The Time-Crunched Cyclist Podcast by CTS

Is FTP Dead? Is Critical Power the Cyclist's Next Great Training Metric? (#270)

• CTS • Season 5 • Episode 270

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OVERVIEW
Cody Stephenson is the Education Program Manager at TrainingPeaks, meaning he teaches coaches how to properly utilize training data to improve performance. He's the perfect sports scientist to discuss the similarities and differences between Functional Threshold Power (FTP) and Critical Power (CP), Functional Reserve Capacity (FRC) and W Prime, and how all these training metrics and methodologies relate to each other. Best of all, he and Coach Adam Pulford are pragmatists, so they explain the strengths and weaknesses of each, without bias or hidden agendas.

TOPICS COVERED

  • Is FTP dead?
  • What is Functional Reserve Capacity (FRC)?
  • Explaining P Max
  • Are Critical Power and W Prime better than FTP and FRC?
  • How to choose between FTP/FRC vs. CP/W Prime
  • Why is "clean data" so important?

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Guest Bio – Cody Stephenson

Cody grew up racing mountain bikes in Durango, Colorado where he developed a passion for endurance sports, science, math and technology. He switched to the road and track while racing for Fort Lewis College, where he also managed to get a couple of science degrees. Now he gets to write and talk about his favorite topics every day as Education Program Manager at TrainingPeaks. When he’s not helping coaches learn to leverage technology to reach their goals he’s trying to become as good of a mountain bike racer as he was when he was 13 years old.

Resources:

- Cody Stephenson LinkedIn
- Articles: https://www.trainingpeaks.com/coach-blog/how-to-coach-athletes-who-arent-racing/
- CP W’ vs FTP alone
- Analyzing FTP by Joe Friel
- Power Training with WKO:
- Why Train Submaximally? WKO Case Study - Targeting Specific PDC Improvements 
- Learning More about LLM’s and AI

HOST
Adam Pulford has been a CTS Coach for nearly two decades and holds a B.S. in Exercise Physiology. He's participated in and coached hundreds of athletes for endurance events all around the world.

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Speaker 1:

From the team at CTS. This is the Time Crunch Cyclist podcast, our show dedicated to answering your training questions and providing actionable advice to help you improve your performance even if you're strapped for time. I'm your host, coach Adam Pulford, and I'm one of the over 50 professional coaches who make up the team at CTS. In each episode, I draw on our team's collective knowledge, other coaches and experts in the field to provide you with the practical ways to get the most out of your training and ultimately become the best cyclist that you can be. Now on to our show. Now onto our show. Is FTP dead? Will AI take over the endurance coaching world, and what's the best system to monitor data for both your aerobic and anaerobic performance? Welcome back, time Crunch fans.

Speaker 1:

I'm your host, coach Adam Pulford. We'll be unpacking answers around these questions today, while talking about training data, which happens to be one of my favorite subjects. But I'll admit, I am just a lowly coach and not the smartest when it comes to all of this. So, lucky for you, I found someone who is. I think the best summation of what he does can be found on his LinkedIn page, which says I check that complicated things are accurate. I figure out how complicated things might be useful. I make sure complicated things are easy to understand and I try to make useful complicated things fun. And that comes from Cody Stevenson of Training Peaks. Cody, welcome to the show.

Speaker 2:

Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here of Training Peaks.

Speaker 1:

Cody, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. Yeah, I'm excited for this conversation. So let's do a quick intro on you for people who may not know you, like I do, and that you're living in Boulder and doing the whole Training Peaks and bike thing. Can you tell our audience a little bit more about yourself and how you came to all the knowledge that you have and the role that you play?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so I grew up in Durango, colorado, and you know, in some cases personal history might not where you're from is where you're from, but being in Durango pretty much means you have to be a bike racer and also means I grew up around Todd Wells, ned Overend, howard Grotz, sepp Kuss and all of their siblings, who were also really fast, and so it was like born into a competitive cycling environment and I'm also not the most naturally talented athlete, and so I was. But I was also a science and math nerd from third grade on. So looking for you know any, any tool or trick or way to kind of smart my way into whatever athletic deficiency I had, so always been into training with data. I got my first heart rate monitor as a birthday present when I was 16 years old, so my parents kind of knew where I was going to um and leveraged that to some success. I uh wanted to be a mountain bike racer, but that was a little bit more of a requires natural talent. Went to road racing where I could use kind of like more data, more tactics, try to smart my way into it. Um had some fun racing collegiate road and mountain um and track.

