Mudge wrote:
If you like getting into the weeds, you'll want to listen to lots of Kolie's podcasts. As for the most recent one with Coggan, they spend a fair bit of time lamenting the fact that the industry has, as you say, adopted the one hour thing, as it wasn't his intention and frankly, it's wrong (his words, not mine).
Alright, I just finished listening to the Coggan interview. Good stuff. I was expecting a much stronger dispelling of the "FTP is 60 minute power" myth though based on what you've written in this tread.
I gathered that he would strongly disagree with someone declaring that FTP is, and only is, exactly the power one can maintain for exactly 60 minutes. But beyond that, he was just lamenting a bit that some people don't understand that FTP is intended to be a broad overarching concept rather than some exact number determined from a specific test.
There were many mentions relating FTP to 40k TT power, TTE at MLSS power, and how they were generally in the range of 40-70 minutes. He mentioned his power proverb "squiggly 1 hour power is to FTP as s is to sigma." So a pretty far cry from, "Sorry, but no. FTP is not the power you can hold for an hour, or even about what you can hold for an hour." in my opinion.
Towards the end when he was prompted to clear up any misconceptions with this work, he touched on the 60 minutes thing but concluded that it probably didn't actually matter much in terms of the actual application of the FTP concept, just that he didn't like that it showed that people don't really totally understand the concept.
What I thought was most interesting was that he really views FTP as a broad overarching concept. Almost to the point where I'm surprised he doesn't advocate for it to be a range rather than one number. Seems like he'd be happy with it being a 95% confidence interval or something like that. He's clearly on the conceptual end of FTP and seems to struggle with the fact that athletes, coaches, software creators want it to be a concrete thing that is calculated and used to calculate other things like workout prescriptions. Even when he talks about his involvement in WKO, he is careful to say that it is modeling an estimate of FTP based on the data it is given, not calculating it exactly. That's all fine, and I get it.
He describes FTP as representing a blurry line. He describes it as an umbrella covering critical power, MLSS, maximal metabolic steady state, ventilatory threshold, etc. He says FTP
is CP, FTP
is MLSS, while also acknowledging that when really pinned down, CP and MLSS power tend to be different numbers.
My ultimate takeaway is that FTP is a range of power values. This certainly makes creating workouts and race plans based on FTP a little more difficult though!