Nate and I addressed a question from an athlete asking our stance on whether people should ignore FTP or if people should hyperfocus on it. Those were two extremes, but it made for a good question, hehe.
We covered that question by explaining that we don’t feel FTP alone is sufficient, hence how TrainerRoad’s models analyze your abilities in each zone independently, and also discussed a possible change on how much emphasis we place on FTP (possibly almost getting rid of it?? ).
After that we dig back into the athlete’s account we briefly discussed last week, but this time in more detail, looking at what they are doing well and what can be improved.
Hope you enjoy! Share with others, and feel free to let us know your thoughts on de-emphasizing FTP.
I think so too. I saw the pitchforks in my mind’s eye when he mentioned it, but as I mentioned in the podcast, it’s a big hangup for a lot of athletes, and a pure wattage approach could be better…
On workouts revealing only on the day, my only concern would be when it’s outdoor - you need to match the route to the workout, and/or some can be quite finicky.
You’ll still have a good idea of the workout structure. For example, you’ll still see if it’s on/offs or traditional VO2 intervals, or over-unders, or float sets, etc.
But the more important counterpoint to this is as of now, if you look at Friday’s workout on Sunday, it almost certainly won’t end up being what is on your calendar, so any further planning you could do for the specific workout vs. having the Zone, Profile, Duration, TSS, and a thumbnail could cause more problems for you.
These designs aren’t final and I might need to take them down (ignore the black boxes. Those are admin tools), but here’s what a week in the future might look like:
If it’s a big hang up for some athletes, one option is definitely to move away from it. Another would be to help people better understand how and when it can be useful, as well as when to ignore it and not be hyper-focused on it as the metric. Changing tracks just because some people have issues with it is not a good path, IMO.
I like the place cards for future workouts, clears up some confusion.
Wish the workout would at least show what is the most likely workout you would get if you did everything correctly for that week.
I would still give this a shot and I bet it would be fine.
Maybe add the option to keep it the old school way for the athletes that wouldn’t like this.
But theses cards
Totally normal, Dave. 70+ ml/kg in your mid 40s on 9 hours of biking? Have fun out there other Masters athletes. Is TrainerRoad releasing an “40-49 hour record” training plan?
I guess TR could handle FTP and everything behind the scenes and hide it from the user, but there would have to be some understanding of where your physiological threshold is to prescribe workouts. Or at least, a target RPE for a given wattage and duration.
Maybe TR could say, instead of an endurance ride, I need you to ride for an hour at a continuous wattage where your RPE will be easy or moderate, here is the watt target, and it’s some absolute endurance PL score for a workout, 0-100, 100 being Pogacar’s Z2. There wouldn’t need to be a workout library at all, you’d just set a duration and TR would give you a wattage target to get you to that goal RPE.
It gets harder as you go up in intensity, because without FTP there is no definition of intensity, just more watts. So how do you prescribe sweet spot? Call it muscular endurance? How do you delineate 4x10 and 2x20? I think you almost have to fall into one type of workout per zone instead of all the mishmash of types of workouts we have now.
Say sweetspot efforts. SS RPE should be between moderate or hard. Does TR say, I’m going to give you a wattage that will make 2x20 feel hard? And if it’s a “threshold” workout, its a wattage that makes 2x20 feel very hard? VO2 workouts are 5 minute efforts at a wattage that feels very hard?
I think TR would end up in a place where athletes would still track FTP, just on different platforms for analysis. Without FTP you’d lose IF, TSS, and other stuff. Intervals.icu would get more users.
As someone who does all their workouts outside, I agree with this. If a workout didn’t suit the hill I lived on & I didn’t have time or fatigue-bearing capacity to add the 1h15’ round trip to use the velodrome, either the week got shifted around, or the workout got swapped out. Beyond the velodrome or the perfect flat country road, Antelope +5 & Monitor +5 are classified the same but require very different routes. Antelope’s longer recovery times permitted me to do it on a hill with switchbacks but Monitor +5 required a longer, sustained climb.
Regarding workouts revealing them self on the day.. I would like it 1-2 days in advance so I mentally can prepare me for the pain ahead and maybe see my history and compare it to previous done workouts.
Is it too late to put the FTP genie back in the lamp?
If so, TR has to acknowledge its role as one of the most vigorous lamp rubbers around.
I think ignore is too strong a word.
Maybe the focus on it reduces if AIFTP changes to be something that reports on other measures in addition to FTP, e.g. TTE, KJ used, Z2 (or Zx) power etc. etc
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