Adding lean mass is hard. 20 watts is 5-6 kg or 11-13 lbs, depending on your watt/kg. That's a fair bit of muscle and you can't "just" gain muscle. You will gain fat too, then have to restrict intake to remove the fat back to your desired body comp.

Its also hard to gain mass while doing endurance training. So, you'd likely need to cut way back on the cardio. Then restart heavy training to regain what you've lost. You will likely them lose some of that gained muscle.

How old are you? this gets progressively harder as you get much older than 30.

I think that's a losing game in the short term. What time frame would be looking to try and make this type of change. This is more of a annual plan type of thing. Eg, you could focus time in the weight room over the winter and stop much endurance training, and then switch back in the early spring.

Et si prendre du poids, nous fait ensuite perdre du temps sur la course à pieds, ce n'est pas top

Depends on a lot of factors, e.g. your body type now, fat%, how maxed out you are in terms of flatlining your FTP, how you train now, etc etc.
But initially agree with Tom above that this is not a feasible/good strategy. Try adding here your current weight, your FTP and maybe some FTP enhancing training sets you do. Finally, what your are asking for has ONE, easy answer: HTFU

English, please?

besides the facts that French people don't do efforts to write or speak English, and that they ignore you if you do your best efforts to speak a little French when you visit France, he didn't get the fact that you are asking about pure cycling and not triathlon

Most healthy people have the muscle mass they need for a surprisingly high FTP. It's likely changing up your training is the answer here. Important to remember that training at FTP doesn't really raise FTP, it primarily extends TTE. VO2 is your friend here, although important to do it with the right dose and give yourself appropriate recovery

You're not a cool guy, it's just that your excellent site is automatically translated for me, and I wrote in French instead of English. Avoid putting all French people in the same bag, even if it is true that we are bad at English ;-)

By what mechanism would gaining weight help raise your FTP? Lifting for hypertrophy and eating a lot will help gain lean mass, but that will overwhelmingly help your 10-30sec power. If you're a world tour level rider such training would likely lower your FTP.

Gaining muscle mass in a vacuum would almost assuredly lower your FTP, assuming a reasonable level of baseline training. Bigger muscles can produce more maximal force, but also require greater amounts of oxygen and produce greater amounts of lactate. FTP and endurance is not about maximal force, it's about oxygen utilization.

We know this intuitively just by looking at athletes in different events. Track cycling sprinters are huge, muscular, max force producing machines. Track endurance riders are tiny and slight, even though there are no climbs on the track.

How about some actual periodize bike training instead of just accumulating miles by being a bike courier?

I bet you can get those watts by actually training the bike. You can only get that far with volume, and even your current volume is spread out throughout the day so much that your “moving time” in an activity is like 20%.

I don’t think you are training the bike in any way, shape, or form. You are simply riding your bike.

i am 41, I did gain 5lb last year cutting down my running after that volume was slowing me down and leading to injuries. Although I did take a new job 2 months ago, I lost all that mass and ftp went down about 10w... so I quit and went back to the old one..



See above, too low of weight not a good thing. Come to think of it most my marathon PR's when I was 10lb heavier



actually in crit racing improving my 10-30s power would be a benefit. My sprinting is so weak.



still need to put food on the table. i just log those miles for tax reasons and big kahuna 13. I do a decent bike workout 1-2x a week. If you want to join me, tuesday fiesta island 815am ;)

What kind of workouts are you doing?

Don’t forget that W/kg is still pretty important for crits since power used for acceleration scales with rider+bike mass. (F = m x a -> P = F x v = m x a x v). In other words, ability to throw down an acceleration at a given speed is regulated by P/m, not P alone.

If you post your power curve, I suspect some of the pure cyclists here might have ideas for what workouts you can do to improve your competitiveness on flat crits/TTs.

Of course they vary 1'x15 @110-120% ftp or these group ride try to hold ftp for 20-30 min then see if I can hold on for longer

There are low cost to free training plans to raise FTP on the bike all over the internet. Any of them would be innately better at raising threshold and/or sprint power and more sustainable than trying to gain lean weight.

