Coggan is famously on the record dispelling the hour thing though
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Thereâs the thing called FTP thatâs very clear. FTP is a proxy for mlss, as I read stated by Coggan himself. Itâs a power and duration pair. Itâs a real thing.
What everyone seems confused about is how to estimate the thing. The seven deadly sins was one list of ways. There are dozens of ways to estimate the thingâŚ.FTP. Most ways are simple approximations based on population data. They work for as many people as they donât work.
Thereâs also confusion due to the math of FTP. 1 hour at FTP = 100 points. Well, hardly anyoneâs TTE at FTP will be exactly 1 hour. Thatâs a disconnect.
Ftp, from training and racing with a power meter, is âin principleâ a benchmarking of aerobic fitness to base training zones off of. 95% of your 20min max power is what is used to form the zones.
Pacing is hard so people prefer vo2max step tests and, for example with TR, take 75% of the highest minute step.
Ftp isnât some physiological marker, but itâs a âfield testableâ benchmark to base training zones off of. This is what coggan said in the most recent podcast I heard him on, and he laughed about weirdness on the internet about it too! Lol
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âFTPâ is a performance limited by your body. By definition it is a physiological marker. Itâs just not a meaningful one since you have no idea how that performance is comprised since power only testing is lacking.
Holding this power for this many minutes isnât traditionally what an exercise scientist would refer to as a physiological marker⌠I think you might be misunderstanding. Physiological markets are typically vo2max, blood lactate accumulation, etc
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I understand that. However, I disagree.
The performance is still the same whether you observe whatâs happening inside the body or not.
Your MMP curve is a numerical description of physiology. Itâs a direct measurement.
Blindly applying arbitrary reductions to maximal performances to estimate something is bad science. Where I am relative to mlss at my 95% of 20m MMP will be different and has a significant impact when you try to perform sweetspot style training with a narrow band of âoptimalâ intensity.
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Well n=1 I would find it easy, as I absolutely sucked at ramp tests/ VO2 Max.
So thatâs sort of the crux of it all. FTP isnât really 1hr power. That is just a convenient short hand. Itâs a physiological quasi-steady state threshold where riding below is much easier and riding above quickly gets harder. Like an inflection point in your power/RPE curve.
Thereâs also two parts to someoneâs âFTPâ. Their power at FTP and their Time to Exhaustion (TTE). Power is the power while riding that threshold like and TTE is the amount of time they can hold that power. TTE @ FTP can range from ~35m to like 75m.
Most beginners probably are more likely to have a low TTE. So that would be one reason why lots of plans start with something like 3x10 @ SS. The other is that there is a chance that people have their FTP over estimated so if you started a beginner with 3x30 SS with an overestimated FTP then they will crash and burn. The final reason is that beginners havenât necessarily built the mental grit to grind through sustained efforts like that. So the progression is training the mental side as much as the physical side.
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Well, there we go then.
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Ftp is crucial to OPs question. If ftp is going to be your estimated 60min power, then 97% of ftp for 1 hour is a very hard - bear maximal effort. If ftp is 40mins, then 97% of ftp is nearly impossible for an hour. Etc.
In other words, the longer your âftpâ estimates sustained power, the more easier it is to complete âsweet spotâ internals.
The real question for TR users is what is TRâs definition for the estimated duration of ftp?
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TR famously doesnât have one, and on past podcasts they have even said they prefer raising power to extending duration, which is frankly a gross misunderstanding of how adaptations to threshold work. TRs podcast has created this expectation that FTP changes frequently and if itâs not going up, something is wrong, and thatâs just not how it works once youâre somewhat well trained. Your FTP is not 287W in April and then 289W in May⌠yay gainz!
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I donât do TR plans but I start my SS progressions from 2x30min or similar which feels pretty easy, I usually try to figure out where I end up and plan the progression backwards. I use the Kolie Moore test to set my FTP.
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In my humble opinion you should start by focusing on what you are training and why. When I got started, articles like that left me a little puzzled as they paint training in broad strokes. What Iâm going to post is just a little of what I wish someone had explained to me when I got started 7+ years ago.
The definition of FTP or Critical Power (CP) comes from a long line of research, here is a paper from 1923 that basically kicked things off:
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/epdf/10.1098/rspb.1924.0037
by defining the steady-state of exercise, and the difference between stable and unstable physiology. This border between stable and unstable, you can easily test for yourself by GOING TO EXTREMES:
- sprinting so hard you blow up in 20-40 seconds
- riding so easy you can go for 5 hours
If you pay attention during and after the sprint, youâll notice that after blowing up your breathing keeps getting faster and deeper, and your heart is racing. After the sprint your body had to âcatch upâ on the oxygen demand from sprinting (vs the 5-min all-out example below). And then your body recovers and your breathing and heart rate slow down.
