How to determine your Functional Threshold Power
Lately there have been plenty of comments and inquiries about how to determine one's Functional Threshold Power. Do a search on the term threshold and you'll turn up a bunch of good material about increasing your FTP. But Bobber's FTP Mystery post highlighted that we hadn't really addressed the topic of how to determine your Functional Threshold Power on this site. Andy Coggan, the real Andy, answered with a pointer to his post on the wattage list from about a year ago.
With Andy's permission, I'm posting the content of his message here.
Andy Coggan's Seven Deadly Sins
How to determine your Functional Threshold Power (roughly in order of increasing certainty):
- from inspection of a ride file.
- from power distribution profile from multiple rides.
- from blood lactate measurements (better or worse, depending on how it is done).
- based on normalized power from a hard ~1 h race.
- using critical power testing and analysis.
- from the power that you can routinely generate during long intervals done in training.
- from the average power during a ~1 h TT (the best predictor of performance is performance itself).
Note the key words "hard", "routinely", and "average" in methods 4, 6, and 7...
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Also 75% of MAP
I searched the topica list a little more and noticed (remembered reading in the past as well) that Andy also pointed out taking 75% of a MAP test. This article by coach Ric Stern describes how to do a MAP test. Ric has also devised training zones based on your MAP results. This page at Coach Stern's web site will calculate them for you. Andy pointed out that FTP should typically exist between 72% and 77% of MAP. So a good question to follow this up with is where would you insert 75% of MAP in the list? And then we have to rename the list to Andy's 8 deadly sins!
why I'm against fixed ratios (20 min power x 0.95, MAP x 0.75)
Both of these methods will, in most cases, provide a reasonable estimate of your functional threshold power, but there will always be outliers. Take, for example, my wife: her functional threshold power was only 90% of her 20 min power, because she had an extremely high anaerobic capacity (as you'd expect for an elite pursuiter). OTOH, my functional threshold power is 97% of my 20 min power, because my anaerobic capacity is less than average. So, why go to the trouble of conducting some sort of formal test if you're only going to get a ballpark estimate anyway?
Good Info
Thanks Andy, that's very good to know. I think you are really very similar to Joe Friel in this sense except Friel tends to prefer a 30 minute time as an FTP proxy instead of 60. I talked with Andy Applegate about this some time ago and his rational for 30 was that it was closer to what a person would typically do for a 40k TT done under race conditions.
I think I must be similar to your wife (although there's no way I will win a world championship of course) as I just can't come close to any of the estimates of my FTP. Last fall I did a MAP test and got 310 watts. I think I had lost a slight amount of fitness. But even so, 75% would be 232.5 which is slightly higher than what I have been able to achieve even this summer when in fairly good fitness. But I have improved on shorter times significantly.
3 x 20 power
My method is to just use the power I can maintain for 3 x 20' interval workouts. No testing required - training is testing and testing is training...
Rest Interval?
Dave,
How much rest time between the 3 20s?
And now we are up to nine deadly sins! :0
Rest Interval
Ah, isn't that still 7 deadly sins? Number 6 to be exact.
RI, Monod method
Hi Bobber,
I always do the 3x20 workout on a climb, so the RI ends up being the descent. Pretty long at 8 minutes or so...
Here's a spreadsheet I put together some time ago to do the Monod critical power calcs. I used this method exclusively for maybe 3 years and really liked it - it was very consistent and gave me an idea of changing levels of AWC and FT. The downside is the training inconvienence. AWC doesn't matter much to me these days so the 3x20 method works fine as it's a regular workout of mine.
AWC?
Pardon my ignorance but what is AWC?
Never Mind
Searching Topica reveals something about Anaerobic Wattage Capacity and Level 6.
also...
a short local tt will work... ours is about 15-20 minutes...
I find that 1x20 power tracks ~= 95% of threshold or 1hr power...
which interestingly enought tracks with the other deadly sins (MAP inluded) or even the regression method that I have come to call "ScherrerCogganHowe" from cherry picking peak AVE power numbers...
g
Hunter's idea?
A 20 minute test minus five percent is the technique that Hunter Allen uses. Is this what you mean?
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