Given I’ve found my mojo I’ve decided to do some of the TrainerRoad plans I used to love.
I return from holiday on Sunday am going to get stuck into the plan on Tuesday which will start with the FTP test.
Pretty much all of my outdoor riding for the rest of the year will be on a road bike (commute and weekends) with 3 dedicated TR sessions on the TT. So should I do the test holding TT position, accept the much lower result to if I was sat up, then train to those numbers in the TT position? Or test sat up, train to the higher number and do turbo intervals in the TT position to gradually get comfortable at the higher power?
Obvious answer is to test twice on each bike / position. Give yourself a couple of days between tests. You might find that there isn’t that much difference
TT position, accepting that you’ll swap in and out as you get more fidgety. (The number produced will be largely the same)
You’ll get a decent base number from that and then as you know you’ll quickly get used to the TT position again and your next test will be all TT position.
If you had a race you were building up to, I’d say definitely test and train in aero position.
Given that race is a fair way off next year and you’re only road riding, I would consider training in road position for the sake of variety until you are 28-30 weeks out.
Trainerroad technically recommend testing in the position you’ll train.
However, for consistency I just test sat up each time. I mix aero into most sessions, and actually find the TT bike more comfortable for prolonged periods of time. I’ve never perceived a huge disparity between my numbers however, at least at race level intensities. If I was racing sprint/oly where I was working at or above ftp, then maybe I’d think differently
In theory you should have multiple FTP’s as road bike will be different to TT sat up and TT in aero. Inside is different to outside etc etc. Bottom line is it is all semantics. You should do 90% of your training just going steady, and the rest just go fucking hard. Don’t over complicate it anymore than that.
In the book 80/20 it is based on number of sessions not amount of time going easy. When you consider rest in a hard session its closer to 90% easy. bottom line is do one proper interval session on the bike a week, and some parts of every swim at speed. run largely easy except maybe some strides unless you are in a build phase towards a goal.
I think the problem with my running when I go long, is that I do no speed work building to an Ironman. Yes, I do intervals in swims all the time, and a hard Zwift session. But the run is generally 2x Brick and a long run (at least this year)