Speaker 2:

Got a couple of science degrees at Fort Lewis, then went to graduate school for exercise physiology at Colorado state university and at that point it was like been around, been using training school for exercise physiology at Colorado State University, and at that point I'd been using TrainingPeaks for 10 years. At that point, as a customer knew some exercise science, was okay at math, loved technology, and so there was kind of one place I could Strava didn't exist yet. So the one place I could work in the world was TrainingPeaks and been there ever since. Now I'm the head of education at TrainingPeaks. Been there ever since. Now I'm the head of education at Training Peaks.

Speaker 2:

So, kind of to my LinkedIn bio that you read earlier, I'm so you said I was smart. I'm actually kind of dumb, so I have to explain things to myself in really simple terms, and so that made me an okay teacher. So now I teach coaches and other sports scientists about like the technology and data side of like the endurance sports worlds in online courses and in-person events, which is, I think, where we met and yeah, so now just you know living out the, the, the downhill side of my racing peak, and you know talking about all the stuff I would have talked about every day anyway, even if I didn't work here.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, you, you and me both, and uh, a proper, a proper nerd, as anyone uh listening can, can, uh can hear. And I think too, cody, I mean, I think, like you know, for I don't know, um, those you know, good coaches and good educators. It's usually because we weren't the greatest like performers, you know what I mean. So we, we had to work hard to understand this stuff and I think that, um, you know, have an educator and a coach and everybody you know, like yourself, to explain this, I think, is really really helpful.

Speaker 1:

So, um yeah, for our listeners, I think you're in for a treat, and I'm excited as well, cause I think I'm going to learn a lot with that said, let's jump right into the main points and questions, and that first question I'm going to queue up to you, cody, is the one that I led with, which is is FTP dead?

Speaker 2:

No, it's been reported. Its death has been reported several times over the past 10 years. It seems like I've started to think about it. It's not dead, but it just joined a band years. It seems like, um, I've started to think about it. It's not dead, but it just joined a band, like it's been a solo act for the past 20 years and now it's like you know it's. It's taken its place among a group of things that all work together, I think to to complete a better picture. So dead, no, but it's not the only thing in town anymore. That's a solid answer. I've never really thought of it like that or framed it up as such, which is why it's so great.

Speaker 1:

Only thing in town anymore. That's a solid answer. I've never really thought of it like that or framed it up as such, which is why it's so great that you're on this podcast. So remind us like what FTP is and kind of how it should be used, and we'll think about it and it's kind of like a solitude context and then we'll expand on what band it joined.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so FTP, functional threshold power. It could also be functional threshold pace for runners. There's lots of functional thresholds. It's originally come up with by Andy Coggin so again, all of your listeners probably know Andy Coggin, but if you don't read his books, go see, he was kind of one of the first guys who came up with a lot of this stuff and it's a translation from things you do in the lab, because for decades now we've been able to test lactate threshold as a benchmark of aerobic ability and progression.

Speaker 2:

But labs are complicated, hard to get into regularly, they're not perfect, and so ftp is a way to field test your threshold, your what would be equivalent to lactate threshold, or um, mlss or maximum lactate steady state or obla or all the different kind of sub protocols that people have. But it's meant to be an approximation of those that you can test. Anybody can test really easily out on the road on the trainer any time of year with pretty basic equipment and then you can use that as a benchmark to one set your training intensities or track its progression over time to see if you're getting better in a very generic kind of aerobic sense.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, that's it. That's it as a good summation. And I think, too, what a lot of people need to realize is is you know, we do that 20 minute test and take 95% of that to estimate an FTP. That's about where we're at right now, kind of a convoluted history leading up to that point. Come out to say why that's good or why that's not good and build upon it, which I think is great. But we also need to understand that a 20 minute, taking 95 of the highest average power on a 20 minute test, gets you pretty darn close for an amateur, recreational, serious recreational rider to create the training zones and like, get after it. Would you agree?

