this may sound like a non-sequitor, but i say you are completely missing the point. what the profile shows you is the type of rider you currently are, not if you are at that category. the chart was never made to represent that. what this chart says to you is that you have quite a bit of aerobic head room if you 5-min power is quite a bit better than your 20 min power. Also, you are missing the data point for 1 min.

I was asking if the implied TP CAT ranking chart was close to people's real CAT ranking.

again, you are totally missing the point of the profiling. Dr. Coggan never intended it to be predicative of your racing category, and those labels got slapped on there b/c someone else wanted it.

That's weird. He is quoted as writing the exact article on TP I'm referencing. I get all of the disclaimers he mentioned but was just curious how the data set matched to real life.

Power Profiling
Friday, October 10, 2008 | By Andy R. Coggan, Ph.D.

I'm a Cat 1. My 1 and 5 min power falls into cat 1 territory. My ftp is in cat 2 territory, and my sprint is cat 3ish.

Best for road races? Who knows. Guess it depends on the road race in question, i.e. the field, the terrain, your own experience, and the weather.

I feel that the first makes the most difference, regardless of your power. Experience is right up there, as well, though.

Question from a non biker (non anythimg really), but what sort of differences between cat 1 and the tour team riders in terms of those figures? I confess i dont have training peaks so interested.

Where are you seeing that? I have TP and I can't find any cat numbers tied to my training.

It's one of the charts your can drag to your dashboard. All you have to do to make it work is enter a workout, click metric and type in your weight and save it. Based on that weight that day it will throw out all the stats. You can choose 1 week, 4 weeks, or 8 weeks of data for the graphs.

If you search Power Profile Training Peaks Help click the link and you will see the full article on how it works and loose examples of the type of rider you measure up against (based on their data set). You can then download each of the 4 riding style profiles (sprinter, pursuit, etc) into excel and compare yourself to the data set.

Anyway I know it's something you should use loosely but was curious about a few things:

- Do people find it generally a fair judge
- Do you alter your workouts to maybe help or address weaknesses

I'm a mediocre cat 4 on the road and a mediocre cat 3 on the track (none of this data includes track riding, that bike doesn't have a PM). I don't get dropped typically (extended climbs notwithstanding), but other than placing in TT's and nabbing the occasional preme in crits I haven't done much.

There's no recent 1 min data points in that data but it'd be lower relative to the 5 second power. The others are all pretty accurate reflections of my ability for that duration.

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All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. ~Gandalf

I haven't looked at my chart in over a year until this thread because it means so little.

I use past or current races to identify weaknesses and mistakes. Am I lacking aerobically and need to improve ftp-ish stuff? Am I lacking in high-end, repetitive sprinting type of work? Am I lacking in endurance and the ability to put in a huge effort at the end of races? Etc., etc.

That's all that matters. And it's far easier to just evaluate the race. "Here's where I sucked; here's what I need to improve."

Indeed, I wrote the article (back in 2003 or so...the 2008 date is just when everything was mirrored on the TP website). The category labels are also something included in the original tables (but with "e.g.," before them, and overlapping brackets to show the wide ranges).

However, many people missed the caveats - or even failed to read the article at all - so I yanked them off at one point, to try to encourage people to focus on the real purpose of the tables. Then I had various coaches asking that I put them back, as they found them useful (e.g., if an athlete had "Cat. 1" FTP power but was getting dropped in Cat. 5 criteriums, they knew to look elsewhere than fitness for an explanation). So, I then put them back on, but only under protest. :)

Anyway, to a large degree the power profiling tables have been superseded by the power-duration profiling and auto-phenotying algorithms found exclusively in WKO4. Also, keep in mind that the Excel file hosted on the TP website is multiple generations out of data...I believe they still have version 4 up, but the tables have been revised multiple times since then (the final version was #8). (I don't know what version the online website actually uses to analyze your data.)

Here are some examples of how such information can be displayed and manipulated:

Thanks. I enjoyed the article and only recently started looking at the power profile chart. Even as outdated as it is, I found my trend interesting as a general judge of my personal profile.

going back to the original question by the OP about what kind of power profile is best for road races;
its almost impossible to answer that question without first knowing the terrain and the competition. unlike a steady state individual discipline like a tri or TT the other individuals involved play such a huge part in road racing.

