So looks like the ramp test has some validity, but I needed to calibrate the result to my current abilities.
Ramp test result: 268. Not surprising as the only intensity I had done the previous block was 4x8 min at 285 watts.
Hour of power result: 264 avg for 34 minutes, so I decided to bump it down to 260 FTP in TR. I think next time I try an hour of power I’ll just drop by power by 5-10 watts for 5 min or so if things start to get dicey, seems as though it doesn’t have as much of an effect on AVG power as i thought, the 5 min warm up in the hour of power workout only dropped my avg by about 4 watts, so I think I could have limped in at 255 for the rest of the hour if I had planned for it.
Not sure I"m going to recalibrate, but I’ll be using 72% of ramp test 1 min max power for FTP for the time being. VO2 max workouts are relatively easy, but still hard. SS workouts aren’t too hard at all IMO. I’ve been doing as much volume as my schedule allows and trying to keep intensity <20% of total training time.
Last year I noticed that my pacing by power was way off… based on the power I was doing in intervals on TR I thought I could do better. What’s interesting is that even though for Spencer +2 the target was some 30 watts lower than the last time I did it, my avg power for the 6 intervals was only about 10 watts lower. I am curious to see if after doing general build my HR is back to the ~90% of max doing the 3 minute intervals. As right now it’s not even close, maybe on the last one.
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That’s about where my real FTP usually sits. 70% - 73% of ramp-generated MAP. I’m fiddling around with a custom ramp test to see if I can get those two numbers to converge.
You could ride for an hour at that intensity every week? I’m not sure I could.
Anyhow, regardless of what Joe Friel says, when I do a ramp test & I start a 1 minute step with my HR just creeping up to 160bpm…the average power of the 1 minute step is what my ramp test result is likely to be. Or at least it has been for every ramp test I’ve ever done.
So maybe TR should adopt Joe Friel’s 30-min test? 
I don’t t hink so. I’m going to side with TrainerRoad, here. It’s cool to talk about, though.
Then you are going to ignore HR? 
Anyways my last ramp test gave a valid FTP result. Not all of the ramp tests I’ve taken have given valid results. And I can do focused vo2max block and manipulate the results to get a “valid” result. Let’s estimate max aerobic power, and then use that estimate to estimate FTP. Not exactly a test I can trust for FTP estimation.
Going back to your proposal my last ramp test gave a valid result. This is the HR for 1-min at the resultant FTP:
- average: 147bpm
- range: 143-149bpm
That’s my sweet spot HR. I’ve got good multiyear data on my HR at longer FTP intervals and posted the same. There is a pretty big gap between the “1-min ramp test HR at ramp test FTP power” and what I can actually do for an hour. I dunno what to say other than I like looking at data 
and appreciate you sharing and discussing 
And there ya go. The TrainerRoad product doesn’t work for you…you don’t like TR results. I’m saying the TrainerRoad product works for me & I’m able to use it’s results. There are a few other points I want to make…
I like to open my most recent TR ramp test in TR analytics…note the resultant FTP of that test…highlight either the 1 minute step that is closest to that FTP result or highlight the 1 minute w/in the test that has average power equal to the FTP result of the test…then use HR during that 1 minute period as a floor for an hour ride.
During the hour ride, try to maintain HR above that target. This is a good workout that is hard but not so hard that you can’t do it every week. Watching average power over the workout & power drift during the workout provide two great metrics to track true hour power & FTP TTE.
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Excellent use of data @Brennus. Bravo. HR can give clarity to certain training regimes for sure!
Quite the leap in logic! I’ve looked at my ramp results and what you outlined is sweet spot HR on my ramp tests. It’s not a good floor for doing an hour effort, for me.
I’m a happy paying TrainerRoad customer and plan to renew. Lots of features, I don’t use all of them. Very happy with TrainerRoad the product, podcast, and company.
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I love hacks like this, just can’t seem to get it to work for me. Making sure I understand what you wrote, here is another ramp test with same result:
- Ramp test estimated 233 FTP
- found that interval
- HR was 146bpm, which is a full 14bpm below my observed HR on hour efforts
Did I misread your procedure?
Or is this another case of HR and Time-To-Exhaustion being more individualized?
I spent a lot of time looking at the data you provided in this thread. Thanks for being so forthcoming! Not sure I have anything insightful to say…the first thought is that you’ve probably trained TTE in the threshold range better than I have! 
So when you get in that range in the ramp test you’ve got more ‘heart rate reserve’…well, you certainly have more heart rate reserve.
Read this paper yesterday evening…I found this bit funny:
“The subjects proceeded to train for 5 months by pedaling a cycle ergometer 1 hr/day 4 days a week at a load requiring 75% of their maximal aerobic power. Initially the subjects could not tolerate this load for the full hour and it was reduced to about 65%…”
Huh? How about that? Couldn’t hole 75% of MAP for an hour?
I would say this is a new discovery but this was circa 1972. 
Not that this is a profound discovery in any way…75% of MAP is a metric used to construct training plans, not a true representation of hour power…just thought it was funny.
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Maximal aerobic power as in VO2max, or maximal aerobic power as in power during the last minute of an incremental exercise test?
They don’t explicitly say in the paper. So that’s probably the same protocol that had been around for (at that point) 50 years…start pedaling and up the watts by 50 every two or three minutes. MAP is watts for the last 2 or 3 minutes prior to failure. Colloquial wisdom at that time was probably that MAP was ~133% of power at 2nd lactate threshold. (but see my post on the anatomy of a 15 minute VO2max interval…most often 133% but not always!) I guess that gets you to 75% of MAP for the 1 hour interval.
Just thought it was funny that all the way back then some dude who cranked out a 400W MAP on the stationary bike tried to do an hour at 300W, crashed and burned, and had to back off to 260W. Nothing new under the sun.
But, hey, I’m just gonna stipulate that I wasn’t reading a lot of exercise phys papers in the first part that decade. So whatever the social norm definition for MAP at that time probably applies.
The most interesting thing in the paper was the fact that already recreationally active athletes can REALLY BOOST muscle glycogen stores with diligent training. Like, more than double it. Yikes. That’s a lot.
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That’s a really motivating point 
So the quotes came from a scientific paper? I’m pretty sure they were referring to % of VO2max, then. Even today, that seems the most common way of expressing exercise intensity.
ETA: Digging back into the literature a bit, it doesn’t appear that people used the end-power of an incremental exercise test as a reference point until around the early 1990s, e.g.:
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Soooooo I did a ramp test a little over a week ago, FTP 193.
Today I did 1 hour at 208.
Does this mean I achieved the 1-hour power?!
FWIW, I think I just suck at ramp tests, but I’m unwilling to do a 20min test because yuck. So I had already put my FTP at 200 immediately after the ramp test.
I should probably bump my training FTP up to 208, huh?
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