Yes, increasing your FTP could make you slower in a race or group if that’s all you work on and could lead to a fitness plateau.

I looked up what the most searched terms are when it comes to FTP. As you can guess, the list looks a lot like this:

How To Improve My Cycling FTP
Increase Cycling FTP
What is a Good FTP Cycling
TrainerRoad FTP Increase
Realistic FTP Gains
2 x 20 FTP Intervals
Increase FTP by 50 Watts

You get the point.

Looking to increase your cycling FTP? Great idea!

Just be aware that this doesn't necessarily mean you'll be a faster BIKE RACER or ready for the GROUP RIDE when you try to drop your friends in a few months.

Read on as to why you want to grow your FTP, but there are some prerequisites to this, and there are other areas that need focus as well!

But why? Let’s think about this in realistic terms.

When you flat and the spare wheel ruins a good pic

First off, most people are gauging FTP as a 20 minute effort. How do I know this? The number of athletes that get a power file analysis done and have a serious drop off in w/kg after 20 minutes is, well, a lot. Very few ride hard out to 45 minutes.

So for this article, we’ll assume most athletes are using the 20 minute result multiplied by 0.95 to get their FTP.

There’s nothing wrong with that: 95% of your 20 minute best is still looked at as the major gauge for FTP amongst most of us amateurs.

Why aren’t we talking about VO2Max numbers more often though, when that is really a bigger determining factor in cycling?

1) Most don’t know their VO2Max value, so we can’t compare and discuss

2) It’s much harder to track and therefore improve, so less people are selling a product to athletes aimed at this. We’re being told to IMPROVE FTP…see your “FTP” go up —> be happy. Right?

Increasing your FTP IS IMPORTANT.

Threshold workouts were one of my top 3 workouts that you need to be doing this year if you’re aerobically fit.

However, I’m not obsessed with it. Why?

When To Make FTP Improvements

A lot of amateur cyclists are not aerobically fit; what does that even mean!?

These athletes struggle to ride at zone 2, 55-75% FTP for longer than 90 minutes. They get very tired, their heart rate skyrockets, and then watts drop.

This athlete should not even be worrying about FTP gains yet. SERIOUSLY! This athlete should focus on riding more endurance and sweet spot intervals. There are huge gains to made there, which will no doubt make them faster. Sure, they can do some efforts around FTP, but increasing their aerobic engine with as little fatigue as possible, will be huge!

One must remember, endurance spots are literal marathons; the events, and the training cycles. The short cuts leave you scratching your head down the road, unable to make more gains, plateaued, or worse: BURNED OUT.

What Does An FTP Increase Truly Mean On The Road?

Let’s say an athlete is riding 2 x 20m at 270W, and over the course of a couple months, she hits 280, 290, and now 300W!

She really focused on this, and achieved it! She’s ridden a bunch of sweet spot and threshold, and now stronger! Right?

She shows up to a group ride, but they seem harder. How is that possible?

This is a hypothetical case, but the rest of the picture often is this: before, when her FTP was at 270W, she could also handle repeated attacks from 120-150% FTP (325-405W). This is because this athlete also worked max aerobic and neuromuscular power.

Now, the “improved” athlete with the 300W FTP could honestly get jettisoned OUT THE BACK when surges increase to 110% FTP, or 330W. If you do not think this is true, talk to a triathlete that just starts racing bikes. Many have trouble with surges, not because they are a poor athlete, but because they haven’t trained this capability.

At 300W FTP, 120% FTP, or 360W could feel VERY HARD after just a few whacks, let alone after a 90-120 minute race.

So, the rider with the higher FTP could easily get dropped before the one with the lower FTP.

This brings up the idea of repeatability. Let’s discuss this further.

Cycling Repeatability: How To Show This and Cycling Standards

There is no clear cut way to monitor this, which is another reason why it’s not talked about much.

I have athletes that improve in this area because they can at first do only one or two max aerobic reps, and then they eventually can do 5-7 reps at higher wattages. Not only did the max watts increase, BUT SO DID THE REPEATABILITY.

Even if their watts DID NOT INCREASE, the ability to do them over and over again is PARAMOUNT TO CYCLING SUCCESS.

I personally value repeatability over max watts at that same duration any day. Said differently, I would choose to be able to do 510W for 5 minutes for 5 reps as opposed to doing 540W for 5 minutes for 2 reps.

The second one looks cooler on a w/kg power profile, but I bet you 9 out of 10 times, the rider doing 510W more often places higher in the race.

The only way to track that is by comparing week over week.

Also, the athlete knows they are stronger based on performance in a group week after week, but again, it’s hard to track.

After attending the Training Peaks Endurance Sports Education Seminar in Boulder last summer, I’ve been in contact with product leads about a myriad of topics. Tracking repeatability was one.