Speaker 2:

yeah, absolutely, and he, yeah it's. And maybe you have or different coaches can have different things. For a long time I was coaching, like college age, male mountain bike racers. So you know, they've got lots of energy, they've got strong anaerobic systems. So I use 93% of 20 minute power just because it seemed to work a little bit better for them. Like that's the thing is, there's a lot of art and finger in the wind with those sort of things. So, as long as you're consistent, that's what matters. If it's an imperfect estimation of a laboratory test, well, that's fine. Your goal isn't a laboratory test, your goal is performance, and so measure it consistently and keep the spirit of the test in mind. That's the other thing is like understand what it's trying to tell you. Help your athletes understand what it's trying to tell you so they don't try to cheat it or even accidentally cheat it. Yeah, it's, it's. It's a tool that is supposed to be easy to use, not perfect.

Speaker 1:

Yep, yeah, that's it, and we'll come back to the art of coaching too, because I think it just that can't be lost with all this data Right, and I've got some thoughts on data stuff as we as as we roll along here. But that art of how you apply the science is really important with this. So you know some of those listening right now that use products like WK, oh five, or maybe you've listened to previous podcasts where I've talked about functional reserve capacity, FRC. That's tool and I think maybe part of the band that FTP has joined. So let's talk about maybe FRC and let's talk about the band that is, is being or has been assembled now in kind of like this new age revolution of data training in science.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, frc, I think, is you is. You know they're all important. I think FRC is probably the or its equivalents there are other kind of conceptual equivalents is the other kind of front runner for being really useful across a wide range of disciplines. And it kind of hits that the higher end aerobic getting into the anaerobic transition zone, which is where so many important things happen. This is one of the downsides to using something like FTP totally on its own or naively is that it's a relatively low intensity metric for the way that bike races are won. It's a relatively low intensity metric for the way that bike races are won. You know, road races are won with brakes and sprints and attacks, bridging moves to get into brakes, and mountain bike races are typically short, hard kind of VO2 max efforts. So FRC is a way to quantify that, like how much juice do you have in that range? And like can you make that battery a little bit bigger? Or like are you deficient in that rain? How quickly can it recover?

Speaker 1:

and so that's, yeah, I'd say that's the other kind of co-front runner for important metrics yeah, that would totally agree with that, and I do think that you know taking a step up from the you know recreational, to the serious recreational, or you know racer, that kind of stuff is adding in you know another metric or tool. In that way, so you have FTP, which is high aerobic, frc, which is high anaerobic, and having a coach or a self coached athlete kind of playing with those two or monitoring those two aspects for performance is a great way to do it. Is there any buddy else in the band that you want to mention right now, before we move on to a different system that plays off of these two?

Speaker 2:

things. The other one, just to throw it out, is PMAX. I think it's gotten a lot less attention because it's really simple, there's a lot less nuance to it. It's basically your ability to sprint. It's more interchangeable with FRC. We're talking about this wide range of durations it could be from 60 seconds out to five minutes and how does that duration intensity balance?

Speaker 2:

Sprinting is kind of just sprinting. If your 12-second peak power gets better, you became a better sprinter. Pmax and that are pretty interchangeable, and so it kind of makes sense too from a science realm is that we have three energy systems. One has two branches, and so now we have a metric for each energy system FTP for aerobic, frc for kind of that glycolytic VO2 max, transitional realm, and then PMax for like phosphogenic sprinting, and so now it's like, oh, we've got a much more complete picture and there might be other metrics that start covering eventually down the line of things that are like, uh, sub maximal ultra efforts or your ability to tolerate variability and things. But so far this like kind of energy systems based those three ftp or something like it, frc or something like it, and sprinting power and that sprinting power.

