Normalized power

gubber12345

Can normalized power be used as your ftp??

Reason I ask is my ftp is 219...not brilliant I know but hey ho.when I looked at my stats on my ride on Saturday I noticed that my NP was 231 watts for 26mins.

So as above can I now use this number as my updated ftp....hope so cos I hate the test itself(like most people I suppose)

ryan_w-2

In short. No.

joey54321

Nope, but a NP higher than your FTP does indicate you should be doing a test, what was the ave power for those 26 minutes?

That is a borderline effort 231 * 0.95 = 219w which is your current FTP. If after that 26 minutes you were maxed out it's likely that your 219 is still in the right ballpark.

gubber12345

joey54321 wrote:

Nope, but a NP higher than your FTP does indicate you should be doing a test, what was the ave power for those 26 minutes?

That is a borderline effort 231 * 0.95 = 219w which is your current FTP. If after that 26 minutes you were maxed out it's likely that your 219 is still in the right ballpark.

Yeah just looked and the avg for the 26mins was 217...prob not to far off.
I wouldn't have said I was maxed out(was climbing at the time) but certainly was giving a good effort..maybe time for the dreaded 20 mins test.

joey54321

It depends why and what you are doing the test for but you could try something like a ramp test instead. Mentally much easier.

Or look in to the CP model and pick 2 random distances, one shorter and one longer and use that.

Tom Dean

I think 26 mins is too short to draw any conclusion. The recommendation is usually if NP is 1.05 x FTP for about an hour it’s time to retest.

Alex_Simmons/RST

gubber12345 wrote:

Can normalized power be used as your ftp??

Reason I ask is my ftp is 219...not brilliant I know but hey ho.when I looked at my stats on my ride on Saturday I noticed that my NP was 231 watts for 26mins.

So as above can I now use this number as my updated ftp....hope so cos I hate the test itself(like most people I suppose)

26 minutes is a bit too short a duration.

One way to estimate FTP is from the NP resulting from hard ride of about 1 hour duration.

It may however be a little higher than FTP, but it will be closer to FTP than your average power from a hard ride of about an hour.

Typically NP from a hard ride of about an hour will be no more than 5% higher than FTP.

gubber12345

joey54321 wrote:

It depends why and what you are doing the test for but you could try something like a ramp test instead. Mentally much easier.

Or look in to the CP model and pick 2 random distances, one shorter and one longer and use that.

Basically just trying to get my ftp up a bit as I have a couple of 100 mile sportier coming up this year and really want to be able to do them comfortably and hopefully get a new PR for the 100 miler.

Recently bought myself a power meter and working off my numbers now to improve if I can.

gubber12345

How accurate are these ramp tests instead of the ftp test....do they just put you in the ballpark or are they near enough correct??

ryan_w-2

Take them with a pinch of salt, but you just go for as long as you can and then take your best minute power and multiply by 0.75.

They're good to monitor your progress against yourself. As for the final number, kind of irrelevant in the real world.

OnTheRopes

gubber12345 wrote:

How accurate are these ramp tests instead of the ftp test....do they just put you in the ballpark or are they near enough correct??

The problem with the 20 minute test is getting the pacing right, go out too fast which is common and you will be lucky to last, go out too slow and it will not be an accurate figure and add in the discomfort and general dread of doing them then it is not an easy test to get a meaningful figure.
So, how do you get your pace right? One answer is do lots of 20 minute tests, which is not a popular answer.
So, in comes the ramp test, easier to do mentally and quite popular for this reason but is it accurate?
Dr Stephen Lane who developed the ramp test does say somewhere that it gives a number to set your pace for the 20 minute test. So for more accuracy, do the ramp test followed at a later date by the 20 minute test.
Also you should by rights do a test for Trainer, a test for the road etc. .....

Alex_Simmons/RST

OnTheRopes wrote:

Dr Stephen Lane who developed the ramp test

Such tests were developed and performed before Dr Lane was born.

supermurph09

Alex_Simmons/RST wrote:

OnTheRopes wrote:

Dr Stephen Lane who developed the ramp test

Such tests were developed and performed before Dr Lane was born.

On a similar vein, I went to a great lecture at loughborough uni last night, have you ever read the book "bicycles and tricycles" ?

Alex_Simmons/RST

Supermurph09 wrote:

Alex_Simmons/RST wrote:

OnTheRopes wrote:

Dr Stephen Lane who developed the ramp test

Such tests were developed and performed before Dr Lane was born.

On a similar vein, I went to a great lecture at loughborough uni last night, have you ever read the book "bicycles and tricycles" ?

Only a small section I referenced in this blog item:

https://wattmatters.blog/home/2015/01/t ... ocity.html

This was the chapter which described pedalling forces and showed the pedal force plots from force measurement pedals designed and developed in the late 1800s.

I think I looked at some other parts but it was an online reference and not all of it was viewable.

stueys

If it helps I’ve found ramp test to be pretty accurate to my 20minute test result. So I don’t do 20 minute tests anymore as ramp is easier to be consistent on and far more palatable. I’ve also found xert and wko4 calculations to be pretty accurate, only issue with those is base training time when you aren’t really pushing hard intervals.

MishMash95

I personally interpret Normalized Power as performance potential. It's not the same mental battle as holding power for an hour, but IMO, it is still a great training metric. So for me, if I cycle for an hour and set a new NP record (hasn't ever actually happened) I would update my FTP. Also, I would also take NP over shorter durations with a pinch of salt, (30 minutes or less) because of how the smoothing algorithms work, short durations won't correctly fit the defined mathematical model.

For example, you may be able to pull a higher NP in a race situation with surges than in a steady-state TT, but my interpretation of this is that during that scenario, the athlete is better adapted to surges and recovery, however if they were to train steady-state, they would very likely be able to achieve that power in a TT as well.

I personally find Strava's Normalized power to be very accurate, but Wahoo's estimate takes the piss, it gets super inflated by high-end work and doesn't decay much as a result of easy pedalling.

Also, depending on your anaerobic capacity, your NP may or may not be accurate. For myself personally, I have a decently high anaerobic capacity in proportion to my FTP (400w for 4 minutes when I had an FTP of 270w = 33kJ anaerobic capacity https://www.cyclingpowerlab.com/MonodCriticalPower.aspx) and this means that my normalized power tends to be inflated for shorter rides with a single, or few, maximal efforts. The ride where I set that effort had a Normalized Power of 255w for an hour, despite it being 4 minutes of effort, plus 56 minutes pootling in low-mid Zone 2. In this instance, it wouldn't be representative of a TT effort, but as far as how tired I felt after the ride, was probably proportional.

Interestingly, my highest normalized power ride also happened to be a steady-state ride haha xD which surprised me, as I always expected to be able to get a high NP just by doing lots of race-style short anaerobic efforts, though it can still be difficult to eek out.

Alex_Simmons/RST

I did a three part series on Normalized Power and "NP busters" some years back:
https://wattmatters.blog/home/2013/03/y ... art-i.html
https://wattmatters.blog/home/2013/03/y ... rt-ii.html
https://wattmatters.blog/home/2013/06/y ... t-iii.html