With the endless threads about people worried about their FTP stagnating or dropping a few watts, this video does a nice job of highlighting why FTP is often the wrong metric to stress about. And it’s 100% aligned with my experience over the past ~5 years. My FTP hasn’t moved much, but my increased durability has tuned me into a fairly competitive age group rider. Maybe not what the time crunched “want it now” cyclist wants to hear, but durability is driven by lots of volume over years of training.
Back to the point here, I agree 100%. At some point, you reach your genetic potential and / or your potential given your training restraints.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t get “faster” or improve your performance. IMO, FTP should be used to help set your zones and not be used as an indication of “fitness”.
Heck, I’ll regularly just manually update mine because I know I am capable of handling higher workout loads. I couldn’t care less if that is my actual “FTP”, whether determined by AI or a performance test.
At the end of the day, the only metric I care about is how I perform IRL.
even using ftp to set zones is overkill for most things, in my developing opinion. like I’ll aim to have ss around 90% of where I believe my ftp is, but otherwise, vo2 is done as hard as I can for the given duration and endurance is done at a sustainable pace. so for me the idea of setting anything based on ftp is becoming increasingly limited
I think a case can be made that you need 3 “zones”:
Easy
Kinda hard, but feels good
This sucks, I hope it ends soon
Mix as you’d like.
No doubt we (collective “we”) tend to make training more complicated than it needs to be. We are constantly searching for the “silver bullet” that will transform our performance. The reality is that, at our level, we focusing on minutia that won’t really matter that much.
Ride your bike as much as you can, usually pretty easy. Sometimes go hard. Sometimes bury yourself. Then go ride your bike again.
Solid video. I feel like I didn’t help the convo with starting that one post and should have just gone to support in the background.
Video helps the messaging for sure. However, the Ask a Cycling Coach Podcast hasn’t been helping the messaging. For example, 2 threads down you see this…
I think it was much more appropriate when the messaging was about TR making you faster.
And at the end of the video, Dylan discusses on-bike carbohydrate intake, as being the main factor in improved performance of the peloton - enhanced fueling, otherwise durability doesn’t happen.
So is durability going to fill the conversation void now that zone 2 and polarized has run its course?
Haven’t watched the video yet but -
I’d say FTP is still crucial to durability. If you are working at a lower % of your aerobic threshold, you will be more durable. A rising tide and all that.
Certainly has helped, as has better bikes, training methods, etc. But in my opinion, it is not the MAIN factor.
But back to FTP… It is great for setting up training paces and metric for those who are exclusively inside. But I am with @Power13, what really matters is how you perform IRL. I mean ultimately we are going all hit a point as we age that rather than increasing our FTP we ultimately are just trying to slow the decline.
Durability has been a hot topic/ buzz word for at least the last few years. Certainly not the flavor of the day, but maybe a little less appealing to amateurs since many aren’t as focused on the long game. Post a video about a 5 year plan to get fast and you probably won’t get many clicks. Post a plan about boosting your ftp in 5 weeks with limited training time and people are handing out their credit cards.
A quick glance at an athlete’s PDC over time is much more valuable than a single point (FTP). You get a much better overview of their strengths and weaknesses.
It was an interesting video. I took from it that FTP is great for shorter efforts (say 1 hour) but the ability to finish strong on a long day (5-12 hours) is more important for that specific event. If you have a 300 FTP but have no durability (or I’d use the term endurance) so after hour four you’re down to 220ftp, then an event like Unbound is going to suck.
The idea of a hard effort at the end of a 4 hour ride, which he’d need to do to try and get a good finish at Unbound may not apply to me, but being able to keep my IF .8 for all of unbound vs .7 would be important.
Is durability essentially the same as TTE (time to exhaustion)? Or maybe it’s really endurance + TTE.
The best training result I’ve ever done was a TTE focused build. I didn’t’ get massive FTP watts but I felt stronger than ever on the bike and did hit my highest FTP mid-season (around June). From base to build was probably 25-30 watts.
For me, that was a build out to 4x20min at around 90-95%.
My take on “durability” is what we called back in the 90’s “speed reserve.” In other words, the better trained (and less tired) you are the more you have to throw down at the end of the race.