Speaker 1:

I've touched on it in like maybe one or two episodes, but P-Max correct me if I'm wrong. The definition of P-Max is the power generated for one complete revolution of the crank arm. Is that correct?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's. Yeah, it's basically that, and so it's a little on the short side even for some things like um. So using that in combination with, like you know, the stuff coaches already kind of know how to do because, again, sprinting is probably the simplest part Like, oh, did your P-max go up? That's good. Oh, or did you take your existing P-max or your existing, like, sprint power and could you go from doing it for five seconds to doing it for 12 or 15 seconds? That's also improvement. But that's a pretty easy thing to assess without a new metric.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, exactly. And so if you're using the tools like WKO5 that has those three band members in there and the PMAX very, very useful for crit racers, sprinters, road racers, mountain bike athletes sometimes, I mean, if you're doing fondos and gravel races and just getting to the finish line on a lot of this stuff, p max isn't necessarily something that I use for performance.

Speaker 1:

However, it is important to uh like create the full athlete because even my 60 plus athletes who come to me and their FTP is pretty good. I'll work on their anaerobic side uh, with both FRC and and and P max, using uh, you know, sprint workouts and other stuff to drive that up and I would say, and they get more snappy over time probably improves durability and sometimes you just got to go hard right and and that can raise the ship. Meanwhile they see some big numbers because PMAX is keep in mind, people. It's it's not even a one second sort of power, it's less than that. So it's a big number and a lot of people get motivated when they see a big number increase. So that's a little bit of how I think about it and use it in my coaching.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, we see it a lot with like crossing disciplines too. I'm a bike racer so I'm required by law to make fun of triathletes. But you see, triathletes who you know, they they have five watt per kilo thresholds. They're insane athletes. And then they want to like try something fun. So they come into a cyclocross race and they're like off the back and ignoring handling skills which they may or may not have, their um, uh, their.

Speaker 2:

You collect some data and you see their FRC is just like relatively low. And so they're like oh, why I have a five watt per kilo threshold? And so you can like kind of guide athletes on weaknesses, Like, oh, we know this, We've always known this intuitively as coaches and athletes. Now we have a number that we can like show somebody and track over time and say this number is really low, let's work on that. And oh, by the way, even if your threshold goes down a little bit to all athletes you know, 10 years ago that would have been catastrophic because that's the only number we had Now you can say like, okay, it's okay to let go of a little bit of threshold, because now your FRC is going up, your PMAX is going up, Something else is getting better, and that's what we cared about right now.

Speaker 1:

So, like you don't have to panic so much about the other number going down, yeah, no, exactly, and not to FRC. Shame anybody. But what's fun about that is, you know, some of those, some of those jokes come to light when you've loved the numbers and all this kind of stuff. But but I say, on the more serious side of things, when I've got somebody who is a road racer, mountain biker, a cycle cross racer, that kind of stuff anybody outside of, like triathlon, um, when FTP is high, with FRC that's fairly high and there's this combination of kind of high, high together, that's a great time to race, and at various points of the season we want high FTP or high FRC happening for various reasons, because we're working on that, and then when it, when they come together, that's usually a sign that we're ready to race. Yeah, absolutely yeah. So, cody, I'm going to just steer the ship in a somewhat different direction than we're going to bring it back home.

Speaker 1:

But one of the reasons I reached out to you, um, originally, like a month or so ago, is my, my feathers got a little ruffled when I read an article out there saying that critical power and W prime is better than FTP, and so I did a letter discussion at CTS to talk about this.

