Power Mentor Group with Shane & Marc - Closed. (Page 8)

The definitions and explanations of critical power/FTP are super helpful, thank you.

I got out for a 40 minute spin, super easy, knee seemed a little stiff but no pain. And I've got data! Everything seemed to be working and managed to get the ride uploaded to Golden Cheetah! Do you guys then upload that file into your BT training log? That might be what I have to figure out next...

Jaime

Did FTP test from Allen and Coggan:

20 min endurance pace (65% FTP)
3 x 1 min 100+rpm (1 min RI)
5 min easy riding (65% FTP)
5 min all out
10 min easy riding (65% FTP)
20 min time trial
10-15 min easy riding/cool down (65% FTP)

315 watts for 5 min portion of test
268 watts for the 20 min time trial

I had to estimate when I started, since I had no clue what my FTP was. Also, I've taken a 4 month layoff, so I feel I'll need to test again soon, it should jump a bit as I get back into riding shape, and I should have a better strategy for the test next time around.

I have a question though, if you are riding for your 20 minutes, and you still feel like you can push harder at 20 min, can you go for 22 min for example, and subtract out the first 2 minutes? Since the goal is to do 20 minutes as hard as you can?

Double post.

Edited by ImSore 2013-12-29 2:18 PM

Wow, great to see all the hard work although feel bad for those who have found the end of 2013 to be filled with injury woes! Hopefully nothing that lasts too long and we see everyone able to have a solid 2014!

I'm hoping that now that most of the holiday season is over, I'll have more time to respond to posts as while I have been reading pretty much everything, I haven't had a great deal of time to respond to posts.

As Marc said, we are looking at January 6th as the kick off and we will want to test during the first week to establish a baseline. We will get to the actual workotus for the week toward the end of this week but I put together an overview of some of the information that I thought would be important as we head into the first week of this program. My initial thought when talking to Marc about this was to create a complete document regarding the program but as I sat down and started to write, I realized that it might be a little less overwhelming if we took things in a more of a week by week manner. For the first week most of what I've written revolves around testing and as we go forward we will talk more about other elements of training with power. By the end you should have a very solid knowledge of how to train with power and hopefully having the smaller chunks makes it more manageable in terms of developing your understanding.

If there is anything that is unclear, always feel comfortable asking questions; it is unlikely you will be the only one with the question.

For this week, I would simply focus on getting a few rides in using whatever means you have for power data collection; watch what your power does in a variety of situations, see how power and effort correlate and upload your workouts into Golden Cheetah and just play around with the software a little. There will be lots of things that may not make sense if you are new to power but even being comfortable with importing ride files and seeing how a file is presented will have value as we analyze rides later in the program.

All the best in 2014!

Shane

With the group, the first week we will be completing baseline power testing for all athletes; there is really only one way to truly test functional threshold power (FTP) and that is a one hour, all out effort. However, since this is a very hard effort that few athletes would relish undertaking on a regular basis, it is common to use a proxy for FTP that allows an athlete to test using shorter efforts in order to make a prediction of FTP. You can read more about different testing methodologies at Alex Simmon’s website (http://alex-cycle.blogspot.ca/2008/05/the-seven-deadly-sins.html).

For our purposes we will be using the Critical Power (CP) model where we will use two different tests in order to extrapolate your CP (which is basically analogous to FTP). While they are not exactly the same thing, for our purposes we will be able to use these interchangeably and since most power documentation revolves around the use of FTP, although we are actually testing CP we may call it FTP. When it comes to cycling performance, the most important marker is going to be FTP, whether you are racing a sprint distance event, an Ironman or anything in between. While it will be important to do some race specific work in the build up to your event(s), over the winter simply focusing on raising FTP as much as possible is typically the best approach which is what we will be doing in the coming weeks.

