The Time-Crunched Cyclist Podcast by CTS

How Quickly Can Cyclists Increase Functional Threshold Power (FTP), with Tim Cusick (#284)

• CTS • Season 5 • Episode 284

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OVERVIEW
Following their episode on aerobic training, CTS Coach Adam Pulford and Tim Cusick (Head Coach at Basecamp and TrainingPeaks WKO Product Leader) dig into Functional Threshold Power (FTP) training in Episode #284 of "The Time-Crunched Cyclist Podcast". This is one of the clearest, accessible, and practical explanations of FTP training you'll ever hear. They talk about what's happening in your body, how long each phase of FTP training should take, what interval durations/frequencies/intensities to use, and what adaptations to expect if you're a relative beginner cyclist or a very experienced athlete.

Topics Covered In This Episode:

  • You are not your FTP!
  • What's happening in the first 2-4 weeks of FTP Training?
  • What you'll feel after 2-4 weeks of FTP Training
  • What's happening 4-8 weeks into FTP Training?
  • Diminishing returns after 10-12 weeks of FTP Training
  • Training intensity ranges for FTP workouts
  • Recommended durations for FTP intervals
  • Frequency of FTP Workouts per week

Resources

  • Tim at Basecamp: https://www.joinbasecamp.com/tim-cusick 
  • Tim on IG https://www.instagram.com/tim.cusick_coach/
  • Stress vs Strain: Difference Between Stress and Strain - GeeksforGeeks https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/physics/difference-between-stress-and-strain/

Guest Bio:

Tim Cusick is a world-class cycling coach, a leader in data analytics for endurance sports, an educator, and an innovative business leader. Tim works with Olympians, world champions, and more, including Amber Neben and Rebecca Rusch. As a data analytics leader, Tim is an acknowledged expert in the field for endurance athletes. He is the TrainingPeaks WKO product leader, 
codeveloper of WKO5, and Instructor: Advanced Training with Data. As an educator, Tim has presented at USA Cycling summits, TrainingPeaks Endurance Summits, TrainingPeaks University, and more. Tim is also the founder of BaseCamp, which is driven by Tim’s philosophy of bringing together the science of data and the art of coaching. His values-based approach focusing on shared vision and team building allows for the construction of dynamic and purposeful organization development.

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_01:

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 Polford, 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.

SPEAKER_00:

Thanks for having me again. And I think we're going to say that a couple more times before this is over.

SPEAKER_01:

We've got a lot of times to say that because we have a lot of adaptation to talk about. Last week we talked about training impact and how stress and strain drives the type of adaptation that we either are seeing or wish to see in training. We then had a deep dive in aerobic training of uh how much time you'd have to spend to see these responses and what to expect. We also had a fun dialogue about zone two hype and reductionistic thinking. And if our listeners missed that episode, definitely go back and listen as each discussion in this little mini-series builds off the other. So, Tim, since we talked about aerobic adaptations last week, what are we going to discuss today?

SPEAKER_00:

I think we should discuss functional threshold power, FTP, which can be named a whole bunch of other things, but let's just use the FTP definition. Uh let's dive in there.

SPEAKER_01:

Let's do it. So uh again, you you gave some uh caveats uh uh about what we're talking about, and I would say what is the one thing about the bell curve that you want to stress when it comes to threshold adaptation?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, we talked about in episode one this idea that we're variants, variables, and diminishing returns, and that we're playing the bell curve. Um the concept of diminishing returns means that when we are, you know, when we first start training, we see faster gains early, but then those returns begin to diminish as we train more and more and more. The gains we get early are hard, you know, harder and harder to get later. We need to do more and more work, balance the fatigue and fitness relationship more complexly. When we start talking about FTP, there's two things to say. One, and I'll say this to the whole audience, and it's really important before I make my second part because it's going to be disappointing. You are not your FTP. It doesn't define you, and it actually doesn't, even though it's an important part of your train, your performance, it doesn't fully define your performance. There's so much more to performance. FTP is a solid metabolic marker that allows for the determination of exercise intensities and it gives insight into let's just say how your body's making energy and dealing with metabolic waste product. Simple as that. So don't judge yourself by your FTP. Because when we start thinking about threshold adaptation, as you become a more mature athlete, meaning you're training in a structural fashion year after year after year, your athletic maturity is improving. The law of diminishing returns loves to kick us right in the FTP gut. Like it literally is the one that can often get like you've gotten your gains year one or year two that you started your training, still saw some in three, by three years in, four years, you tend to be fighting back to the same point or trying to diminish loss. You know, it depends on age and maturity and everything else that you're going through. So it's a tough one to emotionally deal with because we've linked everything to FTP. Athletes, you know, endorance athletes on a cyclist are defining themselves by FTP. And that's a bad habit because the more you train, the more that might become a little disappointing to you. But it also isn't the limiter. Your performance gains will generally come in other places. The FTP is just the metabolic marker. It's an indicator of your metabolic fitness and capability more than a definition.

