Hi all, I recently participated in a short Zwift race (took just over 20 minutes) and afterwards was informed by TP that my power threshold increased from 330w to 356w. I’m unsure if I should update it in TP yet as I still have four weeks left of 16 weeks of sweet spot plan and am a bit nervous about how much the intervals will ramp up. Any suggestions on what to do?
Did you do the 20 min test at the halfway point of the program? How did that go?
Well that is usually a great sign! So what was your peak 20 minute power in the race? You can use the peak average power, NOT normalized power, to determine your FTP just like if you had done our 20 minute field test. Just take 95% of that 20 minute peak power and that is roughly your FTP.
Now remember your FTP is a power you can sustain for an hour. Some athletes can produce a huge amounts of anaerobic power that can throw off the 20 minute test a bit and inflate the number. In reality your FTP maybe anywhere between 93 - 97% of your peak 20 minute power but on average we always use 95%.
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I certainly did, moved from 320w to 330w
My 20 minute power was 375w so the 356w threshold would be correct! Just not sure how accurate it might be with me only completing a 10 minute warm up beforehand rather than the rest of a normal field test.
So your last field test was around 350 watts and in the race you did 375 watts for 20 minutes? Congrats, that’s a great improvement. How long has it been since your field test? Was it the same power meter (no switching from a PM to smart trainer data, for example?)? Did you feel you under-performed on your last test?
Thanks! Last field test was roughly 4 weeks before the race, and the same power meter as I test indoors to make sure it’s always repeatable (I live on the coast so it’s always windy to some degree, but not in my pain cave) I don’t feel like I underperformed on my field test but definitely felt closer to throwing up after the race!!