I believe it has to do with simply, if you’re not training it, it won’t improve. If you ride any number of hours a week including big hour weeks like 12 hour plus, most of your time is below FTP. So yes, you will gain endurance and durability for everything under FTP. And you could argue you will be able to ride longer at ranges really close to your existing FTP, But to truly gain time and or more power with anything equal to or above FTP you really have to ( fight ) to make those gains. And I say this as someone who is also still trying to figure it all out but this is my current belief.
For clarity, my reply was aimed at the OP.
Re-reading your info, that is also good stuff, so another example that it pays to look beyond the magic number that gets too much attention.
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Yeah I know, was just sharing and it was related to what you said; aiming to exemplify it 
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Yea I get that. However…I also see people talking about increasing power and repeatability ABOVE ftp.
So how are people magically making everything better both below and above ftp, but finding a way to keep ftp the same??
It just smells fishy to me…
Nothing “fishy or magical” here, and the implication is simply silly. Great to ask the question, but don’t imply there is something off base or dishonest here just because you don’t understand it.
I am the wrong person to cover this as well as it should be, but take one fake example of someone working on their sprint.
- It’s possible their peak power (say 1000w) could stay the same, but they may be able to extend that from something like 5 seconds to 15 seconds with the proper training. “Peak Power” is unchanged in this example, but the Time To Exhaustion (TTE) is where we see improvement.
- Similar can be said for someone with a given FTP that may be able to hold that TTE for around 50 minutes at the start of a training block, who may be able to hold that for 60+ minutes at the end of that block. This stems from the reality that FTP and related testing result in TTE range around 40-70 minutes rather than a hard locked and discrete single time (ex: 60 minutes as it is oversimplified too often).
Looking at the OP’s chart above, we see that there are the “same power levels” produced, but at lower Heart Rate values. That is an “equal power for less work” type of thing and is an improvement, even if the max power level attainable is unchanged.
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Obviously you’re not going to get stronger doing the same thing. I’m following a TR plan. I do all of the prescribed threshold and Vo2 workouts with a progressive overload of intensity. Obviously this drops off during a 2 week off season or a base phase. But I’m most definitely doing a lot of threshold in the hard to very hard category. And almost all are “productive”.
It varies but for a lot of people you can make big FTP gains relatively easy (not actually easy, just relatively) up to a point; your natural physiological threshold but to go beyond that takes a lot of hard work and commitment and your battling against aging, life etc (available time could be stopping you). So a lot of people tend to plateau around there. However, whilst FTP might plateau with increased exercise/ endurance its relatively easier (again not easy) to increase the time you can actually hold at that threshold (TTE). If somehow you were actually able to raise your FTP continually raising the TTE would become very hard as you are constantly raising the bar. There’s probably much more to it than what I’ve gathered over time.
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Well, you don’t understand what FTP is and what it isn’t, and you overemphasise its importance and relevance. That will always makes it harder for you to understand training, and explains why you’ve rejected TR.
What about me?
I also believe you can have a rider with a 250 FTP who does it by riding almost strictly at that wattage without much variation.
Then you have a rider who also has a 250 FTP but does it by being able to really push hard above that repeatedly many times during the effort combines with riding below it so it averages out to 250.
I think as riders we try all kinds of different training methods but we tend to stop or completely mix up the training ( right before ) we would start to reap any benefits from our current efforts.
If you are someone who believes steady state efforts just below FTP are the way to increase FTP you ride those efforts for day, weeks, months and may not see much progress so you try the other methods.
Little did that person know if they’d just stuck that training out for another year they would start to see bigger gains. But they move on to another more dynamic type of training and do that for a few months, dont see much progress and then take a break. Rinse and repeat without really following the numbers closely.
This is basically my experience and you may not relate to it. But in general, the riders I see and ride with who are fit in our area can ride really dynamically, push hard many many times in a ride.
But I still don’t know what kind of training that takes.
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Lol chill…I did not mean fishy in the “somebody is up to no good” sense, but the “this logic doesnt seem to pass the smell test to me” sense.
Having said that…people mention time to exhaustion increasing but not the power itself…that make much more sense conceptually to me. In my head I was thinking of a person whose 5sec-30 minute PRs all went up, as well as their say 90 minute to 10hr prs all go up, yet 45-60 minute numbers stay the same.
