A must-listen for anyone serious about getting faster - all the science about FTP and what you should (and shouldn't) use it for.
This is a must-listen for anyone serious about getting faster. Sure, you’ll hear why Neal loves going hard for an hour and why Mac feels you should think about 4DP like a cupcake. But, more importantly, they break through all the hype on FTP, explore what’s wrong with most standard FTP tests, and why not everyone’s FTP works the same way. They also explain why FTP is great for setting targets for recovery and endurance - but NOT for high-intensity work — and what understanding your FTP relative to your MAP, AC and NM tell you about your potential for improvement.
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Mac Cassin 0:00
Welcome back to yet another episode of The Knowledge podcast by Wahoo. I'm Mac Cassin.
Neal Henderson 0:04
And I'm Neal Henderson. And this is part four of our talk about 4DP metrics. Today we are discussing the grand diggity, daddy of all power zone acronyms, FTP, also known as aka functional threshold power, needs a sound effect that we need
Mac Cassin 0:26
to remember, boom,
Neal Henderson 0:28
something, something big.
Mac Cassin 0:30
So the simplest way to think about FTP is that it's the power that can be maintained for approximately 30 to 60 minutes. The thing, the technical definition uses the term quasi-steady state effort, which just kind of leaves room for no one really knows what
Neal Henderson 0:45
it was I said, he said, I mean, if I were doing and steady our effort at my FTP, I can guarantee you my temperature, the core temperature would change unless I was in an extremely cold environment. So I'd have to say in a certain condition that it might be steady state, but in normal conditions, it wouldn't be
Mac Cassin 1:05
or even if you're going up a climb like that your elevation is increasing. So you get less oxygen delivered
Neal Henderson 1:13
to power could actually be decreasing with that heart rate could be rising, lots of different things that could be a non steady state, there's a lot of stuff that people might go into extreme depth in the nitpicking of this, and of that, and of this and of that. But big picture, it's kind of that sustainable power for in that 30 to 60 minute range. Yeah,
Mac Cassin 1:34
it's, you know, originally sort of tried to be correlated to lactate threshold to the point where lactate would start to accumulate. Again, that's not necessarily the case for everyone. But we do know for, for well trained individuals, you know, that steady state can be held for 50 to 60 minutes for most people unless trained, it's probably closer to 30 to 40.
Neal Henderson 1:57
Yep. And in some cases, it might even be more like that. A maximal lactate steady state, rather than where that lactate starts to rise. So again, there's lots of different things we can see between what laboratory and what scientists sometimes call a lactate threshold or maximal lactate, steady state, or all these different terms relative to them, what we're calling that functional threshold power, which, ultimately, we are going to be talking about the power output that you can sustain rather than these different physiological phenomena as much we're going to focus more on that, what is that value? What is that power target that you're able to sustain for that duration, we could also talk about your cycling threshold heart rate. So that would be the heart rate associated with that after holding it for a few minutes.
Mac Cassin 2:43
But again, like you were saying, In your example, your heart rate will continue to increase throughout an effort like that.
Neal Henderson 2:48
Anytime I've done and honest Hour of Power, my heart rate clearly goes above my cycling threshold heart rate for the last, oh, 40 minutes, in most cases, minimum 30 minutes, in the rarest of cool days, only 20 minutes is above that CTA chart, because it just always drifts up no matter what.
Mac Cassin 3:09
And so the the significance of FTP and why it's such a big component of training is, you know, we've discussed neuromuscular power and aerobic capacity, maximum aerobic power, those are all, you know, the domains of high intensity efforts
Neal Henderson 3:23
from extreme really down the high intensity, I would say like neuromuscular isn't that extreme and really anaerobic capacity to sorry, back.
Mac Cassin 3:30
And so that FTP represents, okay, that's on the lower intensity side of things. And so that's what you want to base, your low intensity, your endurance training your recovery rides, based on that FTP power. And even if you're doing a lot of high intensity training, even in a given workout like that, a lot of the time is spent at a recovery state. And just in general, for a proper training bounce, the majority of your writing is going to be a lower intensity. So you want to make sure you're at the right lower intensity.
Neal Henderson 4:03
Exactly. And just because we have an understanding of value, and value, high intensity work for specific purposes, that doesn't mean that you don't have to do the endurance work this is still a major factor for success for endurance athletes, you can't exclusively we'll say like eat the icing, you know, if we think about you know, anaerobic capacity neuromuscular work, Max aerobic power is like, you know, icing and sprinkles on a cake or cupcake, you know, you gotta have the cake in there for it to really be a good thing. Yeah, a little bit all four.
