Raising the ceiling

Training
1

After quite a lot of work with TR and cycling outside, I can see that my heart rate is really starting to drop at higher power efforts which is great and means I can recover faster, however it feels that my upper end (150% FTP seems to have suffered a bit).

What doesn’t seem to have improved much is my power curve. I’ve just now completed my last big event for the year (Dragon Ride in Wales) and after a few days to let my sit bones want to now think about how to raise the ceiling.

What’s the best training to do this?

A general build phase, which focuses on anaerobic & vo2Max, combined with endurance training to keep my endurance gains?

1 Like
2

No ideas guys?

3

What’s your goal? Depending what you mean by raising the ceiling the answer could be a lot of things.

1 Like
4

I want to be able to output more power for longer, in addition to the same power at lower heart rates.

5

I would say, building your aerobic base is the first thing, and you’ve done that! Great job. Now, with that higher base, and shorter recovery requirements you’ll be able to spend more time in the VO2max zones and work on your power and mental (most important!) aspects of performance.

Time in zone > Threshold is going to give you the best power, mental, and performance gains. And now that you have a strong aerobic base, you’ll be limited only by what you want to build.

Keep up the good work!

By “mental” I mean your work ethic and the ability to continue working, and choosing to let the discomfort increase because you want to (have to) keep going to get what you want. It’s definitely something that has to be trained.

1 Like
6

Thanks - looking at the various build programs, it seems that the short and general power build seem to have the most > threshold times. General is threshold, anaerobic & VO2max which seems to be quite appropriate.

Edit: is there any sort of guidance as to when I should do threshold vs VO2Max work?

7

The typical way to go is doing extensive work (SS/FTP work) to increase your TTE (time to exhaustion) followed by the intensive work (above threshold intervals).

I’d recommend the WKO training videos on youtube. Extensive/intensive is covered pretty in depth. Kollie Moore talks a lot about this stuff in his podcast as well.

There are some related topics on the fasttalk forum too:

https://forums.fasttalklabs.com/t/raising-the-ceiling-ftp-vo2/1588

https://forums.fasttalklabs.com/t/raising-the-floor-lt1-tempo/2508