Andy Coggan's Seven Deadly Sins

How to determine your Functional Threshold Power

In decreasing order of reliability:

  1. from the average power during a ~1 h TT (the best predictor of performance is performance itself).
  2. from the power that you can routinely generate during long intervals done in training.
  3. using critical power testing and analysis.
  4. based on normalized power from a hard ~1 h race.
  5. from blood lactate measurements (better or worse, depending on how it is done).
  6. from power distribution profile from multiple rides.
  7. from inspection of a ride file.

Note the key words "hard", "routinely", and "average" in methods 1, 2, and 4.