exception to my suggestion in a recent post that you could get a very rough
gauge of your functional threshold power (FTP) based on several variables, the
major one being your body weight. This could prove useful if you wanted to set a FTP goal for your bike training.
Someone pointed out to me that there were also contrary comments on other
websites such as SlowTwitch.com. (One guy there threatened to throw away all of my
books for writing such an extreme piece. I wonder how he deals with topics such
as abortion, gun control and the war in Afghanistan. :)
I realized that as I was
reading these comments that several were made by triathletes. It was
hard to tell in many cases, but the SlowTwitch.com comments were more than likely
multisporters. That flipped on a light bulb for me making me aware of yet another major variable that would downgrade
someone’s FTP if the guidelines in my original post were followed – time in the
saddle.
The less time you ride in a
week, on average, the lower your FTP is likely to be. I suspect that if we
compared the FTPs of roadies and tris we’d find that for comparable levels of
competition within their sports that the roadies would have higher FTPs. I
don’t know that for a fact but I’ve seen something like this happen four times in the last five
years with clients and myself. I’ve had three clients who went from multisport
racing to bike-only racing for various reasons. In each case the athlete's FTP
increased significantly. The biggest change was for a 50-something male with a couple of decades as a very competitive triathlete who
went from 240 watts at FTP as a triathlete to 280 watts as a road cyclist – a
17% increase in less than three months. The same sort of thing, only not quite
so great a change, happened to me when I had to stop running five years ago due
to a knee that didn’t like it any more after nearly 50 years of running. My FTP
increased about 20 watts over the course of a season.
So why do I think this
happened for each of these triathletes? More time in the saddle. And, along with
that, more hard workouts in a week on the bike.
I would say, based on what
I’ve seen in such athletes, that the less time you ride in a week the lower your FTP is
likely to be. Obviously, if you only ride once a week, no matter what you do
the remainder of the days in the week (don’t forget the specificity principle
of training) you will have very little improvement in cycling fitness. If you
gradually built from one to seven days a week you could expect a
significant change in FTP. Why? More specific cycling-related stress. Stress
produces adaptation (ala Hans Selye). Greater stress means more adaptation.
More adaptation means more fitness in general including a higher FTP. (There is specific training you can do to improve FTP which I will get to at a later time.)
Most competitive age-group
triathletes ride 3 to 5 times in a week getting perhaps 6 to 12 hours of saddle
time. Serious road cyclists typically ride 6 or 7 times a week with perhaps
12 to 20 hours of butt-on-saddle time. More bike-specific stress. Higher FTP.
So my very rough guess (no
science here – strictly opinion) is that if you are a typical triathlete you
can subtract in the neighborhood of 10 to 20% from the FTP you estimated from my
previous post and probably come closer to a number which is appropriate for you
given all of the other variables. The more you ride the less you'd subtract. If you ride a lot, however, like more than 15 hours a
week as many serious Ironman triathletes do, your FTP will be on par with most
comparable road cyclists.
I hope no one takes this to
mean that I believe triathletes are poor cyclists. This is not intended to be an indictment of
triathlon in any way. It’s merely an observation of a key difference between triathletes
and road cyclists when it comes to FTP – an observation which needs to be considered when estimating what your FTP could be with more focused training.
On the whole I think we can figure that
a triathlete’s FTP is likely to be lower than that of a road cyclist with
everything else being equal – weight, age, gender, body composition, altitude
and experience. To be on par they would have to train the same amount and in the same way.
Good luck to everyone doing Ironman Canada next weekend – especially TrainingBible Coaching athletes!
