FTP Increase After Every SS Workout?

If you’re able to sustain your power at FTP for over an hour, is it still your FTP? :thinking:

I think Coggan would say FTP is “around an hour” but I don’t want to say his name too loud or he’ll smash through the wall like the Kool-Aid man.

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considering coggan defines FTP as being between 40-70 mins, yes. FTP is one thing, time to exhaustion is also a thing

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Fine as long as you dont say it 3 times - like beetlejuice

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At least at some point, he seems to have changed his mind over the years … :wink:

You have to be careful with that, because if you have trained one thing, it tends to feel easier on you with time, throwing your RPE meter out of whack.

When you are asked to do an effort you have trained less for (e. g. over/unders), the RPE might rise simply because you are less used to how they feel. There is also personal preference. I dislike over/unders where you ramp up and ramp down, I find them psychologically harder than flat over/unders even if the average power on the overs is higher.

In my experience, a good way to test FTP if you are not quite sure about the exact value is to try over/unders near your FTP (e. g. 95–98 % unders and 105ish % overs). If 98 % unders feel easy, but you feel lactate accumulating at 105 %, your FTP lies in the 101–105 % range.

Not necessarily. Personally, I can really feel the lactate accumulating in my muscles, which is very different from fatigue.

It could very well be, or your ftp could have gone up. I can and have pushed my power at FTP out beyond the 1hr mark, decided to test if it went up by riding ~10w above that power and blew up in under 30m :man_shrugging:. It is important to actually test these things as not every rider responds the same way to stimulus.

Completely agree which is why I believe it is very important to actually test rather than get an FTP bump because you did a sweet spot workout.

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It seems to me one of the fundamental issues with TR plans is they kind of operate under a ceiling of training hours, hard sessions per week, and recovery days. If you are pushing up SS up against FTP and trying to do it longer, then there is a limit to that. The more effective approach would be to increase volume (hours), adapt, and then start pulling the other levers. You can only improve so much doing 8-10 hours per week.

Note: I haven’t done a TR plan in a long time, so things may have changed. Do TR plans add training hours over the weeks for more volume stimulus or just keep messing with the intensity levers?

+1.

However if they did call it something else what would everyone argue about every month or so… We’d have to go back to talking about Zone 2! :wink:

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