Does it give any guidance or a goal that is useful?
A few self-critical comments above already show the negative reaction (when they see their position in the range as below average or desired) that several of us predicted.
It may serve as a disincentive for some, or as an outcome goal that may or may not be attainable/appropriate for others.
Data can be used in a number of ways… some good, some not so good. This data doesn’t offer much other than a comparison of a single point that’s not useful on it’s own.
@mcneese.chad said above essentially what I would have in response to your post.
Interesting, yes but not particularly helpful or necessarily motivating. Lots of caveats with the data even if you do feel able to take something constructive from it.
I do get one thing out of it. My wife is about 4 watt/kg and I’m at like 3.85 watt/kg right now. So normalizing for gender my wife is really like 4.5 watt/kg and I am in awe of her.
She should have a podcast about grit. I’ve seen her miss like 3 workouts in our 8 year marriage. She took two days off to have a stroke, and then like 2 other days off due to really bad sickness. The power of consistency!
IMO, I think for the right type of person, it’s pretty motivating to know where you need to be w/kg wise to be in the top X percent. Especially if it feels in range when you see how few people are at the pointy end of things.
If you give me a carrot, I’m going to want to chase it.
I’ve seen this chart expressed as 20 minute power before too. Considering there are quotes that coggan never said ftp was 1 hour power that may be true. The context of the ftp number can make a big difference. 5% change in power for me is almost .25 gain in w/kg.
It is and it isn’t, and it does and it doesn’t in my opinion.
Although we all know, but then again maybe some people don’t know, that setting a plan and following it, and with a bit of consistancy mixed in there, will assist in you becoming faster, stronger, whatever, to a point; lot of people are visual, and can infer from the graphs produced on the data, ok it can be taken with a pinch of salt, that if they train improvements maybe had. All obvious, I know.
Any processed data be it gathered from TR, poles, surveys, medical trails, etc, is always subjective to individuals who will arrive at their own conclusions to it usefulness, validity, etc. You don’t think it is helpful, there are others that will.
Although Nate has spoilt us with the graphs he has provided, you could go to town all day long cross analysing against other data, eg take the graph of either All Men or All Women and apply average hours trained along the X axis of FTP/kg. Yes people know that not all training is created equal, neither is the effort that people put in, but there are some people who are absolute monsters who do very little training compared to say someone who does 6 - 8 hours per week religiously year in year out, but they are no faster. However I’m fairly confident that the scale would show training time increasing as FTP/kg increases, but it would be interesting to see what these durations are, and are there any abnormalities like whether when people get over say 5W/kg then there is a blip / drop off in hours as these people maybe trainer smarter? It’s not to say that this is the magic number of hours you need to be doing per week to acheive 4W/kg, but more just the trend of duration related to W/kg.
The same could be done for time of day that people train against FTP/kg.
Although the 2 graphs may show it, it doesn’t mean that people need to train for 12 hours per week at 2000hrs (both a guess) to acheive their target, it’ like I said in my other topic, “it is just trivia”, and some people are interested in it.
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