In order to test CP, we will complete a short test (5 minutes) and a long test (20 minutes) over two different sessions. It is important that these are completed over two different sessions as the CP model revolves around determining what is called the Anaerobic Work Capacity (AWC) and if one were to complete both tests in the same session, the AWC would not recover between tests and this would skew the results. The basic premise of the CP model is that the five minute test, while an aerobic effort, relies heavily on the AWC and, when combined with the twenty minute test, will allow us to determine the power you can generate for a one hour all out effort. For both tests we will complete a warmup including a few short harder efforts and move into the test; the goal will be to pace evenly across the entire test and finish knowing that you could not have gone any harder. If you feel you had more gas in the tank at the end, this will be valuable as we go forward as learning how to test is valuable not only for the test sets but also for other training sessions and for racing. As Marc has said, one of the key things that comes with training with power is that it often resets an athlete’s idea of what is hard and what is easy.

To calculate CP, we will be using Golden Cheetah and you will be able to input your short and long test results in order to have the program calculate your CP. We will then be using CP as a guide going forward to target percentages of CP in your workouts.

There will be four workouts available for athletes each week; while you are certainly free to do all four, based on your testing, we will recommend which three should be the key workouts for the week. The short test will give us insight into your power at VO2max (level 5) and FTP (level 4) is your threshold power. If these two numbers are fairly close together, while threshold work will be important, so will a VO2max session as power at VO2max will limit threshold. However, if these values are quite a bit different, then the VO2max session becomes less important and it may be more beneficial to include two threshold workouts instead of a threshold and a VO2max effort. There will also be a longer workout for each week focused either on sweet spot (high level 3/low level 4) work or tempo (level 3). Another consideration will be how much time you have available as well as how much time you want to spend on the trainer for any one session; since the tempo or sweet spot session will be longer than the other sessions, if you prefer to do a shorter but harder workout, then you can do that as well. Also, if you are planning to do a hard run workout during this block of bike training, you will likely not want to do two threshold and a VO2max workout as you want to alternate hard days with easy days. If you have three hard bike workouts in a week, unless you are very fit, you should be looking at running easy all the time so that you aren’t trying to do too much hard training. My suggestion would be that you drop running into maintenance mode while doing this; you can certainly run frequently but your running is going to be easy for all runs and I would cap the long run around the 90 minute range. For a bike focus session I would look at most runs being in the 20-40 minute range and then one longer run of 60-90 minutes. For the shorter runs, I would probably suggest strides on a run or two a week if you want to include some intensity but the watchword needs to be easy for almost all running.

The above test is one method to approximate FTP.
The 5'/20' in separate sessions is another.

On this test, you would take 95% of 268 = 254w

The CP calculator would give that same number if you use those values
IF you did the 20' fresh you would score higher and get a higher CP.

From Coggan himself

quote, ( talking about the 5' all out )

I don't know how many people follow Hunter's advice, but I can say this:

1) if you don't, then 95% of your 20 min power will overestimate your functional threshold power much more often than it underestimates it; but

2) if I did a truly all-out 5 min effort first, I'd have a hard time even completing another 20 min at a reasonable effort any time soon, much less averaging 95% of my functional threshold power.

As for the relationship between 5 min and 20 min power, that will depend upon your anaerobic work capacity relative to your critical power.

end of quote

What I really like about the 5/20' test on separate sessions is you can go longer than 20' and it will use the extra in the calculation. If you have gas, you can go an extra 4' crank up the watts and you will get a higher CP
A coach I worked with actually preferred a 30' test.

PS : you folks are crazy with all this testing :-)

Edited by marcag 2013-12-29 3:11 PM

Very happy to hear that
Missing finger parts we can deal with
Broken hands, no problem
Missing power data, we'll fix that.

But knees are needed to this adventure.

Great to see you Shane!

I agree. I think people will relate a lot more when they get to manipulate THEIR data rather than the theoretical stuff a document/book presents.

It's cool to see people trying to get a feel for their power

Which before we forget
Be consistent in your trainer setup
Calibrate, calibrate, calibrate

Nothing worst than doing a 20' FTP test only to realize the data is not reliable.

