Have you ever held FTP for 60 minutes?

WTF is FTP

By definition if you can’t hold FTP for about an hour then it’s not your FTP.

Yesterday I held my FTP from exactly 3 months ago for hour. Does that count?

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I went on a solo break which lasted ~1.25 hours (or 50k) in September and my max 1 hour power was roughly 94% of my FTP. RPE felt like 9 or 10 for that effort.

So close but thats the closest ive come so far. Ive only attempted it a few times as i do road racing and not very many TTs.

I think if you are getting near that in road racing, you need to think about your race tactics :grin: i am. That solo break ended in glorious failure, caught with 10k to go.

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Every time that I’m about to ride one hour close to my FTP, my FTP goes up in the next test

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Agreed, I have done that several times and actually exceeded FTP. I could not do it on a trainer though - mentally too much for me to handle

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Can of worms but this depends on whose definition of FTP you are using… Those worms have been spread all over this thread here:

Lots in there on the ‘FTP isn’t important’ theory, but from memory, also quite a lot about whether Coggan ever actually defined FTP as ‘1 hour’ power.

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I use WKO4 as well and keep an eye on my mftp. However using that instead of CP20 is probably unreliable, especially if you are a steady state endurance or TT type specialist.

The reason being is that you could spend some time improving your 1 and 5 minute power and everything in-between and you would see a significant jump in mftp. However that does not translate into TT type events

That’s the shortest period of time I’ve seen FTP described as yet!

If we wait another couple of years maybe FTP will be something we can manage for 10-15 mins? :smiley::rofl:

I did a 50 minute FTP interval last year out on the road and it was an interesting experience. Mentally I went through a bit of trickery. Told myself I’ll commit to 30 mins, then 10 more if I can hack it, then 10 more. Part of me was hoping to go to 60 but the road started rolling increasingly downhill and the higher cadences required to hold the wattage was starting to mess it up. Instead of trying anyway I used it as an excuse to quit. The watts for the 50 mins was just 3 under what I considered my FTP to be around then acc/ my power curve, though Strava itself on the activity page says I was 1 watt over. Either way it was pretty close.

Basically, my take home from doing it was that if I find any excuse to quit at that discomfort level I’ll take it.

Physically everyone has a max power they can hold for an hour, but you need to find a way to force yourself to do it. My way was okay, but I actually think something like creating a one hour interval in a workout creator, sticking the trainer on ERG mode and entering a time trial event or race on Zwift would be the ultimate way to do it. Don’t have to deal with rolling roads and you have some sort of motivation along with the much needed control of ERG mode. Scanning through the analysis of my 50 min effort makes it look more like a random over/under session.

We agree that FTP is used as a tool for training and not as a predictor of 40k TT performance right? Get someone relatively untrained to do an hour of power and their zones are going to be completely screwed up.

If your program sets an FTP for you and you’re able to complete workouts then that’s a good enough target.

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Agreed. It seems that FTP as defined by a ramp test is a good metric to build a training program around (especially one that relies a lot on sweet spot work). Is it actually a power most can hold for 60 minutes? Probably not.

Great article
Thanks for sharing

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In October 2016, when I was doing a lot of zwift racing, I did legit hold FTP for over an hour (265w at the time) during races. Unfortunately at around that time I caught a nasty cold that stuck with me for weeks and then I had other stuff that kept me from training. Would love to get up there again, my FTP is 275 and I very much doubt I could approach anything close to 60mins, even though this FTP works well for my training zones (mainly a mental thing, maybe partially physical)

I am confused by your response here, because by virtue of what you say, it is exactly why mFTP would be more accurate in my case. For instance, my entire 2018 season (training and racing) was focused on 10s to 5m power, because 95% of my racing was on a velodrome…therefore I would not perform well on a CP20 because I was not training or racing in that time band, so my body was not adapting physiologically do those types of effort demands…yet, I felt just as fit as the 4 years before when I was doing primarily TTs, and WKO4 was correctly projecting a similar FTP, even though my TT performance suffered while on the track. This is one of the underlying points in the article from TrainingPeaks, and why it suggests other test protocols besides the CP20: The Physiology of FTP and New FTP Test Protocols

…which leads to my other questions, if you are a steady state/TT cyclist, then why would you be spending your time improving your 1-5m power and everything in between? For instance, if you are a time trialist, then isn’t your training regiment reflecting that? Aren’t you out doing 40K TTs so that WKO4 is drawing on that data?

Because Sweet Spot is quite close to threshold and the ramp test is probably the most inaccurate way of estimating threshold, I’m of the opinion that you’d be much better using one of the other test protocols in this case.

All this talk about the ramp test. I’m going to try it this coming season. I am very curious and intrigued. Painful but quick so it appears – sort of like having your leg severed with a razor-sharp axe, vs. by a rusty serrated blade (CP20). :rofl:

That is an outdated definition for FTP. The TrainingPeaks article referenced earlier states the following:

This is your Maximum Lactate Steady State and can be held, typically, for between 30 and 70 minutes, depending on how well trained you are.

Mike

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For reference, my Ramp Test result, the TTE test from the TrainingPeaks article, and my WKO4 mFTP were all within 5 watts of each other. I did all of my pre-season testing this past week so I’m not cherry picking numbers.

If you are rider that only focuses on one type of very specified riding, YMMV, but the Ramp Test is very accurate for me.

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60 second FTP test! LOL CP1 - 50% :joy:

I guess you’re right in the middle of the bell curve.

Interestingly, I just listened to the ‘That Traithlon Show’ episode about 80/20 for time crunched athletes (talked about on one of the other threads) where the host stated that FTP is typically 10% higher than MLSS (I think that was by 20 minute test). I’d like to know where those numbers come from as it doesn’t say much for the work of Hunter Allan (and maybe Dr Andy Coggan) and the correlation he found if it is overestimating by that much.

Mike