With accurate, reliable smart trainers like KICKR and SNAP becoming more accessible to athletes, more athletes are realizing the advantages of training with power. More athletes are taking advantage of functional threshold power (FTP). FTP refers to your highest sustained power output over one hour; cyclists and coaches often focus training efforts around increasing this number; conventional wisdom holds that in order to enhance threshold power you should focus on threshold efforts while training them separately.
However, such an approach fails to consider individual athletes’ varying power production across duration and intensities – even among riders with similar FTP. Each of them may possess differing capacities when pushing beyond threshold wattages – making it challenging to design one-size-fits-all training approaches using FTP as the only metric.
Think of your goal of reaching higher FTP as your destination; how far you have to travel and the vehicle most suitable to getting you there depends entirely upon where you start from today. Just because two athletes share similar destinations doesn’t mean they all begin from equal places. Though their distance may be the same, athletes could take different routes when covering it. One athlete might need to navigate unpaved roads and mountain passes while another has direct freeway access. Knowing exactly where you stand when planning the best route can be daunting task – that is why smart trainers like KICKR are such powerful tools; providing real-time feedback about power output that you can track over time as a means for planning. But looking beyond FTP may reveal additional sources of power output!
At Wahoo Sports Science, our comprehensive power test measures not just FTP but also Neuromuscular Power (5-second power), Maximal Aerobic Power (5-minute power) and Anaerobic Capacity (1-minute power). This same power test used by The SYSTM’s Four-Dimensional Power(tm) platform (4DP), known by Wahoo as Full Frontal; we refer to it simply as Full Frontal as this reveals what an athlete’s capabilities across different efforts are; as well as important relationships between different forms of producing power on their bike: MAP =FTP =
Roughly equivalent to your power at VO2 Max, MAP can be determined in Full Frontal with an all-out 5-minute effort. In physiological terms, MAP represents your body’s maximum oxygen uptake when producing power; furthermore it acts as an upper limit on FTP; the latter always remains below and constrained by it; every person’s individual ratio between their MAP to FTP ratio varies, though generally when fresh your MAP shouldn’t drop below 115% of FTP; regardless of how hard or fast your work, your FTP won’t move any higher regardless. No matter how hard tempo and threshold work you put out there until MAP increases again or vice versa
On the opposite end of the spectrum are athletes with MAP values as high as 140% of FTP. Just as one can reach too much or too little endurance, once one’s MAP reaches certain level relative to FTP it won’t increase further until their endurance improves further – it is not simply numbers in isolation that matter but their relationship between one another that counts!
Imagine two athletes with identical FTP, where one athlete’s MAP stands at 115% of FTP while the other stands at 140%; both want to increase their ability to produce sustained power (think time trial or triathlon bike leg), but one may need to work on raising his/her ceiling while building strength; to meet that same goal successfully both must take different approaches; simply measuring FTP wouldn’t reveal key differences.
First and foremost, understanding how your power production changes with duration and intensity is the cornerstone of designing an effective training strategy tailored to your physiology. Accurate power measurement during training along with an objective understanding of your current status are the keys to reaching your desired destination: You are more than your FTP!
