Huh. Now that’s interesting. That seems like they’re using reasonably good math, and since I always use a power and heart meter on my outdoor rides with my Garmin, you would think that their estimates would be pretty good, and people’s anecdotes in the thread seem to support that.
I mean, there is the peculiar phenomenon that it feels like I have an “outdoor FTP” and an “indoor FTP” and the outdoor one is definitely higher. Maybe due to better cooling, or just some sort of placebo effect? All I know is, that if I set my FTP to 250 and tried to do a threshold workout, I would be tapping out, after maybe 20 minutes.
This kind of elides with another thread on “long distance high intensity” rides, and how our TR FTP doesn’t really line up with our true “hour power”, but it’s a little disconcerting to have all of these numbers, all over the place. I’m going to keep using TR for FTP and training purposes, but Firstbeat seems to have put some real thought into their product, so why the two numbers are so different is weird.
It usually good enough for me, when I have a new FTP (up or down) notification I just this up everywhere on TR/TP/Strava etc… and my workouts are usually spot on where I can feel it should be,
no on calculating FTP from previous rides. If you have enough hard efforts at short/medium/long durations (say 5 sec, 1 min, and 20+min), WKO does a very good job at retrospectively analyzing FTP.
FTP is an abstraction of your Maximal Lactate Steady State, and the time MLSS can be held ranges between individuals from 30 to 70 minutes which is one of the reasons why it is often associated with an hour.
yeah its a good question, the handouts from this webinar has perhaps the best written explanations I’ve seen. Also heard Coach Chad talk about it, but I didn’t take notes on that podcast. My own experience is that once my duration was out to ~40 minutes it really became an exercise in conquering the mental game. Everyone is going to have their own unique experiences with increasing muscular metabolic fitness out into the 50-70 minute range.
@redlude97 He already defined MLSS above. MLSS should never differ if your do lab-test measuring lactate but my guess is that most don’t. So then it all boils down to how much we can tolerate as humans. Either way FTP should only be seen as a figure to set training zones and not something that defines you as a cyclist, even though I know it’s hard.
@jpolchlopek Of course MLSS is trainable, that should be the whole reason to why you are training. To raise your ceiling for MLSS.
I think there is a confusion between MLSS, FTP and VO2Max. Fortunately there’s a lot of reading to be done on the subjects.
There are a several important physiological markers in play here and sometimes it’s hard to tell whether people genuinely aren’t aware of this, or are using this minutae to support a position/opinion of a particular piece of software, hardware… or of course a training paradigm.
Regardless, here we go:
Lactate Threshold 1: The point during exercise of increasing intensity at which blood lactate begins to accumulate above resting levels.
Lactate Threshold 2: (also referred to as OBLA): At a slightly higher exercise intensity than lactate threshold a second increase in lactate accumulation.
Maximal Lactate Steady State: This is defined as the exercise intensity at which maximal lactate clearance is equal to maximal lactate production.
Now, all three tend to move in parallel… one goes up, they all do. One goes down, they all do. For simplicity, a single metric (FUNCTIONAL Thresold Power) was created as, wait for it… a FUNCTIONAL indicator of this physiological turning point (aka: THRESHOLD) without the need for lab testing.
To identify FTP, (before power duration curves and models were a thing) testing protocols were suggested and this was the genesis of years of flame wars and argumentation about the value of the metric itself, and whether it is “hour power, 95% of 20 min power, ramp testing”
There’s an error in your comment: “extensive vs intensive method to push TTE out”. Only extensive training pushes TTE to the right (makes it longer). It’s the intensive training that pushes FTP up (makes it higher).
You said “An overestimated FTP that exceeds MLSS used as the basis for training wont necessarily lead to increases in TTE.” but really your focus on the FTP number misses many other important pieces to the puzzle