I was in contact with Cody Stephenson, an education specialist with Training Peaks and WKO.

I was super excited when Cody responded with, “So you are in the mixed good/bad position of being one of the people asking cutting edge questions. Which means you won't find easy answers but you might be able to start defining your own.”

Here’s Cody’s reply:

There are 2 parts to this - the first is the actual idea (What is repeatability? What percentage do we use at a given duration? How many repeats?) and the second is How do we identify this programmatically using the tools we have?

Even though it's a pretty fundamental component of success in bike racing, as far as I know nobody has actually gotten far enough to start to define standards for it (either in academic research or just from coaches or high performance programs.) The approach up until now has been to treat repeatability and variability as a black box so coaches just make sure to introduce variability into training (either through micro-intervals, over unders, mixed effort/mixed recovery workouts, or just group rides and training races) and hope for the best. It has definitely fallen on the "art" side of the art-science spectrum for coaching.

Part of the issue is that it becomes a combinatorial problem from hell. If you start combing the duration of the effort you are interested in, the percentage of the effort you want to test for repeatability, the duration of the recovery interval between the efforts, and the number of repeats you get an almost infinite number of combinations. As I've thought about this I've tried narrowing it down a little bit based on some things.

Instead of looking at every duration, or even many of the typical duration for something like peak power, you can look at it by energy systems. Using that as a guide you can treat everything from 5-30 seconds (phosphagen) as the same, everything from 30 seconds to maybe 4-6 minutes as the same (glycolytic), and everything longer than that as approximately the same (ox-phos). That way you only have 3 basic things you might be looking for.
This can then guide what recovery you might care about. Research has hinted that anaerobic sprint type efforts take the longest for full functional recovery - up to 10 minutes, and longer but maximum aerobic efforts (5-20 minutes) can take as little as 2 minutes to recover (that was based on athletes on the elite end of the scale, I tend to think 4 minutes is more realistic) and glycolytic efforts are somewhere in between. Knowing this you can then start to decide if you care more about degradation in performance assuming relatively complete recovery, or you want to test for incomplete recovery.

The second half - how do we identify this programmatically using something like TP or WKO is also tricky. I think there are 3 approaches people try or imagine when they start thinking about it.

Automatically from aggregated workout data over some recent time period (similar to the way the way the PD curve and PD curve metrics are calculated.
- This would be the ideal solution - but it is the most technically challenging. Software like TP and WKO are really good at identifying the single best effort from any given workout, but it is extremely difficult to identify the next hardest efforts in a meaningful way. More research and testing has to be done before we can set the parameters for that kind of automatic analysis. I'm sure we (or somebody) will get there but I think other useful progress can be made through manual methods before then.
Manually from any type of suitably difficult workout or race (something like looking at races and hard group rides to see progression of matches burnt)
- This isn't a bad option and I think will always be a supplementary approach but requires more manual work and time, experience, and definitely requires knowledge of the context of the workout or race. You can look at the matches chart that is set up in a way to identify glycolytic efforts and see that they happen frequently in the first 90 minutes of road race and then stop. That may tell you the limits of that athletes repeatability before they got dropped, it may tell you that they made the break and got to ride much more steadily after that, or it tells you that they missed the break and just got to cruise in with the group after that.
With a standardized test protocol or set of protocols
- I think this might be the most realistic and useful approach. I haven't seen any standardized protocols for this (the Sufferfest 4DP test kind of approaches this a little bit by putting the 1-minute test at the end of the rest of the testing protocol), so it would take some work to come up with a useful protocol, but if you could start using it consistently across multiple athletes and collecting some data it might be worth it. The good news is that these protocols would likely resemble pretty good workouts, so it wouldn't be a waste of time or effort to mix them into training. I would start by identifying a representative duration and intensity for a discipline that you are very familiar with. For something like road racing it could be 2 minutes at VO2max power (or 5 minute power or something similar) with a challenging recovery interval (maybe 2 minutes) and see how many they can do. For MTB racing I might do 6 minutes at 110% of threshold, for crit racing it could be 30 seconds at their peak 2-minute power with 30 seconds recovery (I came up with all these on the fly, but hopefully you get the idea). You would then have one more decision - is the goal to increase the number of these that they can do - or to increase the intensity that they can tolerate and repeat - or alternate between the 2 as one becomes sufficient? Or does it depend on the strength or weakness of that athlete?

Maybe some of that was helpful - maybe it is all stuff that you have already thought of and were hoping for something more elegant or useful. Let me know if any of it is unclear, it was a little bit train of thought.

I do agree that so much of that aspect is the art side of coaching, and was hoping to quantify improvement for athletes beyond just how they felt, but it's great to know that I'm not missing some easy way to do that.

