Improving Your Functional Threshold Power - Why it's not everything

This blog post is probably aimed more towards the amateur racing cyclist than it is towards an elite cyclist, as the gains that can be made if you're an amateur rider are far more than that of a well trained elite cyclist.

What's a reasonable improvement in FTP? A question that I've been asked a few times when I begin coaching a racing cyclist but particularly riders new to training with a power meter. In the cafe or at races, you'll often hear talk along the lines of "What's your FTP?" or that someone has done such and such to increase their FTP to 'X'.

Bear with me for a minute while I explain why focusing only on FTP as the key indicator of a cyclists performance profile is not optimal.

Most riders don't realise that FTP is not the holy grail of cycling performance and it's not something that should be obsessed over. Why? Because there is far more to a riders performance profile than what power they can hold for 20 or 60 minutes. For example, racing rarely involves riding at a steady effort for exactly one hour. It depends on things such as anaerobic capacity, repeatability of efforts, technical skills, and fatigue resistance over longer durations. FTP only captures one point on a rider’s power curve.

Two riders with the same FTP can perform very differently depending on their strengths, one rider might excel in short, high power efforts, whereas the other rider could be better at sustained aerobic efforts. FTP doesn’t reflect the full capabilities that determine real-world cycling performance.

FTP also doesn't account for a riders ability to resist or manage fatigue, this is highlighted because it is one of the most important aspects of a riders cycling performance, and perhaps more important in elite races as they are longer and harder races, however, for riders racing at Cat 3 and Cat 4, it is also still a valid area to work on.

Testing and understanding your FTP is still valuable, I just don't rate how highly some people place it in terms of determining a riders performance profile, because it never shows the full picture. Now, the question on how much it can be improved each year?

For elite riders, very little, as they have spent years training and have gotten very close to their genetic ceiling. This could be somewhere < 2% per year and for professional riders, some might not see an improvement at all after a certain amount of years, instead they will often focus on improving repeatability, efficiency, race weight or race execution rather than raw FTP.

For amateur riders with a year or less of experience, an example would be between a 10-20% improvement in the second year of cycling training and racing. If a rider weighed 70kg and started with an FTP of 210w or 3 W/kg, they may see their FTP reach 252w or 3.6 W/kg in year 2. It's highly individual of course, but many novice racers will often see a good 10-20% improvement within one year of consistent training and racing.

However, this is where riders become fixated on improving their FTP to the point where they don't focus on the other key areas of their performance profile, and this happens in many racing categories.

It's that time of year where riders return to winter training and I can guarantee you, many will have one eye on how much their FTP will increase next season. Instead, I would encourage any riders focusing on only FTP as their performance test, to switch their focus to a full performance testing profile, for example, looking to test their critical power for 30 seconds, 1 minute, 5 minutes and 20 minutes.

This will help you understand your overall abilities as a rider to some extent, obviously other areas such as the ability to resist fatigue can't fully be tested here but you can get a very good view of your overall ability, at least much more than that of an FTP test.

Thanks for reading,

Graham

OBN Performance