Even on a dead pan flat course that would seem to be suited for a steady state rider and TT specialist, you can have a field that decides to attack the crap out of each other all day trying to whittle the pack down to avoid a bunch sprint, and so you a race where its all about your 15s and 1min power of whether you can match the seemingly pointless surges time and time again, and not whether you have a big engine and can push good power for an hour.
As an aside, I've yet to see a Cat5 race that ISN'T exactly as described above. Cat5 is all about the surges as no one is secure enough, and no team is organized enough, to even let a break form and go up the road. So anytime someone moves everyone pounces on it. Makes for a day of 100w, 500w, 100w, 500w....over and over and over again.

cat 2

:05 cat 2
1 cat 3
5 cat 1
20 cat 2
60 cat 2

In general the numbers are pretty close to what i perceive is needed, but there is always a good deal of variation as you move through the different cat's and the demands of the races.

I will say that the TT profile is mostly useless in US amature racing where almost all races have crit's or circuits where sprinting is critical. I remember as a cat 4 a while ago actually dropping two professional triathletes who could not handle the surges in the last 5k of a road race, these guys had at least 75w on me at threshold, but could not handle a minute attack at 650w, then being counter attacked over and over. I have never once wished i had spent more time in Z 3/4, but many times wished i had done more work in the 20 second to 5 minute range to hang with the hard surges. This is not to say threshold is not important, all zones are important, but they should not be the primary focus.

At some point, typically around cat 3 you will have to stop being a triathlete and become a true roadie to hang with the hard surges. I would suggest that if there were two critical power numbers they are 1 and 5 minute power followed closely by 15 second sprint power. Develop those and add in a massive base, lots of racing miles, and learn the tactics.

Actually I was going to just say it, but it might be more interesting this way...

Guess my category:

Was there anything interesting in the changes over time?

Was it a major shift due to a larger data pool? Or just some tweaking around the edges?

I agree with shorter power durations being very important, but I've actually found a lot of success with the z3/z4 approach in the past two seasons. I used to hattttteee threshold stuff and would avoid it like the plague. I had great 1 min/5 min power (relative to my other abilities) but was abysmal at anything over 10 minutes.

Really focusing on z3/z4 stuff, had a huge effect for me across the board. One min hasn't improved much (actually a bit lower as I don't generally do 1 min efforts), but 2 min+ has all improved and my ability to do them at the end of races has also improved tremendously without me doing more than a handful of VO2 max training sessions outside of actual racing.

Now, this very well could be a perfect example of finally working on something that I previously neglected, but it's really had a positive impact on my numbers and racing ability over the last two years. A lot of my races come down to breaks and now I can finally get in the break and roll it pretty good and finish up strong. I've looked at what I was lacking in races and really worked on that (though still have another thing I really need to work on) and it's paid off.

It would be really interesting and very useful if someone were to get some real world data to match up various competitive riders with the various power levels. So what do cat. 3 sprinters really do? Or Pro Tour TTers? Etc…. There might be some good data sets to be had from things like National Championship races, etc.

I am a Cat3 sprinter
5s - 1805w
10s - 1142w
20s - 965w
1min - 592w
2min - 522w
5min - 422w

FTP - 337w

I've raced a number of Cat1/2/3 crits and been more than competitive. Problem is for the road races I just dont have the fitness to handle the extended distance and pace that Cat1/2 bring to the table. In Cat3 races I suffer on long climbs (6min+) but can hang around and not get dropped on the shorter stuff, sit in, recover, then sprint. Luckily where I race there aren't many races with hills longer than that amount, and for the ones that do have it I just hope that the pack that gets dropped along with me is organized enough to pull back the group, or i simply view it as a race where i work for my teammate who is a climber and i just drill the pace hard near the start and hope to get him where he needs to be.

The vast majority of successful roadies have "TTer" profiles, i.e., relatively flat power-duration curves.

Furthermore, the further up the food chain you go, the more true this tends to be.

See the standard curves in WKO4.

I am just bringing up the typical triathlete comment that they are a TT style rider, which often means they have woeful high end power and that is not useful, you have to be well rounded. I 100% agree that at the higher levels things are pretty flat.

I'm a cat 3, but not really a sprinter and not really a threshold guy either. I guess more of a puncheur? Dunno, but I dig a 300-400m 10% finishing climb:

5s = 1475 (17.05 w/kg)
1m = 808 (9.78 w/kg)
5m = 405 (4.8 w/kg
20m = 350 (4.23 w/kg)

Based on the above, I'd fall between cat 1 and 4. I rarely do any 5 min efforts because ... well I just don't. In the end, the values don't mean a lot TO ME, since a race (road, crit, etc) can play out based on so many factors (e.g., field, terrain, heat, wind, rain, etc) that the last thing I want to be thinking about is "did I train xx min power enough?".