Speaker 1:

I reached out to you and in the end I kind of decided and we agreed, that's like. Actually that statement is true Because if we just look at FTP as the solo band member right doing solo acts relative to what we'll talk about critical power and W prime, yeah, because FTP alone doesn't have the anaerobic marker. But if you combine it with FRC, which is that anaerobic marker, now that's a little different. It with FRC, which is that anaerobic marker, now that's a little different. So the reason I bring this up here is because there's a lot of marketing out there saying that critical power and W prime is better and it's different in the Europeans and the pros are using it. Is that true? What is critical power? What is W prime? Help guide our listeners into understanding this more and cut through the marketing stuff.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I'm never going to have a million social media followers because I won't, I can't, I'll never die on any of those hills, yeah, yeah. So critical power is. And again, I can make so many academics angry and just like one sentence by saying I don't think they're that different. I don't think critical power and I should say in a very general sense, those two things do correspond. Critical power kind of goes with FTP, w-prime kind of goes with FRC, and so conceptually they are the same thing. It's not like a totally different methodology, it's just how you're getting at them is pretty different. Um, critical power, critical power is pretty old. Even the concept of that started coming up with. Um w prime and critical power. Some of the original ideas are almost 100 years old.

Speaker 1:

Um and which is crazy, by the way, because it's about how old like exercise physiology is exactly so.

Speaker 2:

There were some of the first ideas, like you know. If you think about some of the first ideas, like you know, if you think about what's the first thing you would notice in exercise? It's that there's a relationship between duration and intensity. And if somebody out there happened to be kind of math focused, they would say, well, maybe we can just plot this. And that's what they did. Right, their tools at the time were pen and paper. And so they will say pen and paper. And so they'll say, you know, have people go run on a track or do something as hard as they could for a certain amount of time, and you know, plot that number, plot that pair number of duration and pace at the time. But you could replace it with power now and then do it at a different duration, do it at a different duration, and what you notice is that there's a pretty smooth, pretty consistent pattern between most people, in fact between most terrestrial mammals actually have really similar relationships with that. And you can see this pattern where, above some kind of magical I guess it gives it away some magical threshold there's a given amount of work that most individuals can accomplish over that once they're going anaerobic whatever number, that is, 20 kilojoules, 5 kilojoules, and so if you extend the duration, then you can't sustain as much intensity, you can't sustain as much power. Or if you increase the power, that duration has to come down. And if you basically plot a few of those points and follow that line down, you hit a point where that number over threshold becomes zero and because of that that duration becomes infinity. But we know it's not infinity. It just happens to be where it goes from being a pretty short amount of time to a pretty long amount of time until other fatigue factors start setting in and that's threshold. So they're getting at it from above, mathematically, by saying like we have this consistent pattern of intensity and duration, where does it bottom out? That's critical power. And then ftp we talked about. You're more testing it, just like real world.

Speaker 2:

W prime is, and we didn't. We talked about frc and I never even defined it. W prime is that consistent amount of work that somebody can do over threshold. It's like a box where one side is duration and one side is intensity. That box always has to be the same area. If one side gets way longer, the other side has to get lower. Duration goes out, intensity has to go down. And there's this assumption built into W prime that across this whole range where W prime and FRC are relevant, say 60 seconds out to five minutes, that that box always has to be the same size, that you always have the same size of battery. It's just like the relationship between power and duration. Frc is telling you the same thing but instead of say choosing three data points to do it a lot of critical power.

Speaker 2:

W-prime tests are something like a. I should have done more research before, but they change so much and every academic has their favorite test protocol for W-prime. It's like three minutes, five minutes and 12 minutes or something. You do those on different days and plot it out. Frc does it a little bit differently. It's looking at kind of the entire duration and looking at the shape of that and then calculating the area under it to say like this is the size of your battery. So W prime and FRC are pretty similar conceptually.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and if there's a better definition than this for FRC, let me know. But since we didn't define it, functional reserve capacity is the amount of kilojoules that you can do in a continuous effort before you fatigue and have to pace down below threshold.