Mac Cassin 4:36
I'm liking this metaphor and I'm gonna go with map is the frosting because I like a good large amount of frosting on a cupcake and I like map the most so
Neal Henderson 4:45
yeah, and then like anaerobic capacity could be like the little like where you write your letter, you know? Happy birthday, you're right there and then like the neuromuscular sparklers the spark sparklers. Ooh, man. Yeah, I get I like it. Alright, I think is important.
Mac Cassin 5:02
I don't think Eddie appreciates this anymore.
Neal Henderson 5:04
So buttons isn't down with that.
Mac Cassin 5:07
All right back to back to the serious business. So, okay, we've got FTP, we were saying it's important, it's going to dictate a lot of your lower intensity training zones. And that is really that
Neal Henderson 5:17
border of high intensity. If you go above FTP, or in a true high intensity, right, you're
Mac Cassin 5:22
in a non sustainable state. Correct. So how do you go about testing your FTP?
Neal Henderson 5:29
Yep, there's a few different ways we can do it. One of the ways is just going out and doing like a 40 or so 5060 minute all out effort as hard as you can go. That's my like, happy place.
Mac Cassin 5:44
Kind of your. But you have to remember everyone, Neal's pretty weird. So it's not don't disagree. It's not everyone's happy. It's certainly not my happy place
Neal Henderson 5:53
Hour of Power. I've done it indoors. I've done it outdoors. It's just, it's a grand old time. You know, you get to sit with yourself for an hour and contemplate hanging on the edge.
Mac Cassin 6:05
I do think it was Eddie mercs after he did his our record. He said it was one of the hardest things he'd done in his life. And I believe he said he, he thought it took three years off of his life. Wow. But he didn't paces out didn't know. For those who don't know, his opening, kilo was a 110, which is
Neal Henderson 6:25
extreme crazy. A 112 is 50k an hour.
Mac Cassin 6:30
And yeah, so from a standing start, he went out of the gates hot and held on but
Neal Henderson 6:35
tough, tough guy. So there are other ways of doing it rather than that really long, steady state effort. So there's an old standard, we're going to talk about one that we don't necessarily use, and this would be having a rider athlete go out and do a 20 minute full out effort. And then just take 95% of that. Because Mack,
Mac Cassin 6:55
read because the idea would be that that additional 5% power is kind of coming from your anaerobic sources. And so you just chop 5% off, and Bingo Bango, you've got your FTP. The one of the issues here is when this was developed, the subjects who did this who had their lab tests done to determine FTP and did this in the field were more endurance inclined riders, they were more experienced, they had less anaerobic ability compared to the majority of people out there
Neal Henderson 7:25
probably more time trial type, or Climber type with a higher percentage of slow twitch muscle fiber, a lower anaerobic capacity, or w prime, some of those things created, then that it makes sense in that population that 95% could fit. But when we start to look at a broader population, we start to see that kind of fall apart. And I can tell you, I've had athletes, all the way down to 85% of that 20 minute power is actually their true FTP, because that 20 minute, they can just jam over their sustainable level, because they can dip into those anaerobic reserves, so deep in that into that w prime, and get a lot of energy being produced from there that they can really exceed what their true sustainable power is. And so those folks that really was overshooting their reality,
Mac Cassin 8:17
right, and so what you end up there with if your FTP is artificially high or inaccurate and set high, all of your training zones are, are off. And that might not sound like a big deal. But again, with the amount of time you're going to be spending, using FTP based targets, you want that to be as accurate as possible. And just as a side note, for everyone out there, this is something I took me a while to learn. But your zone two, for example, you know, can get up to 70% 75% of FTP, doesn't mean if you're doing a zone to write that you have to stay pegged at 75% the whole time,
Neal Henderson 8:52
please don't, please shoot to the middle with a plus and minus. So if we say 55 to 75%, for an endurance ride, shoot at 65 plus or minus 10%, you'll be spot on where you should be,
Mac Cassin 9:03
yes, the number of times I got to the end of a five hour ride and was so frustrated that my heart rate had gone all the way up to the top of zone two. But then my power was just steadily dropping. It was it would I internalized it a lot more than I should have. Yep.
