Increasing Threshold Power, total mileage vs speedwork..

maryka wrote:

For low volume fairly inexperienced cyclists, more mileage is always the answer. Get up to 200-250 miles per week and see what happens. Now is the best time to increase your riding volume, given the season. It's got to be easy though, below 80% max HR.

In winter you can see if you can handle more threshold/intensity, if you're more serious about it then turbo work is ideal for that.

I'm happy with that - on track for 250 this week, with two 100 mile rides in 3 days.

To put my original question another way, which intensity for the non-commute riding ?

I could ride near threshold at 200W, but would start to bonk after an hour. 180W (sweet spot?) I could manage two. 160W I can do all day long.

I suppose I could split the 180W/200W session to get around the bonk problem and find more saddle time.

Eg. Session in the morning, then a meal, then go again in the evening.

One pitfall is that I heard the exercise adaptation occurs during rest, so split sessions may not be so useful. The other problem with short, fast rides aren't going to take me very far, and i'll soon get very bored of the local routes. Once I get >30 miles from my house my ears prick up and I start looking interested, which is why i like the long stuff.

So, a week could look like this :

Day 1 working - commute
Day 2 working - commute
Day 3 working - commute
Day 4 working - commute, detour on way home for another hour as I don' t have to be up in the morning. Best not to overdo this , as I'm heavily in sleep debt at this point and i've gone into a hedge a few times by microsleeping in the saddle.

Day 1 off - evening ride 200W 1hr
Day 2 off - lunchtime ride 180W 2hr
Day 3 off - long ride - 6 to 8 hours at 160W
Day 4 off - rest

Total of 20-23 hours over 8 days

Second unrelated question, how much FTP could I pick up ? I've heard that 30% is possible on an untrained individual. Whilst I'm not starting from zero I suppose I've not been doing proper mileage that long.

Update :

I've been keeping at the commute and throwing in a 100 mile ride on my days off since my last post, but my Vector 3 pedals decided to get flakey and I had no power data, until Thursday when I finally received a replacement battery holder. This precluded any notion of speedwork or being more structured.

In the meantime I also acquired a Garmin compatible chest strap HRM.

The power meter part arrived at 2pm and I immediately set off on a 120 miler, arriving home at 2am. As it now has access to both HR and Power, the Edge plus cycle computer has started calculating performance parameters for me, though an Endurance ride like that probably is not the best source of data. Anyway, after that long ride it said my VO2 max was a respectable (for my age) 45. It also upgraded my estimated FTP to 209 (still mediocre ofc).

Yesterday I was back at work, data from the commute upgraded my estimated VO2 to 47 (excellent?). Today, I received a further upgrade to 48 ml/kg/min. A 7.5% gain in VO2 max in 3 days is certainly... beyond what i thought likely.

Unfortunately, I've seen some backsliding on the FTP, back to 200 again.

My house is on the top of a hill, looking at the data from the end of my commute home, I held 200W+ for over 3 minutes and to me it looks like my heart rate has stabilized at 125BPM or so (also note the lovely dropout from my power meter, still unresolved).



(edit - for some reason the PNG image doesn't show in the post, if you right click and open image in new tab you can see the graph)

Therefore I suspect my actual FTP is over 200W, but I'll have to wait for my next block of days off to put this to the test. Assuming I don't wimp out of it - I don't like pain. Long rides are fine because they don't hurt. Sometimes they ache a bit, but mostly I just dissociate and occasionally trip balls. They are a form of procrastination.

OK, I tried another "power test", this being six weeks on from my OP.

Unfortunately, the Vector 3 pedals started dropping out (one week old battery end cap, two day old batteries) as the test went on , till I gave up after 10 minutes. I feel this effort would have been sustainable until i hit bonk or heatstroke (UK's second hottest day on record, was humid too). The Garmin Connect site does not count zero readings towards the average, so it says 240w average and 230w weighted average for the 10 minutes. Strava, which must be counting the zeros, said i only did 159w.



I also made a little Excel chart of heart rate vs average power for my commutes. Most of these cluster in the 114BPM/!65W range. Setting off before breakfast, I usually arrive at work quite ravenous. There is an outlier from a day when my legs felt very dead and i wasn't able to push HR over 102. The upside was that I didn't arrive hungry, rather than hanging off the canteen shutters waiting for them to open, I actually took break an hour later than normal, while i was in between tasks. At the opposite end of the scale are the numbers from this "power test".



Garmin connect currently thinks my VO2 max is 50mL/kg but still maintains i only have 200W FTP, this effort wasn't long enough to convince it. I'm going out for a 6 hour jaunt tonight with what passes for a big climb in these parts, so i'll try putting in a good 20 minutes for that and hopefully it'll notice. I'll pay a price no doubt but heck, it's only a 6 hour ride, should be able to finish that even if this brings me to my knees.

Third time lucky with the Garmin Vectors, maybe this time I've added just the right amount of oil to not have the contacts corrode, and tightened the battery door just enough to not have it fall off like the last one or strip the thread like the first one.

So I decided to try a 1 hour effort. I'd been putting it off, but when i finally got round to doing the thing, it was even less fun than i thought it would be.