Speaker 2:

Threshold is a critical part. If people are nerds and sit down and do the math, you'll see like this is a pretty. These numbers don't make any sense. It's because it's like that amount over threshold so yeah, you'll hit again. If it's 20 kilojoules, you can do 20 kilojoules of work in 60 seconds or in eight minutes over threshold before you fatigue.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. So for the listeners that are like, holy crap, I'm now just confused because of all the terms and things and whatever, I think the summary is that these they are probably coming at it from an academic standpoint, but there it's not that different. And so in that way, I think the my best advice is to just understand the systems that you're using. You know, or hire somebody to tell you how they work and then know how to utilize that to kind of develop performance. So I don't know, cody, do you have a favorite system? And I know that you're coming from the training peak side of things, so you can say I'm biased because of this, or how would you kind of differentiate between the two? If a listener was like, well, that sounds pretty interesting, maybe I want to use critical power in W prime. Why would somebody want to use that versus FTP and FRC?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I, like I I do prefer FTP over say, critical power, um, and for a lot of times it's just cause it's more practical, like critical power requires you to do all those tests and then do the math. There's tons of online calculators where you plug in the numbers but a threshold test you can just do. Or if you have race data, it just comes out of race data. There's been lots of research on critical power compared to threshold. It's not like nobody's bothered testing them. The papers I thought that was the best so far about it. It showed that critical power let's see if I get that, I always get it backwards. I believe it's showed that critical power tends to be about seven watts higher than threshold, and so you know, some people might argue that's pretty important. But the spread across both of them just like swallowed each other up. Swallowed each other up, something like 45% of people their critical power was lower than their threshold and the other 55, it was the opposite. So it's like they're so overlapping that just the wonkiness of biology, day-to-day variations, all of that stuff just gets swallowed up, so overwhelmed how close they are. And so I don't think like yeah, I don't think they're magic bullets.

Speaker 2:

On the W prime side.

Speaker 2:

I also prefer FRC, mostly because it just happens Like I use WKO so it just pops out Like I always have that number and something just kind of itches me the wrong way about how W prime and this isn't to like shade any academics still working on it is that it doesn't seem to have progressed a lot from the first version. It's all just like whack a mole of oh. The first model was three, five and eight minute power tests and then somebody wanted to come up with a better one, so they came up with a five parameter model that uses five power tests. Somebody else decided that 12 minutes works better than, and so it's just like I, it doesn't feel like it's like even winning that argument isn't going to move everything forward. Frc, at very least, just feels a little bit more 20th century to me because we're like looking at a whole model, we're leveraging computational power to look at a whole model, do a little bit more math because we have the tools to do it and like come up with something a little more sophisticated.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and I think in that way I agree with you. Where I'm actually really interested in in love, the math and in the research and understanding the critical power and W prime and knowing that system helps you to understand some of the more complicated like research that comes out of that in a very controlled environment. So I can appreciate and respect that. But I think where I'm at in working with athletes riding their bikes outside, racing and trying to get on the podium, I need something that's turnkey, quick, that I can generate in a very quick way without having to do a shit ton of math and be able to then communicate it to the athlete with a simple screenshot in a, in a graph, saying hey, look, you improved or we need to work on this because of that. And to me, ftp and frc does that yeah, exactly, and it's like ftp and it's.

Speaker 2:

It can be unfortunate, but I think it worked out well this time. Is that like that's just kind of what the industry is using now? So like FTP is built into your Garmin. So when you pull up your Garmin instruction manual the first time you start bike racing, like FTP will be the thing that's in there. Ftp is in training peaks, ftp is in other stuff, so it's kind of whatever is just the easiest to use. So you aren't like backing yourself out of what everybody else is using, what every device is using. You should do that when there is a big difference. But that's what I haven't seen is research showing that there is really enough effective difference between the two to to matter and and to like save you or make it easier, anything it's, it's more practical and it's just as good yeah, yeah, that's right, and so you know either those two systems.

Speaker 1:

you need data to feed it, and more and more athletes are using more devices where we're gathering more data. So real simple to you. I mean, why is having clean data so important, and can you talk about data hygiene and what clean data means? Then we'll wrap this into some of the AI and where this goes to create these models.

