I’m thinking about signing up for TrainerRoad and have therefore been browsing the forum for a while. And I honestly have to say that half the people here need to get over their obsession with FTP as a number. It’s the cyclists version of “How much do you bench bro”.
Why are you here? Why are you training? To get better/stronger. And unless you are doing nothing but TT it’s fairly useless to obsess about FTP as much as people do here. FTP is a great tool to get started. You get a FTP test and you have a starting point for your structured training (intensity / duration). But afterwards it becomes fairly useless. You improve on power and the duration you can hold it incrementally, but everybody that has ever been in a single race knows that just focusing on your FTP doesn’t win you anything. It can be ONE(!) tool to measure progression, but you can do the same by looking at your improvements in your 1min / 4min / 10min etc power or the results at your last Grand Fondo / Race.
At the end of the day what matters is if your training is challenging and is helping you to get stronger. I think it is/was a big mistake by TR to put the number itself front and center of everything, but I guess for marketing reasons they felt they needed to. But people need to stop this craze about a single number as if it really represented their “worth” as a cyclist. That’s just gym-bro mentality and it’s beyond silly.
FTP and its impacts on any software based cycling program such as TR, Zwift etc are obviously huge so I am not surprised that so much emphasis is placed upon it as a number.
Though I do agree, outside of a trainer based platform, it has less impact and relevance.
Ironically, given your example, I only race TT’s but even then I dont only consider power when doing them. The primary metrics on my HU are HR, avg speed and to a less priority, Avg power over last 3 min purely so I dont over do certain short climbs.
No one wins races because they had the biggest power figure, they win because they were faster and avg speed tells you your finish time.
According to the TR podcast you are wrong on the assumption that the training is only based on FTP as a number. They’ve stated several times that the AI does not use FTP as a number and instead just understands power at certain durations. Which in my opinion is fantastic.
Displaying it as centrally as they do does them a big disservice in my opinion. And seems to be mainly done so people can still do the typical dick measuring I simply have a hard time understanding why people define their worth as a cyclist through one number instead of simply trying to improve your overall strength on the bike.
No it isn’t. Coggan himself has said many many times that it’s more like 40-70min power, depending on one’s time to exhaustion (which is trainable via threshold workouts)
There was just a MASSIVE change to the platform. I personally feel it was an amazingly good change. I came back to try it out for a few months after a few years away from TR, and I am so happy that I just signed up for a full year.
Having said that, this new upgrade is a massive paradigm shift. I’m sick of hearing people complain about their FTP too, but I absolutely understand why it’s happening. Some of the complaints are coming from people who’ve never posted before, but some are coming from people who’ve been around for a long time, and they’re trying to wrap their heads around the change. Some are also from people who are tying to manipulate the system and are stuck in an endless loop of fighting it.
This is a fantastic first post, and I hope you stick around. As a LONG time forum user, I promise it’s not always like this here. It will settle in and we’ll get back to taking about training, riding, racing, and all things cycling soon enough.
The challenge is, it is related to the work that you’re doing.
For examples for one group of people the issues is - IT’S TOO **** HIGH
There’s a segment of people that are doing low tempo when it should be Endurance, Sweet Spot when it Should be Tempo, and Over/Overs when it’s supposed to be an over/under…. That can be a problem.
So yes, obsession with the number doesn’t matter. But the issue is there has been a material impact to training zones.
I think the thing people miss is that FTP both is and isn’t important. On one hand, you need the anchor to be able to progress in building time in zone and time to exhaustion for sweet spot and threshold work. I’ve literally had people tell me that my FTP is too low because I can do like 2x50 sweet spot. And it’s probably because they work off an inflated FTP so anything of any meaningful duration for sweet spot is too difficult.
On the other hand, setting endurance pace (which should be done to RPE), and doing work over FTP like vo2 and anaerobic shouldn’t be anchored to a percentage of FTP and should be tested individually for athletes.
So, FTP both matters and doesn’t matter. I don’t think enough people get the nuance and put too much weight on the number or are overly dismissive of it
I understand your point, however, for years on the podcast, we’ve been programmed to believe that ftp is a direct indicator of your fitness. How many times has someone said ‘oh, that guy’s really fast because he’s at 5W/kg’? TR asserts that it’s going to make you faster and a sign of that is your increased ftp. Now, we’re told that ftp isn’t really that important even though it appears in BIG numbers on your career page. Even if ftp is just a ‘gamer number’, it still holds power. Many of us are type A personalities who are striving to get better. How do you know if you’re getting faster or succeeding without a measuring stick for comparison? I’m disappointed that TR is walking back an idea that we all have bought into for years.
You are right that FTP has been force fed as a key metric for a long time. but it needs to go back to basics imo.
Time & Distance, both precisely measurable and can be done these days due to online platforms with very few variables to throw off results. Fix the time or a distance & go. That is your benchmark and it tells you if you are getting stronger.
I think I’m just gonna start posting this whenever this discussion comes up, until it’s more common knowledge what “FTP” was invented to be:
FTP was just a method to estimate “threshold” power, as the thought was to base power zones (when training by power was first invented) off threshold power.
Threshold did not have a precise definition either, but the “threshold” people did by RPE, LT2, MLSS, OBLA, etc were all similar enough that it probably didn’t matter given you don’t need precise values for training purposes (a 5% change is just noise).
40k TT time trial and 2x20 were the methods he originally suggested might be useful to estimate was threshold power roughly was.
You just look at your power curve and see how it moved over time. If your 1min / 3min / 10min / 20min power improved, fantastic. You CAN use FTP as one measuring stick, but the obsession is what’s so silly about it. It does not determine your worth as a cyclist.
If you have a higher FTP than me, but I drop you on the first climb and ride away what good is it? If you want to be a competent cyclist (excluding TT) you have to have more tools in your quiver than just a decent power you can sustain for a longer period of time. And even for setting your training zones it’s only really needed at the beginning of your structured training. After that you can always increase power and duration of your intervals to progress.
I absolutely get your point, and no one likes to feel like the goal has been moved. But, I actually like that this is forcing me to go back to the old days and focus on “what is it you really want to achieve?” rather than “what do you want your FTP to be?”. If your personal answer is still “a higher ftp”, then you just define what you feel FTP is (let’s assume you’re a believer that FTP = hour power for the sake of conversation) and then work toward improving that. I know not everyone is going to feel this way, but I actually like being reminded that I need to think about my goals and how I plan to improve them.
Absolutely not disagreeing with the history behind FTP or its changes and applications over the years, but nobody can be surprised when its widely known definition became an hour, with almost every platform describing it as “for approximately one hour”:
I simply have a hard time understanding why people define their worth as a cyclist through one number instead of simply trying to improve your overall strength on the bike.