Oh very likely true on all counts. Of course I’d argue that’s the case for most of us here 
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Short answer:
Rest up for a couple of days and do a ramp test. Show that AI who’s boss and hold on for 20 minutes!
Long answer:
This is a familiar story and I’d wager is more common than the “I started TR 6 months ago off the couch and just got my pro contract at 6 W/kg” 
We know this can’t be true or else anyone who ever trained with structure would eventually be a cat 1. There is a genetic limit.
My story is very similar to yours except over a much longer duration:
-Started TR when it went live, having raced XC in the 90s then off the bike for a long time. I peaked at 4.1 W/Kg over about 2 years using TR. This was using the 8’ then ramp test way before AIFTP detection.
-Since then, I have never seen anything higher. To see if I could breakthrough, some entire seasons I tried: (1) block periodization, (2) a polarized model, (3) increasing volume to 20h/ week, (3) taking the winter months off entirely, (3) increasing sleep. None of these amounted to any sort of breakthrough beyond 4.1 W/kg and some years barely hit 4 W/kg. Of course, each year I’m also a year older so it’s possible I’d be seeing a decline were it not for those efforts.
But here is the good news. You get your FTP to a plateau and that will set what category you can compete in. The rest is fitness measures other than FTP that people have mentioned (power at VO2, VO2 repeatability, sprint power, TTE) and non fitness stuff: skill, mental toughness, team tactics. In fact, this is the beauty of categories in amateur cycling. Your fitness will determine what category you should race. Then you add the little things to make you competitive. If your FTP is so high that you can just ride away from the field, you’re in the wrong category.
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Sorry Windy, I’m not sure what your post means?
Because vo2max is often a limiter to FTP progression. You said you have been doing all the vo2max workouts the TR gave you, but they might not have been the right workouts to improve your vo2max much.
Your story on why Abe, the sausage king of Chicago, rejected TR. Perhaps thats not the reason.
My story is pretty simple, one summary I posted here
For 2 year periods, I’ve trained harder than TR, and easier than TR.
Not showing the TR 2019 year because I was injured, went on long trip to Europe, and it makes TR look worse.
Got faster before and after, pretty much any metric (ftp, max power, estimated vo2max, pretty much the entire power curve / power at 5-sec, 30-sec 1-min, 3-min, 10-min, 20-min, 1 hour, 3 hours, etc)
For myself it was pretty simple “something isn’t working as well as it should, time to try something different.”
Don’t get me wrong, I got gains on TR coming off an off-season. But never as high as when I did crazy hard training, or crazy easy ‘it ain’t polarized’ training. 
Not a knock on TR, I expected more gains and for some reason it didn’t work. Not everybody responds the same to training.
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To be clear…I haven’t rejected TR. I’m still using them. It’s just given the last few years, I do not trust trainerroad to accurately set my ftp/workout difficulty. It’s more I’ve stopped trusting them than rejected them. I’m setting my own FTP and workout difficulty rather than letting trainerroad do it.
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What I am reading here is that you need to go Harder on your hard days then TR says to and go easier on the easy days that TR tells you.
Once you master that, you will get faster then what TR will get you too
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For myself, currently, its doing a lot of challenging endurance, and sprinkle in some full-gas hard intervals (15+ minutes a week). If inside turn off erg, train all the cadence, and don’t limit myself above ftp. Do more modern over/unders, not the TR “its erg and we can tightly control the horizontal and vertical” ones that look like riding at threshold outside. The more volume the better, even if some forum dwellers call me out for doing junk miles. Play the long game. Thats my current approach and its working very well, for me.
@Abe_Froman thanks for clarifying.
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No worries. I’ve changed things up too. Longer zone 2 rides than I’ve ever done…going for 4-5hrs low zone 2 every sunday now, after a sat group ride of 2.5-3hrs I go as hard as possible on.
During the week I still aim for the 3 TR workouts of mid volume…but I’m not being the least bit shy about scaling back/skipping these if I dont feel like doing them/am tired. Particularly that Tuesday interval session if I’m stilling feeling a big weekend.