That is clearly unstable when you compare that to riding easy for 5 hours.
What if you try âsprintingâ longer? Take it out to 1 minute, to 2 minutes, to 3 minutes, and eventually you get to 5 minutes before blowing up. I donât mean to imply you start training and immediately can do these all-out efforts correctly.
Eventually you are able to do 5-minutes all-out. Lets look what happens during those 5-minutes and immediately after. Somewhere around 2 or 3 minutes, you start breathing very heavy, or ragged, at this point you are breathing like a locomotive and your legs are screaming. At the end of 5 minutes you literally collapse on the handlebars, and it takes some time before your breathing and heart rate recover.
That is also unstable physiology.
Now lets approach it from the other side, the stable side. How hard can you push for 2 hours? For 1 hour? For 50 minutes? Keep taking the âtime trialâ down in time, but going hard enough that you are barely able to finish. Your power meter shows you can push harder for 1 hour than 2 hours. Same with 1 hour vs 50 minutes vs 40 minutes vs 30 minutes.
These are all likely in the stable physiology, by the time you get to 20-50 minutes (depends on the person) you are likely surfing around the border of stable and unstable physiology.
If you can get in touch with your breathing and heart rate and leg sensations (all 3, not just 1), you can feel out this border between stable and unstable.
Or in Cogganâs example, if you are highly trained at doing competitive-to-yourself 40km time trials, you are about at the stable/unstable border and can call it Functional Threshold Power (FTP).
However there is an easier way, the critical power (CP) method, and thats doing 3 all-out efforts around 3-20 minutes. So within a week or two, go all-out for 3-minutes. Another day go all-out on 8 minutes. And another day go all-out for 12-20 minutes. If you really went all-out on those 3 efforts, within a week or so of each other, you can plug the power numbers into a CP calculator and come up with a pretty good estimate of the border between stable and unstable physiology.
Cogganâs original definition was that coaches have a concept of threshold exercise intensity that more closely aligns with the highest intensity that can be maintained without continual increases in blood lactate. In other words, the highest power where lactate is stable. In other words, just below the lowest power where blood lactate is unstable. See how CP and FTP are related? CP uses math with 3 efforts to find the stable/unstable border, while FTP uses field tests to estimate the location of that stable/unstable border.
Or you can do a rough approximation using the ramp test, or 8-min test, or 20-min test. But those are rough approximations.
There are more layers to add onto this foundation. But fundamentally, all higher intensity training (including sweet spot) is built around this concept of a border between stable/unstable physiology.
Hope that helps.
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yeah, 1923 was a yawner. Hope that helps someone genuinely curious but confused.
Any reason for these to be within a week or two of each other? Within a month or so would work too, right? as long as your CP/FTP isnât changing very much? or is this more related to Wâ contribution which can change much faster than CP/FTP?
I give you the TLDR, SST is just Threshold training for ppl that want to be doing such a thing for extended periods and longer time in zone for workout.
Itâs great!. I use it in conjunction with harder above threshold 105%-108% 10-20m intervals. I seldom ride at threshold.
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Thereâs been some great info posted on FTP here & in other threads.
As you can see, youâve opened up quite a wormhole. Pretty sure many new riders fall into this trap, myself included. I was totally confused, pretty sure I started a thread very similar to this, and was very grateful for the help I got. Hope this helps you a bit.
If you want to spend 76 hrs reading online & in books, you can do that.
If you want to not do that, but want to make sure you are training optimally:
1 â Forget about trying to find âtheâ definition of FTP, or it being any type of â1 HR max powerâ, etc. All it is for our purposes is a calibration for the software of the rough curve of your power & ideal interval efforts across the different workout types [SS, VO2, etc.] You can quite accurately think of it as your âTR FTPâ [rather than true FTP / FTP]. Itâs highly likely you will quickly find that calibration to be way off at the beginning, when you are starting each new workout type. It takes a couple workouts in each type, and your survey feedback, for the system to get you dialed in. It happens very fast, donât worry. 1 â 2 workouts in each class.
âTrueâ FTP, and testing it, would be extremely complicated, and frankly, not really relevant / needed for progressing your training development IRL & in TR. Your daily fluctuations in max ability due to sleep, nutrition, life stress, etc, will be huge, easily 2 â 15% or even more in extreme cases of sleep deprivation, poor nutrition, etc. Not worth obsessing over your âtrueâ FTP value.
