Oof.

Edit: Yes, it's poorly explained. The "tests" are clearly designed to be fed into WKO4 so it can generate a good mFTP estimate.

There are all sorts of issues with the article. But I call BS on this line, "but there is unanimous consent, at least among the people I coach, that they’re physically and mentally easier. "

Really? The shortest/easiest test of the 4 presented is this one:



That it's physically easier is a lie. It's more TSS. More IF. More peak power. More everything. That's physically harder than the 20-minute test in any metric I can think of.

And mentally easier is harder to quantify, but that sounds absolutely brutal to me. 10-15 minutes above FTP to exhaustion after doing 25 minutes at-or-near FTP? Wow, just wow.


My favorite is Progression 3:



And his athletes prefer that to a 20-minute test? Really?

I THOUGHT FTP WAS DEAD. I WENT TO THE FUNERAL AND EVERYTHING.

But in all seriousness, long tte tests sound miserable.

Ahh makes sense that they have to fed into WKO now, thanks! Though that makes it pretty much useless to me.

I was thinking too when I read the tests that they all seem much more miserable than the 20-minute test!

I don't understand that either. People seem to be constructing ever more elaborate tests to feed to WKO. I think most of the value of the mFTP model is that you *don't* have to to elaborate test protocols to get reasonable FTP estimates.

There is always a different definition of FTP, now FTP is MLSS. I don't think there is any research that show that the new FTP test protocol results in ones MLSS. I feel the fact that mFTP has to be feed long efforts to be anywhere accurate is the driver for the new protocol.

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BoulderCyclingCoach.com

I feel the measuring stick should cater to what you want to train.

A Cat 5/4 road racer has ZERO reason to ever do anything different than a 2x 8min or a single 20min. Why? Their road races are about 90min max and their crits or cyclocross races are 30-40min.

A typical roadie time trial around me is 10mi, or just a few minutes past a 20min ftp test.

Also, the bell curve of the percentage of rider types is probably heavily rated in the "club rider" and Cat 5/4 levels anyway. How is an hour ftp test going to help a club rider or Cat 5/4 racer?

But, for an ironman rider.........sure if you plan on riding at a higher percent of your ftp during the race, by all means do an hour test.

Huh? I can't speak for the rest of the country but go from Cat 5 to Cat 4 in NorCal and all of a sudden you're in a world of 2h30m-3h road races in the Central Valley, though that is as long as they get. For example, Snelling is 3 hours, as is Turlock Lake. Your crit lengths are right, though. Sometimes we're even lucky enough to race 45 minutes instead of 40!

Doing everything we can to help, Karl.

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Armando Mastracci, Founder of Xert, an advanced data analytics and training platform. Blog, Podcasts

FTP is, was, and always will be a functional (i.e., power-based) measurement of the maximal metabolic steady state intensity. As such, you should think of it as an "umbrella" over various physiological markers of the same intensity, e.g., MLSS, IAT, the NIRS breakpoint, VT2, the iEMG threshold, etc.

(If this is news to anyone, then they simply haven't been paying close enough attention...for example, here is what I wrote when I introduced the concept back in 2001:

"...while LT is often defined by sports scientists as the initial non-linear increase in
lactate with increasing exercise intensity (Fig. 2), this intensity tends to be significantly below
that which coaches and athletes tend to associate, on the basis of practical experience, with the
concept of a “threshold” exercise intensity. The latter corresponds more closely to what the
sports science community has termed OBLA (onset of blood lactate accumulation, defined as a
blood lactate concentration of 4 mmol/L), but is really conceptually closest to MLSS (maximal
lactate steady state) or IAT (individual anaerobic threshold), both of which represent the highest
exercise intensity that can be maintained without a continual increase in blood lactate.

...probably the easiest and most
direct way of estimating a rider’s functional threshold power is therefore to simply measure their
average power during a ~40 km (50-70 min) TT.")


The data during the first ~25 min actually have the greatest impact on mFTP.

2018: The Year of the FTP Apocalypse.

Would like to see a URL to that quote, since the earliest reference to "functional threshold power" I have seen was supporting the cyclingpeaks software in 2003: https://web.archive.org/...om:80/threshold.html

Through 2001 and 2002 you still used concepts like CP in forum discussions.

Mark
Mark

I bet it's in here. http://lists.topica.com/...d?sort=d&start=0

https://melorri.files.wordpress.com/...2/traininglevels.pdf (originally posted October 15, 2001)

You will have to forgive me, it's only been 15-20 y and I have only written thousands of pages of articles, grants, etc., since then. <rollseyes>

The quote is from the chapter I wrote for one of USA Cycling's manuals (mirrored various places on the web, e.g.,:

http://www.ipmultisport.com/...ggan_Power_Meter.pdf)

, which according to Word I started writing on March 26, 2003.

I introduced the original training levels in this post to the wattage list on October 15, 2001:

http://lists.topica.com/...sort=d&start=100

Somewhere in between there is when the adjective "functional" was introduced, but you would have to dig through the wattage list archives to determine precisely when that happened.

Of course, regardless of the exact date the concept remains rooted in the studies of cycling performance we did at UT-Austin in the early-to-mid 1980s, as well the rest of the scientific literature...

Note that that .pdf is an amalgamation of various things I have posted, put together by Charles Howe. I don't know exactly when he did it, but the date refers to the original wattage list post, which obviously only contains some of the material.

Just Google Vanity FTP

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Hamish Ferguson: Cycling Coach

(ahem) ... (ahem ahem)

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Armando Mastracci, Founder of Xert, an advanced data analytics and training platform. Blog, Podcasts

You clearly don't compete or coach people.

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Hamish Ferguson: Cycling Coach

That's better.

Why? Are you going use that to confuse people, by repeating your lie that the definition/concept of FTP has somehow changed over time?

(Note to others: if you think the above is too harsh, just research Mark's previous comments. Even Alex Simmons, who is normally quite diplomatic, has felt the need to call Mark out on Twitter for his crusade to undermine my ideas.)

This timeline explains why: http://www.peakscoachinggroup.com/history

Mark

??

Nothing sinister here - just accuracy.

I just pulled up the USAC calendar, and you're right. It seems like a regional anomaly. Here near NC, it appears a lot of them are around 80-120min max. But when I looked up California, yeah, it was a mix of 4/5's doing anywhere from 35mi up to 65 or so.

I would expect some areas of the country to be much stronger.

I've ridden with some 5's and 4's locally before. I can't say around here you wouldn't explode a 5/4 field with just a couple 15min climbs on a 50 mile route. Almost like a Paris Mountain type climb. Pretty sure you would fragment the field like a grenade. But I'd guess in California, that's probably par for the course and I'm just slower/weaker than the average California or Colorado cat 5/4 rider.

My idea though wasn't mine, it's in the Carmichael training book I'm reading. It pretty much says exactly what I said. Maybe bump it to 2 hours from 90min.

But even then, you're special if you're going to do a solo break off the front for an hour in a Cat 5/4 race. Either you are seriously sandbagging and will progress fast OR are special in the head and will blow up in 10 minutes.