Neal Henderson 9:21
So when we test this, that we still can use a 20 minute effort. But in the method that we use, we have a maximal five minute effort that precedes the 20 minute effort. And there's an incomplete recovery, a limited amount of time between the end of the five minute test and the beginning of the 20 minutes. So that's a differentiator that we use to really look then at a 20 minute value, but it's only going to be effective. If you do a maximal five minute if you could hold back on the five minute to be able to do more on the 20 then both of those values are not reflective for the five minute of your true Max aerobic power and then your 20 Minute is potentially going to be in excess of what could be sustained because you held back in the five minutes.
Mac Cassin 10:07
Yeah, and what we've when we've looked at this in the lab, what we see for that, after that five minute effort, when you get into the 20 Minute, lactate levels remain nice and high, but they remain stable, because at that point with the sort of fatigue you have going on, you just can't right above FTP, you can ride right up to it, it's that maximal steady state going any hot harder, you're not going to be able to sustain that for 20 minutes. So that's why, you know, when we do that, we were comfortable taking 100% of that 20 minute value. After that five minutes max effort. And we did for a while, again, we had a cut off there of the five minute has to be at least 115% of your 20 Minute to be accurate. And what we've since found is that in certain populations, that isn't the case, yep. But if you are, anyone in your 30s of any gender 115% is too low,
Neal Henderson 11:02
you still probably have some room to push up that aerobic ceiling, refer back to the max aerobic power episode to make sure you're aware of that. So another way is, when folks do a one minute ramp test to max, we'll just take straight up 75% of the highest one minute power.
Mac Cassin 11:21
Yeah, and if you go back and listen to hopefully, you've just finished listening to the map episode, but we go into the details that are about how a ramp test can be sort of faked by those with more anaerobic capacity. So again, just like the 95% of a 20 minute effort, there's a decent amount of the population who that final one minute power is really not correlated to their steady state ability. And again, you'll get artificially high FTP, which means you'll have training zones that are too high. And it's just it's not a it's not a good thing. Yep,
Neal Henderson 11:55
we're also able to calculate FTP, from the test that we use in system where there is a ramp to max that we get the max aerobic power, and then we do a steady effort that is below FTP, and we're looking at your power output versus heart rate there. And we have a combination of during the warmup, some power to heart rate values, we have your max aerobic kind of high end peak heart rate and peak aerobic power from the ramp, and then this steady state of below FTP, using the combination of those three values, then we are able to get a calculation, that is a much more accurate value for your FTP than doing just the 75% of your ramp.
Mac Cassin 12:38
And even if you if you don't do the constraint part, when we don't take a bullet blanket 75%, we actually have slight variations based on gender, age and weight to again, we know that there are trends across these different demographics. And so we want to implement that to make sure that you have accurate values. Exactly. So it's worth noting that like everyone wants to have a high FTP, but if you're doing training correctly, and then you test and your FTP has gone up, say 20 Watts, the last four weeks of training have all been off that lower FTP number, and you still got better, you don't need to have your FTP slammed to your absolute capacity at all times
Neal Henderson 13:23
Correct. Higher isn't always going to guarantee a better performance for sure. So your goal is as a trend to have an improvement in your own value. But it's not necessarily that you just compare yours to someone else's. And you can say who's always going to go faster in all conditions for sure. It might be more accurate on a, you know, virtual ride on the flat course. Because we don't get the difference in aerodynamics, if you just get power. On the same course with a similar weight, you know, that's relatively flat, then yeah, might be accurate. But if we start going uphill, we want to look at that power versus our body weight. We might look at other things that when we have courses or rides that have steeper sections and flatter sections, where you actually have to go above FTP, then again, those other relationship to the other three values and 40 p could clearly make a bigger impact on your performance.
Mac Cassin 14:25
Yeah, so you know, when you when you look at FTP, you can just look at that raw value, but it doesn't tell you the whole picture you want to in one part look at it as a percentage of map. So like how essentially how close to that ceiling? Are you we had back a while ago this was we had set close in our lab. Tour de France stage winner pretty pretty, pretty solid, incredible climber. This was before he joined yumbo and we got him in the lab test him he had I mean absolutely crazy numbers for power to wait for via to max like, through the roof. But what he didn't have was that FTP as a percentage of his vo to max his FTP, even though it was crazy high, it was a really low percentage of his vo to max to really low relative percentage, right? Yes, relative percentage. To the extent that was one of the worst I've ever seen testing. And so the this is back in 2017. So what that told us was, yeah, he's really good now, but he's gonna get better. And wow, he has done just that he's had success. And so from a standalone just looking at his FTP, you would have said, yeah, he's good. Maybe he can get better. But having that relative view of okay, where does his FTP set relative to these other metrics, that's how you really know how much room there is to improve or what you need to focus on. Yep.
