Hi guys, today I started week 5 of the 18 week SS Plan. Last week was a Regen week so felt ready to rock n roll today. So In each interval it seemed I could push the wants easily and my legs felt great. My average wattage for each interval were 270, 271, 270, 265. (I don’t have these on my screen when riding so didn’t shoot for them). My question is would you recommend a test as my FTP is currently set at 245w after the initial 20min test at the beginning of the plan?
All the best
Neil
If you are doing sweet spot work 110% of your FTP clearly yes, your FTP is set too low - that is a great problem to have!
Thanks Frank, unfortunately at the moment I am unable to afford the coaching subscription (working on the wife’s permission at the moment). But what I’m thinking off doing then is do the Sweetspot intervals tomorrow, Endurance in Thursday then after a rest day Friday do an FTP test on Saturday before my SS group ride /solo ride!!!
I know I won’t be FTFP on Saturday, however if I’m going to get my zones correct need to do the test early in the 3 week building block and after a rest day
Yeah, another test, IMO. But, be careful. I can do 4x8 @ 130%, easy. When it hits 150%, I’m struggling. What does that mean? Not a whole lot, other than describing my physiology, my phenotype is more geared towards short term power and above FTP efforts play into that. I can push into VO2 longer and harder than some others, but I’m far from being an expert, just that I’ve done a fair bit of self-analysis on my power duration. In exchange for that, my FTP is low. I cannot go “that hard” and not pay the price, though I can ride that wave for these type of workouts without a problem.
I can do 3x8 @108%, and recover @ 90% and hold that for an IF of .97 for at least 50 minutes, if not an hour, and I can/would do that week after week I would even dare say I can do 3x8@120% or 4x8@120% and recover @ 90%. That said, I do work like 2x40 @ 90% frequently. Completely sustainable. But, I just wanted to cite that as you could be in the “VO2Max” zone, and based on your phenotype, it might not be that big of a struggle. When you start to push longer durations and pushing up against TTE, you will know, for sure, where your FTP is.
If you look later in the week or the weeks after, you probably have 2x20s or longer scheduled. There you will see the balance between your phenotype and your FTP. I see lots of questions surrounding, my FTP is probably too low. A counter question. Are you going to lower it if you can’t hold that 2x20, or if you blow up in the first 10 minutes?
I’m probably going to get smacked pretty hard for making this comment, but a lot of this plays into your physiology, a fast twitcher or a slow twitcher. For me, it’s important to ride sweet spot for hour long climbs and be able to surge hard over small bumps/rocks in the terrain, and “recover” in sweet spot. And to do that repeatedly. So, I’m always hesitant to chase the vanity FTP number, and look at my real efforts on longer durations.
I’ve chased that vanity number before (stroked my ego pretty hard), and ended up completely blowing up on 3x20/4x20 long workouts. I ended up digging above “FTP” on longer intervals and could not clear enough during recovery intervals. The plan is going to balance short and long term power, so keep an eye out for it.
Long intervals aren’t everything though, as that brings up the TTE part of it (and how FTP is not really one hour, but could be significantly less or more than an hour).
Interesting reading your comment as you described yourself very much like me, I to am able to hit some some high Vo2 and above effort and drop without a problem back into sweetspot. But have never been a great TTer. More of sprinter/last 2km attacker.
I decided not to retest my FTP bit decided to recreate my Zones so they are the top end of my current FTP and the bottoms end of what I estimate my new FTP to be!!! This will ensure I am FTFPing but not going to easy in each zone.
I will reassess after the next regen week!!!
What do you think of that???
That sounds good to me. The plan should have spots to retest regularly, and you should be growing. So the workouts should seem less painful, but at the same time, the plan is increasing time in zone (to work on TTE). You can definitely target the upper end of zones. The zones are pretty big, which helps a lot for outdoors and uneven terrain with spiking power, and makes it easy to focus where you want, on a trainer. Also, important to not forget that Coggan Zone 4 is 91-105%, so you can bump a workout up a few %, entirely. Being able to do so consistently and hitting the target all the time, is a definite indicator that you’re improving. The only downside is overreaching, and some people won’t know until a month or two down the road, when the wheels fall off the wagon and you need 2 weeks to recover. A good indicator of that is testing down a bunch of watts on your next test instead of holding flat or improving. I’m pretty sure that’s why there’s the FtFP mantra here.
I don’t think overreaching will be an issue as I am not going outside of the zones requested within the plan, I am just riding at the upper end of them. The only thing I need to be aware of is that I produce a higher TSS than the plan indicates by riding in the upper end of a zone.
My way around this is to only allow myself to go 50tss over the weekly suggested amount in the plan. So I sometimes have to remove the zone 2 ride to keep things from sky rocketing.
My non trading days in a week are Monday and Thursday. So I do the normal Tuesday and Wednesday training as set out in the plan. Then on Friday and Saturday I do the weekends training and Sunday I do the Zone 2 that was originally set in the plan for the Wednesday. This again enables me to keep the Fatigue dependency of the plan and also allows the option to remove or shorten the zone 2 on Sunday if the weekly TSS is to high.