On Velonews they say, "we overcomplicate training prescriptions but underestimate the complexity of human physiology". I was under the impression that if something's aerobic you can sustain it till you run out of glycogen, but this may not be so, especially if you're a nubcake like me and still riding around without clipping in, trying to shovel 100% of your VO2 max through one muscle group, and are completely unused to working at this intensity.

After a while, I found it hard to maintain target power on the flats. Every time I'd look down at the power meter, I'd slipped back to 180W though my legs were still burning and HR and cadence were unchanged. I'd try to spin or grind to get power back to where it needed to be, but didn't always have the force of will required. Wonder if that's just fibres getting fatigued and me rotating different groups? Near the end of the hour, I reached a big hill and found it relatively easy to get the power numbers back. You can see there was about 7 and a half minutes of 240-245 watt climbing with hr fairly steady 149-152. After finishing, my breathing went to normal very quickly and i started scarfing through the bonk food.



Overall though stats for the hour were -

AVG Power - 218W
AVG HR - 152BPM
Max HR - 162BPM
AVG Cadence - 100 (v high!)

Next morning my resting HR was elevated by 15BPM and my legs were really sore and visibly swollen.

It turns out, I never enabled the "Auto Calculate FTP" option on my Garmin, so it still says my FTP is at the default 200W. No problem, now that i adjusted myself I just need to go out and do that again ! Stuff that.

Apparently the 95% rule for 20 min FTP may lead to an overestimate. According to this guy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4Gik9lxCek

, who compared Strava data of real athlete's 20 minute vs 60 minute results, the difference was much larger with amateur riders and the less TT style work the rider does on a regular basis, the bigger the delta. Worst case, this can be 15% or more. Well , I certainly don't do any regular riding at this intensity, but on the other hand my anaerobic capacity is also essentially untrained so i could probably game the system and get a 10% better 20 minute test score.

That would mean holding 253watts for 20 minutes, which might be possible for me.

Back to training, I heard something on Velonews that indicates intervals are necessary after all. Apparently there is a separate pathway for aerobic adaptation that is triggered by ATP depletion, rather than just time in aerobic zones. This pathway has faster adaptation than that triggered by LSD riding but less ultimate potential, which is why speedwork often only comes in for a month or two before race season. OK, but pretty sure this was the same voice that said too much over threshold work trains your Fast Twitch Oxidative fibers more into glycolytic adaptation, ie. more anaerobic capacity at the expense of aerobic. Whatever, looks like more torture incoming...

Well, so much for the 20 minute FTP test.



Over the hour I averaged 220W. My average for the 20 minute was 224W, which actually comes out as a lower number when you apply the 95% rule. Yes, it was a heatwave day yesterday, but I'm coming to the conclusion that my threshold really is 220W currently. 110% of threshold power feels ok for 5 or 6 minutes, then becomes torture, then a couple of minutes later i'm unable to maintain the output. Had I maintained a steady 220W instead of trying to chase 250W and blowing up, i'd probably have had a steady HR in the low 150s.

On Velonews they mentioned that anaerobic capacity is usually equal to a minute of a person's output at VO2 max. I suppose it ties in with this.

220W is still a 10% gain in 2 months, which is ok, I wasn't starting as a complete novice either. If I'm showing 230 in another couple months I'll be happy. Incidentally, I've been across a few busy A road roundabouts recently, and have seen a new 1 sec power value too - 947W, which is also up 10%. Even though i'm not doing anything to train this, it's going up just as much ... makes me wonder if i got more fast twitch fibres than slow ones.

NitrousOxide wrote:

A full-on 20min test effort would leave you absolutely drained, unable to do anything immediately afterwards than very low recovery power (very approx sub 130W) for several minutes.

It would also likely see your heartrate at least hit, if not exceed, your Lactate Threshold Heart Rate (a rate roughly equivalent to what you could hold for 20mins).

If I do a Zwift "ramp test" which in total takes me ~20mins (but the FTP estimate it gives me I find very optimistic, way above what I feel I could sustain for 20mins), I'm usually happy to do another session or two afterwards including power intervals.
However, if I do "Emily's Short Mix" and fake my FTP in Zwift to ~20% higher than my current estimated FTP, the final 20mins before the cool down of this 30min workout will result in a marginally improved FTP if I complete it... Which leaves my legs absolutely drained, I then do 5-10mins of ~80W and I'm done for the day, with the next day being very soft pedalling besides perhaps the odd few seconds power spike.

It did ! As soon as the timer hit 20 i dropped the bike and lay on my hands and knees in the verge for about a minute, gasping. After that I wobbled along at 120W for a few minutes till some nice young lady on a road bike pulled alongside at the foot of Stathern Hill and started talking to me. I averaged 235W on that climb but only for about 6 minutes. I didn't feel too bad during that effort and was able to keep talking but the logs show i hit 167 HR which is the highest i've seen in the last couple years. Shows the value of having a distraction i suppose.

After the 1 hour FTP effort i was pretty ok, just felt like i was nearing the end of my glycogen reserves. My legs hurt and was mightly glad for it to be over, all the same. Think i went deep into oxygen debt in the first half of the 20 minute FTP and didn't repay the overdraft till i stopped.

I wonder how many people base their FTP on that Ramp test. There's a vlogger i follow who quotes a very impressive number, but none of their Strava rides for the past few months has average power over 200 watts, even when they were racing. Maybe that was a historic figure, after losing weight and switching training emphasis their FTP is no longer what it used to be.