2 â As other users have said, if youâre new to it, SS for 30 â 45 mins ainât super easy. Particularly because youâd never actually hit an hour at your TR FTP!!! That is a total misunderstanding!! : ) It will get easier, with adaptations, but you have to force those adaptations through structured and gradual increases in stress applied, and resulting recovery. You canât âblast yourself upâ levels in physiological SS ability by cranking up the difficulty and blowing yourself out. And as noted by a couple: Workouts should not all be ranked very hard or all-out. You have to mentally get used to the idea that âeasyâ workouts, way below your redline, are healthy and necessary to progress.
Youâre not doing easy â moderate endurance or SS workouts because youâre going to win races or go faster from the âexperience of noodling aroundâ. Youâre doing it because it forces adaptations; increased mitochondria, increased muscular capillaries, increased heart stroke volume, whatever / donât recall in detail. The point is training in the different zones force different adaptations. You canât âhyper-force yourself to catch up / advance more quicklyâ in the endurance or SS adaptations by blowing yourself out in Anaerobic. You train across all zones so that when you do get up into the VO2 stuff, or an IRL event / race, youâve got a more powerful foundation, and can push much harder, for longer.
3 â Try to always finish the workouts. Pull down the difficulty % if you have to. A finished workout with the difficulty % pulled down gives you a much better workout, and the system way more data to move you forward, than dropping out early.
4 â Plan builder really is the best way, especially if youâre new, as it properly builds in cyclical rounds of base, build, specialty, and back to base, build, etc. You can only build the top of the tower so high on the foundation you have. At a certain point, to build higher, you need to go back down and expand the foundation out sideways. You will reach a limit of how far you can grow your VO2 & anaerobic capacity, and then it greatly helps to go back and continue to grow your aerobic foundation [possibly / likely at your newly increased FTP levelâŚ.].
If you canât do plan builder, only use full training plan blocks, not individual workouts. I fairly recently heard that at least for now, adaptive training doesnât work with individually added workouts.
5 â Get Frielâs book. It helped me learn a ton. You will see online some people poo-pooing on the book, that some of the concepts are too simple / too generalized / outdated / etc. One userâs comment nailed it: âYou need to read Frielâs book, in order to not need Frielâs book.â I found exactly that. If you grew up in pro-am / pro training, you probably know it all already, and I have a feeling itâs those people who donât think itâs useful. But if youâre new to all this stuff, reading the book is a quantum leap forward in your understanding and building a foundation. Then you can move on and read more complex stuff if you want. I havenât wanted or needed to, yet.
Bottom line: Spend more time on the bike having fun & getting healthier and stronger, less time on the internet & in books chasing your tail! : )
I sincerely hope you have fun and enjoy the journey as much as I have so far.
Prior to TR I was absolutely blowing myself out in Zwift freerides & races and outdoor rides over and over again, and my power stayed stuck for approx 2 years. Since joining TR Iâm seeing real progress, itâs super fun, and the easy workouts have allowed me to experience the hard workouts to their fullest, and feel the absolutely most insanely physically & mentally challenging stuff Iâve ever done on the bike, pushing my limits way beyond what I ever thought Iâd be capable of. Itâs been an amazing, wild ride! 
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Truth bombs.
If your FTP is set correctly (however you want to measure it) than doing a 20 minute SST effort should not be unsustainably hard. TR tends to do some hand holding at first giving you short blocks at this intensity in order to get you used to it - but I think most coaches start people at 12 minutes and build up from there.
If you canât do 12 minutes at sweet spot (even for a beginner) than your FTP is not set correctly. I can see really struggling with an FTP block at 12 minutes at âthresholdâ because itâs a mental struggle - but SST for 12 minutes should not be impossible - even for a beginner.
Now, holding it for an hour - probably beyond a beginnerâs capabilities even at the correct number - just because it can be a mental game at that length. TR tends to make their lower PL workouts have different changes/short blocks to keep people interested - when in essence - starting with 15-20 minute blocks and progressing form there with short rest breaks is more effective (in my opinion). But if you try doing this on an incorrectly set FTP - you will crash and burn.
Which is why you see people constantly saying to do the Kolie Moore style long form test - gets people used to pacing - and is an honest. IF you can average 250 watts for 40 minutes for the test (even if you think your FTP is 270) than your FTP for training purposes is 250. So off the bat you know your TTE is 40 minutes at 250. So doing 225 for 20 minute blocks should be very doable.
Now lets say you do a ramp test and it says 270. Now trying to do SST at 240 is now only 10 watts below your FTP - so it will be much harder than SST should be.
Yes I have drank the Empirical Cycling style of coaching/training kool-aid but I donât care. It makes the most sense - has no gimmicks, and there are no short cuts to figure out your actual FTP. Then you can actually train at appropriate levels. and when you have been training long enough you can just train based off RPE for SST and FTP - but thatâs impossible for a beginner who isnât used to the feeling at these zones.
Rant Over.
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