5:00 intervals at 112-118% of FTP with long (3:00 - 5:00) recovery. 3-6 repeats in a session, 1 or 2 sessions a week, 4-8 week blocks of sessions, 2-3 blocks per year.

Specificity: In order to improve FTP, you would want to do long intervals either at or near FTP.

How to improve your FTP: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GXeraWADvw

I think a combination of intervals just below FTP in the 10-20 minute range (4x10's, 3x12, or 2x20 with 2-5 minutes between depending on length of interval) at 90-93% FTP are great at building the FTP without a huge TSS hit, so you can do them a decent amount and the second part of the puzzle is periodically pushing above FTP for short bursts during the intervals, maybe drop the effort down to 85-87% of FTP, and then every 3 minutes do a 30 second spike to 115-120% and right back down to the 87%.

I've done this before when focusing on time trials, and had great results. I think two days of the "sweet spot" intervals, and one day of the "over-unders" would be a great place to start, if you can't handle that intensity i'd do one of each a week.

Once you see that improvement plateauing after a few blocks (I was always a 3 week on/1week recovery kind of guy) then throw in a VO2 block that had one or two workouts a week aimed at improving the overall Vo2 max.

Think of FTP as a % of your VO2 that you can ride at for an hour, so eventually through FTP improvement you max that out, and the only way to improve it would be to raise the VO2 ceiling.

---

USAT Level 1 Coach
Team Next Level
http://goteamnltri.com/

VO2 is specific to FTP, and for a 60 year old, more useful.

Oh shit, are we really linking to GCN now?

How to take FTP for a masters athlete to the next level by Hunter Allen and not from GCN: https://www.hunterallenpowerblog.com/2010/12/next-level.html

No where in the article did Hunter Allen advocate doing VO2 max intervals. An excerpt from the article:

"This was the case with a masters athlete that I coached last year. He had focused on improving his sprint and vo2 max power, which did improve and now he was more competitive in his masters category, but still wasn’t winning races in a dominating fashion and occasionally still being pipped at the line by his archrival. The solution was to ‘go to the next level’. I had him focus on improving his FTP solely and not worrying about his sprint or Vo2 or any other specific area of fitness."

fitting those workouts into a triathlon training week sounds brutal. It would probably need adjusted.

---

IG - @ryanppax
http://www.geluminati.com
Use code ST5 for $5 off your order

A couple of the GCN show youtube workouts do this.

They basically do SS with some little bursts peppered into the workout. I modify the workout sometimes to make the SS work load more difficult, but the burst longer and at a lower power than "all out". Other times I lower the SS power to the lower end of SS and really rip the crap out of the "all-out" parts.

This, plus even shorter/harder High Intensity intervals. The best way to raise your FTP and illicit physiological adaptation changes in the body is through High Intensity intervals. Since you have a nice base you'll see some immediate gains very quickly. And since this is cycling; not running, your risk of injury is considerably low.

For sure you can improve FTP. As many have said they key is what I call sweet spot intervals say 3x12@85-92% of FTP then finish with say 5 x 1@ 120ish%. This sesion once a week is a darn good one. Another good one is 2 x 15@95-100% recovery is 6 minutes followed by 1 x 8@105% .