Andrew Coggan and Hunter Allen, with GCN’s Conor Dunne, talking abot FTP
The opening lines to start the discussion
“There really is no such thing as threshold.”
“We can only ever estimate FTP, we can never measure it.”
and a couple from Coggan later on
“So all of the people who say that ‘you know the pros need lactate testing and the pros do it this way.’ They’re barking up the wrong tree.”
“When I was competing, I never did a formal test. Never, ever, ever did a formal test”
This should be fun.
I love listening to Dr Cog. Its a real shame TR banned him from this forum. I loved his constructive discussions on here.
Counterpoint - it is a real shame he could not contain his participation on this forum to constructive discussions.
You make it sound like TR acted in bad faith when they banned him. In actuality, he has been banned form every forum I have seen.
He has no one to blame but himself.
Hahaha, I was about to post the same and your post appeared as I started my first sentence.
Coggan has so much to offer and just cannot help himself, which is really unfortunate. When someone is banned from slowtwitch it’s generally not softness of the reading audience that is to blame.
He is still active on a few cycling forums if you know where to look.
Just watched the video. Not much new. The title is way more clickbait than the video, which didn’t really say anything controversial or contentious. He talked about how they first picked an hour for estimations. Lactate test is unnecessary if you have a power meter. Do the 5-min blowout when performing the 20-min test. FTP changes day to day, it’s an estimation not something definite. Nothing crazy.
Yet, so many still struggle with it.
+1, had the same take-away. FTP = maximal metabolic steady state (or “quasi-steady” as they clarified). Lots of different “imperfect” ways to estimate or perceive it, but it’s a moving target day to day and dependent on all kinds of variables. And of course Coggan working in his favorite tag line multiple times - “the best measure of performance is performance”. I do miss his contributions on the forum, but understand the ban based on the forum guidelines. Personally, I appreciate passionate people who are rough around the edges, even when they are pushing buttons and talking down to people at times. We all have our flaws.
I actually thought this GCN video was more interesting. Some pragmatic discussion on how FTP is used today with some real-world suffering by Conor mixed in. I won’t spoil the outcome, but Conor is obviously a beast and tried to ride at his estimated FTP of 403w for an hour.
Why is FTP so hard to understand? Maybe we should stop with the acronym, and use the actual words - Functional Threshold Power - and that will make it easier to understand. It isn’t called Absolute Threshold Power, but Functional. Meaning what you can functionally do on any day
/rant over
I have an issue with your definition of “Functional”.
Don’t even get me started on “Threshold”.
I’ll give you a pass on “Power”.
That is specifically mentioned in the video by Hunter Allen. He says those three words describe it very well
from the transcript 7:46 on
"right it’s functional you’re on your bike you’re out there training you’re actually doing what you are training for
right it’s threshold you’re measuring this threshold and what are you measuring you’re measuring power right"
The one thing that continues to amaze me about FTP is that so many people find so many ways to argue with the people who coined the term about what they mean by it.
Many people struggle with nuanced concepts that aren’t black and white or open for interpretation. You have Coggan in the video explicitly saying that FTP is a metabolic/physiological quasi-steady state and not tied to a specific duration or distance. But then he has a detailed discussion about using 1 hour power and specifically the 40k TT as the method of estimation they often leaned on. One statement is a definition of FTP, the other statement describes one of many methods for estimation. It shouldn’t be surprising that people struggle with that nuance. People want a single number that they can easily/accurately measure and doesn’t change constantly. FTP is not that. The good news is that it doesn’t need to be in order to be used as an effective training metric.
Regarding the “The_Cog” ban, I’d rather interact with a less educated but polite person than the opposite.
FTP isn’t hard to understand, and I don’t think people struggle with it. The point is, I’m doing 2x20 SST today. Would that be 85% of 100%? If the 100% fluctuates +/-5%, how about Vo2? Should I go all-out? Endurance, breathing? Sustained? I believe that using FTP to then escalate zones and use them rigidly isn’t appropriate.
I know myself to understand my zones without being arbitrary. I know when I’m doing what, but I’ve been in this thing for a decade. For someone starting is more complex.
The whole history of FTP around TR and this forum boggles the mind. People don’t like to test (then why do structured training?), thus TR comes up with the very imperfect ramp test. People like to round up to nice whole numbers like 300 no matter what their actual FTP is, and many claim they struggle with just a 10 minute FTP interval. (I still maintain that if you struggle with just ten minutes at FTP then it’s not your FTP by definition.) Then TR comes up with AI to solve all this, and yet still people still have issues because under the new system FTP is exactly FTP because it’s some combination of FTP and PLs. Now we get “Why did AI take 3 points off my FTP?”
I started off doing the 20 minute test without the blowout. I absolutely hated the 20 minute test. I’d always go out too hard and fade or go out do easy and then end up with an all out 3 minutes at the end.
I finally tried the long form KM test and found nirvana. Once a month I can do a 20-30 minute threshold interval to feel out my FTP when my legs are on the fresher side. I don’t even need to measure my full TTE every month. It just no big deal doing this test and you can just add it to any workout.
Ideally, everyone would be polite, but everyone is wired differently and have different strengths and weaknesses. I like to think we can learn from and have constructive interactions with polite people and also people who are socially inept. There are too many smart/interesting people who tend to be assholes at times, I personally wouldn’t want to miss out on those interactions and don’t really care if it comes with some friction. I was on the receiving end of a couple pretty negative comments from Coggan on this forum, basically calling my opinion’s stupid. Maybe they were stupid, maybe not. I do and say stupid stuff on a daily basis. Didn’t bother me either way (wasn’t personal), but I can understand that it might bother others and the forum owners get to make the rules.
Which is an importnat point, as well…and it isn’t like TR doesn’t touch base with users and say “hey, this post was kinda uncool…please remember the forum rules.”
So he would have had multiple warning about violating the rules of the forum before they took the step of banning him. So he had the choice to modify his behavior and chose not to. 
I got bored of all the tests and just use 40min power as my FTP. Works well indoors too as Alpe Du Zwift takes me few minutes more than that.
Done bit like Kolie Moore style test but mostly just steady power I know I should be able to do. Adjust the watts by rpe.
The Kolie Moore test helped to learn what threshold feels like.