Neal Henderson 15:49
And if you remember back to that map, Episode, my my story about Taylor Phinney, and the difference between him and some of the more established pros, that difference in their max aerobic power relative to FTP was kind of highlighted and Taylor had more room to grow and continue to advance and went on to win, you know, stages and Grand Tours, World Championships, etc, where the other guys kind of were at that, you know, at a high level, but didn't continue to grow, because they basically, they were at their ceiling. At that point, they tapped out got that FTP as high as a percentage of their map, as they could, they had developed their map as well as they could with the genetic gifts that they had. And that was kind of that that high point for them high watermark.
Mac Cassin 16:30
So to get that high watermark, this is a great transition. How do you how do you train to hit that high watermark? What do you need to do to train your FTP?
Neal Henderson 16:39
Yep, there's going to be predominantly endurance training as part of this. And, of course, just general endurance work for somebody who's just getting started can yield some benefit. And there can be a little bit of a payoff with some level of volume of training, longer rides of training well below FTP, but ultimately, you're going to get a little more bang from your buck when you start to work near that FTP. And so I find that it is a better idea to work either at or ideally even just a little bit below FTP, for efforts to develop your FTP than it is to go at or above even just a little bit above, we see a little bit of a shift. And what happens is you're basically sympathetic nervous system becomes activated once you are working above FTP to a greater extent than it is when you're below FTP. And so I know that may sound like Well, that's, you know, kind of splitting hairs Well, in a way, yes, it is that cusp point. And what happens is, there's just going to be a lot more stress hormones, more catabolic hormones released when you go above your FTP for efforts, and so it's going to take longer for your body to recover.
Mac Cassin 17:55
And again, these are longer efforts, they're all the intervals we talked about, for an MHC map, those are really nothing longer than six minutes, I was gonna
Neal Henderson 18:04
say, seconds to a few minutes, when we get into FTP, you know, three, four minutes is kind of the shortest range. And realistically, we start getting up into the 1015 20 minute long range for these kinds of repeats of efforts, not just one of them, but you know, three by 10 minutes, you know, six by five minutes, four by eight minutes, all different versions, two by 15, three by 20. All of that kind of stuff are part of it. But staying again at or ideally just below FTP tend to be a little bit better. One of the other things that we think about is this breakpoint where this FTP occurs. Again, if we're looking in the lab, we would see that lactate levels really rise significantly when we go above FTP. It's about basically production and clearance of lactate. And so we have both a high production and high clearance. If we're just below FTP, we have the same clearance rate if we're above FTP, but we don't have an increase in clearance. And so our clearance is actually maximally activated, even even just below FTP, and that's why we see some of those benefits and training accrue there, because that's a big part of it is this flux of lactate of being able to recycle and reuse it because lactate is a byproduct, not a waste product?
Mac Cassin 19:23
Yes, when we say lactate clearance, what we mean is your body is able to use it as an additional energy source
Neal Henderson 19:29
gluconeogenesis creating glucose back from that lactate does happen in the liver and the enzymes associated with that are upregulated when they're utilized feed forward mechanism here,
Mac Cassin 19:43
right so you've got these a lot of these things going on and that's going on in the mitochondria of utilizing that lactate going through this process of getting more energy out of it. And so when you train yourself to have these shifts these lactate fluxes up and down, you're you're constantly stressed Same that system and it's better to have that in a controlled and greater duration, rather than a one off hit, really flooded, it's going to clear what it can clear. But if you keep it kind of dancing around that Max clearance point, that's where you get the most bang for your buck for specifically increasing that FTP. Exactly,
Neal Henderson 20:21
yep, accumulating the time near that is more important than just putting a higher power output for like one off effort 10 minutes. So doing three by 10 minutes, just below clearly is going to create a much better stimulus than doing one effort 10% harder and then being unable to do more work after that.