There are so many ways to attack intervals: duration, intensity, repeatability, that it can make your head spin if we lose track of what we are training for and why!

I’m coaching athletes to

win races
defeat personal best times
and get FASTER; NOT just improve one number.

Other “Increasing FTP” Cases

Optional Case Study Reading - It’s A Bit Long, But You May Relate…IDK

I have a new athlete that came over from an online program where he unfortunately hasn’t had the results he’s hoped for.

I think the online plans are great since they’re helped a lot of athletes get more active, but for those TRULY looking to make gains that MATTER when it comes to racing bikes or riding fast in a group, there is a LOT left on the table.

Hello I found your info in a thread on the XXX forum and decided to reach out and contact you.

I decided at the beginning of 2019 I wanted to try an online structured training program and signed up for XXX. I actually really like everything about XXX..

The problem I am having is that since I signed up and started training it has been a year now and I have virtually no gains in my FTP.

Now I understand that FTP isnt the end all be all and I am certain to have made some gains in other areas but an entire year and no real raise in FTP is very frustrating.

I linked my training peaks account but only started using that around sept.. If you wanted to see the entire year then I can give you my other login..

There were some inconsistencies in my training throughout the year but going from nothing to training 4 to 5 times a week and seeing no gains stinks..

I would love some guidance and help trying to figure out what I can do to improve.. Thank you in advance and I look forward to hearing from you.

This is the case I make with an online training plan, and why we don’t create templates: a template doesn’t know enough about you as an athlete…you can easily spend a LOT of time and not make gains. You need to be nimble with your training. See solution below.

In order to help him make gains, aerobic fitness checks were on deck for the first month before we crack how to truly make him faster by his first event in MAY.

He asked some great questions that you might be asking as well, so check them out!

He then followed up with this ask about why things weren’t getting very intense yet, as we finished up Month 1 of working together.

Just checking in to see if im heading in the right direction with my workouts. I've noticed the majority of the scheduled rides so far have been tempo or a couple longer efforts at 90% but no real intensity or VO2 max efforts over a few seconds. Do these workouts come later?

Also just making sure when I have a 2 hour workout scheduled but maybe only a 30 min of it is structured and that the rest is just tooling along at 75%? This seems unproductive to me. What do you think? Just trying to get a feel for the plan.

Also can you explain the fitness/fatigue/form metric on TP? I read the description but what does it really mean about where I am as far as fitness or improvement.

Great questions!

Yes, vo2max comes later for SURE, but that system is really "use it or lose it", so you can only make gains with that so much until you have to change things up. The goal now is to get you as aerobically fit as possible (with the tempo and graduating up towards higher intensities as spring moves forward). This is key to reaching your goal of increasing FTP and being able to possible do well at rides like Haute route in May.

<Resume email reply>

It no doubt gets more intense, but if you do intensity now, without building it up in the right manner, you won't high the highest highs that you're capable of. Let me know if that doesn't make sense in email.

Also, zwift should be very intense rides and that will give you the intensity dose that you need right now.

Are you familiar with ATL CTL TSB? Those are the terms TP is using:

CTL is what TP calls Fitness.

ATL is what TP calls Fatigue.

TSB is what TP calls Form.

Fitness: just that, fitness, but its misleading at times if you have lots of fatigue.

Fatigue: how tired you are

Form: the balance between training load and rest.

You can smash yourself and build up a ton of "fitness", but it also means there's a ton of "fatigue", so then you rest and are at your best. I wrote this article that touches on this a little.

The question then arose in our EVOQ.BIKE Exclusive Whatsapp Chat Group with over 50 athletes.

Hopefully I’ve successfully painted the picture as to why increasing your FTP is not the only thing that we should be ranking ourselves with in cycling.

You can increase your FTP be become slower when comparing yourself to other human beings in a race scenario.

YOU MIGHT WORK ON FTP FOR 8 MONTHS AND NOT INCREASE YOUR FTP….BUT YOU ARE ABLE TO REPEAT THE EFFORT MORE THAN ONCE. WAYYYY MORE IMPORTANT!!!!!

For true improvement, look beyond your Power Duration Curve profile and the ability to chat about one metric, FTP, at the water cooler. It makes training more in depth, but you’ll be better off down the road for it.

Email me with questions or inquiries about coaching: Brendan@EVOQ.BIKE. Or, contact us online for more information on our cycling training programs.

Improve Cycling FTP! Or, Get Faster

When To Make FTP Improvements

What Does An FTP Increase Truly Mean On The Road?

Cycling Repeatability: How To Show This and Cycling Standards

I’m coaching athletes to

win races

defeat personal best times

and get FASTER; NOT just improve one number.

Other “Increasing FTP” Cases

Optional Case Study Reading - It’s A Bit Long, But You May Relate…IDK