If you decide you want to do a hillier race in 6months will you have to lose that weight again to be competitive? Some sustainable structure is much better for bettering your performance. As others have mentioned; change up your training routine and workouts before you start to consider “off the bike”, out of the box solutions.

So you are doing 1 or 2 workouts per week. The rest of your riding is not really training, it's just you riding your bike. Even big volume rides are more focused that just riding around town; 5 hour endurance rides with not a lot of stopping. You spend 80% your time on the bike not actually riding it.

I agree with Hackz, you need to pick a training program, and start getting some different kinds of stimulus, and you will find those 20-30W rather than trying to do it via gaining muscle mass. You are over 40, and gaining 4-5Kg of lean muscle is not going to be neither easy, nor quick.

15 reps of 1min at 120%FTP is an insanely easy workout. Unless you're taking like 10sec of in between reps. For our average 300wFTP cyclist that's 345-360w. This sounds like the kind of workout where you'd start going pretty hard and stop as soon as it starts to hurt a little bit.

Until you get into really high volume it's best to just go for highest average power in your workouts. Pick out an interval that adds up to 30-60 min (like 6x10min for a LT focus or 8x4 for a more VO2 focus) and try to keep your average power as high as possible. You're not going to overtrain with 2 workouts and 10 hours per week.

A workout where you 'see if you can hold FTP for longer than 30min' fundamentally means your FTP is set too high. Maybe you can't hold it for 60 min everyday, but 45min at FTP should be challenging but doable any day of the week.

Ride a lot, ride harder, do the work and stop looking for shortcuts.

Pretty much by definition you cannot do 15min at 120%. I’d guess you mean 110%.

Either way for that kind of ride that’s the wrong workout. I would do either some weekly 30/30’s or some short VO2 like 2min sets totaling about 12min.

let me clarify, the average watts during that ride is near ftp power, but NP based. the ride has a lot of big watt sprints to not get dropped, which fry me more than a steady effort. some how there is a 50-60 year old lady that can hang with this group (average ~27mph) and it drives me nuts as to what I am doing wrong

Wtf kind of a group ride goes 27mph? That's faster than pro road races.

I've seen people who have trouble in races but are great in TT's. Usually they suck at pack riding. Little tiny speed up/slow down every second or two. Popping out in the wind, not staying steady.

Either way the answer is more training. Not riding, training. Hours and hours of zone 2 type stuff. A few very hard workouts every week.

my TSS for the week is high with 3-4 run workouts , so I guess I am at the cross roads of going more specific

I assume the thought here is that adding muscle mass will increase raw strength. To that I would just add that getting stronger and adding muscle aren’t the same thing. I think those ideas get conflated, because of course they’re related, but they’re different. One can make huge gains in a squat/deadlift without adding mass. Bodybuilders and powerlifters train in very different ways because one’s trying to add mass and the other’s trying to develop neuromuscular efficiency/rate of force development, etc.

I sort of doubt that intentionally adding pounds of muscle mass will make you faster. I do think some compound lifts a few times a week probably would. If you happen to gain some muscle along the way, probably worth it.

Spot On, mate! In short: HTFU
And can I have number of that 60 year old lady averaging 43 kmh? (at this moment time, I don´t even know why you mention that 🤣)

Honestly man I can't even figure out what you're getting at anymore. You say you want to gain weight to get faster, but list your training as: High TSS with 3-4 run w/o, 27mph group ride at FTP for 20-30min, and 15x1min intervals. That's a lot of talk without a lot of information. It's really hard to give training advice without numbers.

How many hours per week total, and bike total?
How much time in zones per week?
Height/weight
FTP and how you got that number, 1/3/5 min and 12min power would be helpful too.

I know this as a former powerlifter, who still lifts even with a blown disc. I love watching the anatoly video series. In the end, all the absolute lifting records are held by big guys.