Speaker 2:

Like you could almost say, frc is a high parameter model compared to W prime, which uses three parameters, and now we're like tracking all these metrics modeled FTP, which we could talk about FRC, pmax, using every PowerPoint. So it's a little more, like I said, kind of modern and sophisticated, but it also comes at the risk of like, well, there's a lot more things that can go wrong. So, having a a little more, like I said, kind of modern and sophisticated, but it also comes at the risk of like, well, there's a lot more things that can go wrong. So, having a single power spike if you have a 3000 watt power spike for five seconds in a W prime calculator, that doesn't matter because that five second power isn't part of the model model. When you're using something like WKO and a PD curve and FRC so many acronyms is that that five-second power that maybe you never even noticed before now can throw off the entire model.

Speaker 2:

So it's become a part of coaching, I think, is you have to put some responsibility on the athlete to recognize things that are happening. Maybe they clean up their data, maybe they make sure their power meter is calibrated. Maybe you coach them on choosing a better power meter brand. They've all gotten a lot better. That's the thing. It's becoming, thankfully, less of an issue than it was 10 years ago. Power meters are getting better, but it still happens and you've got different power meter brands if an athlete is using. So basically, one drop of that data can poison the whole. Well, if you're using all of the data to try and create like this, more complex, like holistic picture, yeah, yeah, that's it.

Speaker 1:

So I think, like in that way is is you know when you're thinking about um, you know, the next power meter, purchase the next wearable, the next whatever? Because we're measuring a shit ton of stuff that we don't even know if it's going to do anything down the road. Right, but where this goes is like with either machine learning or AI, and if we want AI to give us a training program, you need good, clean data to do that, and I still see a lot of junk out there, whether it is a power meter or whether it is, um, you know, wrist, wrist based heart rate, uh generation or something like this. That ain't good. So you need to be able to understand how the system works, to understand what the output that you're getting the other uh, bad data thing that sometimes get overlooked is missing data.

Speaker 2:

Like athletes, that it's not practical for every athlete to have a power meter on every bike, but it's like you should probably have a heart rate monitor every time. You can't just like, oh, I'm going for a fun ride, not wear a heart rate monitor, or I'm going to do workouts and not put them in training peaks because they aren't important workouts like. So missing data is another one. There's like, as a coach and an athlete, make sure you like, or at least like, tracking the bare minimum of everything.

Speaker 1:

You don't have like zeros and empties and long stretches of things totally missing yeah, yeah, no, that's, that's it, and I mean there's just like so much to say about data and it can really stress an athlete out. Uh, I've got some ideas of what we talk about down the road about this. But, um, to kind of bring it back to the here and now is, if we, if we decide that we're taking a a data driven approach for coaching or training or having the training program and we want AI to generate the training program, is that going to happen? Is it going to take over the coaching and endurance space in your opinion? And I guess, what do you have to say in a very short way, because I'm just kind of queuing everybody up for a little teaser for the next episode on this, Take over the industry.

Speaker 2:

No, take somebody's job, maybe take somebody's job, maybe Ooh boy.

Speaker 1:

that's a cliffhanger, Cody, I think.

Speaker 1:

I think we'll leave it right there for the moment, and yeah and and this is a good one to remind everybody that this is part one in a part two episode. So that's it. That's our show for today. If you liked what you heard, folks, please share it with a friend or a training partner, because that is the best way to grow the show and make sure that you keep on getting awesome advice from people like Cody and myself on LinkedIn, um of which you can find um those links in our show notes. You can also tune back into next week for part two of this discussion, where Cody and I will talk about uh, where uh all this data and um this industry is headed, and we'll have some fun along the way with, uh, maybe a few insights on where training peaks is taking this whole thing. So thanks again for listening and we'll see you back here next week.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for joining us on the time crunch cyclist podcast. We hope you enjoyed the show. If you want even more actionable training advice, head over to train rightcom backslash newsletter and subscribe to our free weekly publication. Each week, you'll get in-depth training content that goes beyond what we cover here on the podcast. That'll help you take your training to the next level. That's all for now. Until next time train hard, train smart, train right.

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