Decided to skip the 5 min CP test today and rode outside to enjoy the beautiful weather we are having here in California (ride was mid-50s with no wind).

I think I'll try the 5 min test on Tuesday morning. I need to try and get back into the pool tomorrow.

I suspect they will resolve it quickly. Both are known for their excellent customer service. Wheelbuilder is usually really fast. I have ordered disc covers from them in the afternoon and had them in Canada the next day.

Ya, I wouldn't do that. Hopefully you can get the ball rolling with them today.



There are so many, but off the top of my head since we are going to go into detail of each

The more historical data you can get in there the more interesting they are.
If I am looking at historical data, the PMC chart I use to monitor my training load. If you can get a lot of data into GC this will be really interesting. We will spend some time on this chart in the near future.
Again with historical data I look at my CP chart. This shows a red line that is your theoretical CP curve, it shows points along that curve that you have actually hit and it shows a single workout and how it compares to the other 2. I like this chart. For hoots, you then go out and try to get workouts to touch, or surpass the red line. We will get into this once people have tested

I usually look at the ride tab. If not on the computrainer I look at how well I did my intervals. I try to make sure the intervals are as even as possible and check if I am tapering off at the end (this is not possible on a computrainer). I personally look at my HR at the end of the intervals and can tell how much I was suffering or not suffering.
On long rides I look at "best 1hr", "best 2hr", "best 5min" intervals. I sometimes go out on a ride wanting to better my best 2hr interval. Some people chase KOMs, I personally chase myself.

I rarely look at things like QA

It also depends on the type of workout. If I am doing intervals I look for one thing. If I am doing long even stuff I do look at my HR response. I know a lot of people would poopoo HR but I find it useful. Then again I am weird for this stuff. I can tell you the speed I am going in my car by the gear I am in and the RPM


I personally like 10sec. Often I'll have 3sec, 10sec, and lap average. 30sec is too long for my liking. %FTP I know by heart and I find it jumps around as well.


Edited by marcag 2013-12-30 7:12 AM

Just got done running the Jacksonville, FL marathon yesterday and really am looking forward to getting on the bike. I'll probably give it a few more days to recover. Won't run for a couple weeks though. Since were a closed group, I'll share my results. Didn't do a race report. Ran 3:32:59. I went in very well trained and was trying to BQ at 3:15. Was on pace through half of it, but knew I couldn't make it. It rained about an hour in and when I say rained it was tropical rain type stuff where you couldn't see and my stride was different. If I went out at an easier pace I could have posted a better time, but I went for a BQ and came up short. No regrets there. Better to go for it than not. Good news is for running I age up next year and my BQ time goes to a 3:25, which is realistic. I really believe this is going to pay dividends for Tri in 2014.

Bring on the bike is this years motto.

Tom

Windows or mac ? On my mac I have two workouts that are there, but don't display. But if add a new one, all is fine. I want to get to the bottom of it

For the spikes, could there be a distance issue from trainer to PC ? Just guessing here

Nice run. No doubt the running base and now this will set you up well.
Not too beat up after the M ?

Do you have a speed or cadence sensor separate from your PT ?

I'm curious about this.  I was going to ask but had so many other questions I thought I'd hold off. But since you are asking....

Should we use a speed cadence sensor with a PT?  I never took mine off when I got my PT, didn't really think about it.  Is it necessary, or just one more thing to have to worry about malfunctioning? =(

BTW - I called Wheelbuilder and the guy was very nice. He is fed ex-ing out a new cap/hub/part something to see if that fixes my problem.  He said from what I told him he thinks it will, so I'm keeping fingers and toes crossed.

Edited by karen26.2 2013-12-30 3:32 PM

Normally you don't worry about it. I just read in one of the GC forums that the two can confuse GC and cause spikes in watts, symptoms like Elaine was having. The PT sends cadence and speed, so does the sensor.

In GC, under Tools there seems to be a "Fix power spikes" tool.
Does that correct the data ? Do you see drops after the spike ?