Mac Cassin 20:42
And that's another reason why like something like over unders or or tempo with surges is so beneficial because you have these sections of over FTP or you know, short Sprint's, during it, you kind of flood your system with all the byproducts that it produces when you're non steady state effort. And then you come back down to below threshold, when your bodies can clear that stuff, you have dumped all this stuff, you force it to clear it. So working at a hard level, and then you go up over again, produce more, come back down and clear it. That's why those are some of the best for those situations better than even sometimes just writing dead flat it Fortunately, for 10 minutes,
Neal Henderson 21:22
exactly. And so there's a lot of ways of getting it done. One thing that is really important to keep in mind is just don't focus exclusively on your FTP and what that value is, and making it the be all end all it is a piece of the puzzle of training and performance. But it is not the absolute Keystone, it is not the highest most important point, it's a piece,
Mac Cassin 21:48
it's a piece. And I will say, you know this, with all of these different metrics and domains, they play a part in performance, but not not a single, there's not a single one that dictates all of it. They all interact play together. And hopefully at this point, after listening to the other three episodes, you can appreciate that FTP is a big component of performance. But there are a lot of other areas that impact that and that you can focus on.
Neal Henderson 22:17
Exactly. The other thing is, keep in mind that your FTP does even fluctuate from day to day, there's going to be plus and minus some percentage. So again, a little flexibility is far better than just being absolutely rigid. And if you can't do the effort, you know, to the law that that you're failing, that is not the case, giving a plus or minus a few percent, for sure is reality, don't freak out.
Mac Cassin 22:42
And like we already mentioned, you know, if you if you test and your FTP goes up, that means you've been doing a lot of training at the quote unquote, lower intensity than what your FTP, FTP actually was, you still got that improvement. So don't freak out that I need it to be dialed on 100% Right at the limit all the time. Yeah,
Neal Henderson 23:02
I worked with an athlete getting ready for an Ironman Triathlon one year. And we, you know, he definitely came into the lab, we did a lot of testing, we're looking where that kind of break point that threshold was in his FTP from from kind of his we'll say, mid season to like, right before a peak actually didn't change. And he was like, Oh, my gosh, it didn't go up, like, I'm not gonna be able to go faster. It's like, no, no, no, like, you're not writing an Ironman at 100% of FTP, we'd been working on your endurance. And so sustaining some portion of that some lesser percentage is what matters. And there was also a part of it of fueling and understanding how much he needed to take in and pacing his effort. And so even though his FTP wasn't any higher, he had a massive improvement in his in his bike split. And that Ironman, I think, close to 30 minutes ended up on the podium at Lake Placid. And so it's not, again exclusively like that you won't improve performance if you don't see your FTP go up.
Mac Cassin 23:58
And even just that absolute value of FTP, again, isn't the determinant when you look at the most successful World Tour pros, pros, their FTP isn't necessarily that much higher than like cat ones or domestic pros, the difference is that they can still right at that after five hours of hard racing or
Neal Henderson 24:16
two weeks and two and a half weeks or nearly three weeks and still get near and hold near those values and have less drop off than the regular or less, less well placed professionals.
Mac Cassin 24:31
Right. So even even at that level, the highest level FTP is not the single indicator of things.
Neal Henderson 24:37
Exactly. Well, Mac if you're looking to improve your FTP Are there any particular workouts that you really think are you know, the stuff that is good for you?
Mac Cassin 24:48
You know, I'm gonna do some a little controversial here and say that two of my favorites for improving FTP I've already mentioned in two other episodes, interest that would be Fight Club So sub threshold with some nice hard surges and 4020s Oh, yeah, lactate flux, you get along, when you lengthen out the number of those, you can reduce the intensity a bit and do longer blocks of them. I've always found that to be really helpful when it comes to just raw FTP centric workouts. There. The reason we have a FTP progression set of novidades is because I really liked them.
Neal Henderson 25:28
Yep, just gives you that progression to follow. Yeah, well, myself, I mean, it's hard to pull. Okay, that's three that top three they'll say attacker kind of the start a little under FTP and and a little over the chores. 4020s. There you go, Mac and then blender, because man, you're getting so much of everything, you're getting a great stimulus there. That being said, I'm gonna give a little shout out to the rookie, a very classic three by 10 minutes, it seemed like a good idea longer efforts predominantly below but with some surges over the bat starting and ending surges over FTP and then settling just under angels and cobbler are all strong contenders for my top three.
Mac Cassin 26:12
I do want to just throw out a fun fact to the listeners that I am one year older than blender, the workout,
Neal Henderson 26:19
barely, barely older. You were just a Big Mac. When that first happened. Way back the Wayback Machine at Penn State.
Mac Cassin 26:30
Neil has been up to this for I mean, as long as I've been alive for
Neal Henderson 26:35
more than a couple decades, for sure. Well, that is it for another episode, we're hope you're able to take away some useful information about FTP and how you can use this information to help make you a better and more capable endurance athlete. Thanks for listening to the knowledge podcast by Wahoo
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