Australian Cycling Forums - Bicycles Network Australia

Quick question, power newbie here, recently started training with power and my FTP has risen 30w+ over the last 50 days.
What approach should I take to see out the 90 days I had planned?

- Carry on at the initial FTP wattage?
- Or go with the new wattage and adjust all zones & workouts accordingly?

Crawf wrote:Quick question, power newbie here, recently started training with power and my FTP has risen 30w+ over the last 50 days.
What approach should I take to see out the 90 days I had planned?

- Carry on at the initial FTP wattage?
- Or go with the new wattage and adjust all zones & workouts accordingly?

Well you should adjust power training levels to reflect your current fitness levels, but as to what training you should be doing and whether your original plans needs modifying, that's a different question and not really possible to answer with a general response.

The original plan ridden at updated power levels may well be just right, or it might be that you are ready for a different level of workload, or a change in training emphasis. Hard to say, it's very individual.

But if you are seeing good progress, then something is working and so suggest you just stay the course with updated training levels and see how it goes. A large part of improvement comes from applying some sound basic principles, with one of those being consistency. The nice thing about having an objective measure to add to your subject sensations is that you can determine if training is actually having a desirable effect.

30 watts is a very solid increase.
Anything in particular in your training that you can attribute such gain?
I am starting to use power also in my training and still getting my head around it all
Crawl, feel free to share your training program

Nothing spesh, just consistency, structure & too many 4am starts.
I don't think 30w is a big jump if you suck in the first place I think another 20w is very achievable though.

Yes, you should perform a baseline test every month and adjust your ftp based on that.

I do a 20min ITT and use the normalised power - 5% as FTP. Doing this will keep yur IF and TSS accurate and relevant for planning your training loads.

craigg wrote:Yes, you should perform a baseline test every month and adjust your ftp based on that.

I do a 20min ITT and use the normalised power - 5% as FTP. Doing this will keep yur IF and TSS accurate and relevant for planning your training loads.

That would over estimate FTP for the majority of people.

FTP is typically in the range of 93 +/- 3% of maximal 20-min average power.