dgran wrote:
warwicke36 wrote:
So at what percent of your FTP (you don't know you have yet) are you supposed to do that effort? Seriously though? All out is pretty ambiguous for a test protocol.
The assumption is that someone may be doing their first FTP test, so it would be rather circular to tell them to do 5 minutes at something like 130% FTP. Saying "all out" and stuff like that is probably more useful at that point. All the same, I'll join the chorus of people who find that part of the protocol problematic. In general if a person has done a variety of hard riding efforts over a range of durations of 90 minutes or less a pretty convincing power curve emerges. I personally know from trying the official test protocol that the all out 5 minute effort disrupts considerably my 20 minute power ability. The result is a FTP test that shows me scoring considerably lower than other objective measures.
I agree 100% with the bolded part. Plus, when an athlete first begins using a power meter, hopefully, they're already experienced riding by RPE and possibly HR too. This should give them enough guidance to ride at a fairly consistent hard effort for 5 minutes to prepare for the main portion of the test. If they don't have that experience, they're not yet ready to test. They should go out and ride for a month with the power meter and learn to correlate RPE with approximate power ranges.
These conversations always make me chuckle, because of what the other poster observed regarding type 'A' personalities. Triathletes are mostly a bunch of extreme type 'A's who want exact definitions and precision for everything. Throwing things at them like the definition of FTP that includes the word "approximately" tends to make heads explode.
BTW, I don't test myself or athletes very frequently. Instead, like others, I use training and race data to estimate zones for training.
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Don Larkin
Reach For More
http://www.reachformore.fit/ USAT Lvl1 Coach, NSCA-CPT, NASM-CPT, BS Exercise Science