Hello,
I did a ramp test last week. I was hungover and had undergone the stress of travelling and moving all my stuff, so my FTP went lower, something like 285 (down from 305 at the start of SSB 1).
I went today for a quick spin outside, and had 5 minutes at 400 watts, my best ever 5 minute power.
I know VO2Max and FTP does not correlso exactly the same for everyone, but… Isn’t the limit of what people can sustain for 5 minutes about 120% of FTP? Surely 140% means my FTP test the other day does not reflect my current shape, right?
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Redo your ramp test while sober 
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No.
Dr. Coggan explains the reason for iLevels above FTP in this article:
One snippet:
” However, there is obviously a very large (approximately fourfold) difference in the extent to which they can elevate their power above FTP at very short durations. As a result, the one athlete can maintain a power of, for example, 150 percent of FTP for about 4 minutes, while the other athlete can do so for only about one minute.”
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It’s a range, and TR is using the lower end of the range (120%) in order to make workouts doable for most people. Adjust accordingly.
Also, bike before booze. Adjust accordingly. 
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A solid hangover blows RPE through the roof. It seems to have the most impact on my ability to put up with suffering, exactly what the ramp test requires. Retest or use your old FTP.
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Alcohol competes for oxygen with your blood cells…so, yeah, doing any kind of exercise with a hangover is going to be rough.
I plan my drinking around my training.
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Don’t make sh*t like that up. Somebody here is bound to believe you.
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Update… I set the FTP at 310 and completed Baird +5 with relative ease (I think I did the last couple of intervals at 103% intensity).
One of the toughest bits was to use the ERG mode effectively with 1 minute VO2Max intervals. My smart trainer is a little slow to reach the target resistance but I figured that if I lowered the cadence 10 seconds before the interval kicked in, then at 1 or 2 seconds to start I shifted one or cogs two down, and picked up the cadence. Going by feel, I hit the target power much quicker than if I left the trainer on its own to adjust the intensity.
I also saw that my cadence went to 105, I tried to bring it down to something more realistic for outdoor efforts such as 95. Kind of funny how I must try to bring the cadence up for Sweet Spot, but VO2Max on the trainer brings me to 105 cadence without much effort…
If you want to confirm FTP setting then it’s best to do a threshold workout IMHO. What you can do on short 1-min over-threshold intervals is not a good way to confirm FTP.
For a long time I kept playing cadence/power games with Erg, and recently decided to give up on Erg and use resistance. Much happier with resistance mode, it’s more like riding outside and no more ‘inside trainer games’ that don’t translate to riding outside.
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Maybe I have to give resistance mode a try and leave ERG for steady state workouts only… Thanks for the advice!
My trainer has a bit of a delay as well, but I do something similar and shift gears around to hit the resistance as well as I can. It seems to ramp well enough for even 20 second intervals, but I end up ~20-30w low depending on how well I’m able to get on top of it. I either turn up the power, or don’t worry about it outside of maintaining the prescribed intensity throughout the rest of the interval. The physiological difference between 500 and 530w (which is for virtually everyone anaerobic) seems like it would be so small as to not matter in terms of training adaptation. On longer intervals of 1+ minutes, the delay has been insignificant to the average power by the end of the interval for me.
not sure how this thread got beyond this reply! lol it did make me laugh though!
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Thanks for this link, @bbarrera.
For anyone who is interested, I extracted the rough power as % of FTP values from Figure 2 with different software that estimate numerical values in image-based charts.
Interestingly, power as % of FTP at LT ranged from ~70% to ~100% at 60 minutes and ~115% to ~180% at 3 minutes. The shortest duration at 100% of FTP appears near the 20 minute mark and the longest at the 80 minute mark.
It’s impossible to say what the range of FTP to MAP is in this data set since you can’t tease out the individual curves, but it is probably much wider than the often cited 0.72-0.77.
I’m a big fan of progression levels in TR, but am struggling to understand the focus on AI FTP detection (which is really just AI Ramp Test result prediction) given the limited utility of FTP in the first place.
Aren’t progression levels and adaptive training better-served with zone- or system-specific power targets?
As an “over-tester” with a stronger top end than endurance base, I have to reduce my AI-suggested FTP from 325 to 280-285 so that my HR and RPE are appropriate for sweet spot and threshold sessions. I could easily complete VO2 and anaerobic sessions at an FTP of 340-360.
There’s an opportunity to put these “your FTP is set too high/too low” discussions to bed.
Progression levels are terrific, but it seems like we really need zone- or system-specific power targets like iLevels to maximize their potential impact.
I would be happy to occasionally calibrate with something like the H.A. & A.C. Power Profile Test if it means getting better data to train with. I suspect many others would too.
Jonathan commented on a recent podcast that he was surprised by how many people don’t test and manually adjust their FTPs. For some of us, faith in and utility of the end result is a big reason why.
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