SPEAKER_01:

Yes, exactly. And there's a lot more to say there on some of those more chronic or long-term uh gains or uh stagnations and whatnot. And I'd say let's get to those um a little bit later in this episode, because uh, and and I'll pull it back to it because it is important. But I would I would say if if we if we're to take like a younger athlete or maybe somebody who detrained properly uh and we started back on some FTP training, what adaptations would we expect in the first two to four weeks of hitting some good old FTP work?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, great question. And return from injury is another great one here, because we get injured and we start freaking out like it's never gonna come back. But once we if we heal first and then start to train, it comes back quickly because you're the law of diminishing returns, you might be more in the uptake curve until you get there. So, first two to four weeks of FTP training, really the major impactors are what's happening with your ability to, I tend to call it manage lactate as a whole. You tolerate, you buffer, you clear, you shuttle. There's a lot of impacts going on with there. But when we think about what FTP is, you know, it is the ability to tolerate the byproducts of more intensive exercise. There's two main byproducts you're talking about. One is muscular acidity. Um, you're spinning off hydrogen atoms in the production of energy. That hydrogen is making you acidic, it's making you muscular acidic, and that's a problem. And we tend to blame lactate for everything, but that acidity is uh a pretty high impact. Lactate, your fast twitch muscle fibers produce lactate. You produce lactate when you burn carbs as fuel. Um you uh that that's the the the chemical uh residue that's like that's what's left over. You know, the byproduct. I had to think of the right word. What does it do? That's the byproduct of the energy production of your fast twitch muscles. Those are the limiters, those will cap your performance at like your power at FTP. I know the P stands for power, but it's a good way to think about it. As you train that, you quickly begin to adapt by your tolerance and lactate clearance gets better. Those are probably the two earliest responses. You begin to have better lactate transporters, which is a complex. We start to talk about MCT1 and two, and I think now there's a four, but we begin to have a chemical response and how we deal with the lactate and the transporters of that, which allow us to resynthesize that as energy and select scenarios. Um we also early on see the ability to buffer muscle acidity. And this is a pretty good one because when you start to talk about buffal, you're spinning off these hydrogen atoms, they're changing your muscular chemistry, you're becoming more acidic, so less alkaline. Um that probably more so than the lactate kind of brings on the pain. That's why like threshold, extended threshold efforts are hard. Um, and you're not only learning to deal with that, your body is doing a little better uh job of dealing with that, but you deal with the suffering better. So your body is defensive, like you were designed as a defensive system because your body wants you not to die. Good thing. We'll say that's a good thing. So you have a lot of sensors in your body that sense negatives, right? And you don't have a lot of sensors that sense, you have a lot more negative sensors than positive. So one of the negative sensors, when your body sees this muscle acidity, it sets off alarms in your nervous system. Bells start going off. It's part of the suffering. And your body and your brain are trying to convince you to stop doing that because that's what the pain is. Like, this is bad for us. It's a precursor to worse things. You actually begin to adapt to that signal. You, and this is an oversimplification, you're muting that signal, those warning signals. You're simply learning to suffer. And that doesn't mean you just shut off the suffering. It means you actually accept it and you're just simply getting better at dealing with it. And that's happening uh at a couple of different levels. Um that's probably what's driving that early initial response. Um, but there's more to come. Like that's an early response. It's a bio more of a biochemical response if you want to give it something. That's some of the early response that we tend to see.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, and I was gonna say it's it's both it's it's the biochemical response. I think there's some psychological in there that I'd you know, that dealing with suffering and pain, all this kind of stuff. But even some of the mitochondrial and cinematic uh properties that you talked about in the first episode, that's occurring here. But I'd say when I'm doing it right with an athlete, they say it hurts. It still hurts, but it hurts less. And that's where I see is like they they're on top of the power better, they're extending it longer, or perceived effort comes down in that first two to four weeks. That's what's occurring when you do it right. And I think for those listening, you know, that's one of those indicators that you can take uh just in real time on the bike, you know, week one to two to three, is to get that like in-person feedback when your coach can't be there, or if you're a self-coached athlete.

SPEAKER_00:

Couldn't agree more. You said uh such an excellent statement. I'm stealing that too. Um I call that like what I'm looking for when I move into FTP training and we're in a phase where this is something where we have a purposeful development of, I call it control. When you first start doing some FTP intervals, you're not in control. There's some standing and some little spikes, and I'm fighting to make control is when the athlete's like, okay, now I'm beginning to adapt to this. My body's dealing with the suffering, the acidity, um, the acidosis, specifically the lactate, and I can still deliver and be smooth and efficient, economical. When you see that more ragged first couple of intervals begin to smooth out, and then control happens, that's progress. That's adaptation that you'll see before you see it in some FTP test or in a specific number. Control is the indicator of that first phase of adaptation.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, exactly. So when I carry out um training, you know, I'll say the next four to eight weeks, what should we anticipate? But I think it's important to also recognize that uh I think we talked about in episode one where we do you should cycle training, especially once we start to hit FTP and above, where uh a typical cycle of training would be three weeks of hard work and one week easy, for example. And so when we say the first two to four weeks and then the next four to eight weeks, I'm assuming, and I want everybody to know that we should have an easy week in there. And even for time crunched athletes, maybe it's not a full week, maybe it is just a block of recovery, four or five days, and then we get back to work on the weekend. It's my typical time crunched recovery week.

SPEAKER_00:

So kind of green more. Yeah, it's funny. I was gonna point out I was literally, that was the note I had just written down. Because we need those cycles of we don't get faster, right? We don't get fitter when we're exercising. We're doing damage and trauma when we're exercising. We need the rest to recover. You know, it's funny that three-one is three weeks on, one week off has been around for a long time, but I find it's pretty good. You talk about a pretty big bell curve of people who will fit in there. Most of the listeners here will. So after, and understand that each one of these cycles, we're generally thinking that bell curve of uh work versus rest relationship. During the second four to eight weeks, we see we tend to see uh a greater range of change. We're beginning to see some of we've moved off the short term, the the more uh normal and metabolic responses. We're getting into more structural change. Muscle glycogen, uh, muscle glycogen storage, muscle glycogen. Uh the endocrine system is controlling that better. You have, wow, I don't want to go too deep in the fly. You're you're having a response base, like a very a better hormonal balance, a better ability to store glycogen, a better ability to use glycogen is happening. You're producing, again, you're having an improved uh relationship. You're your enzymatic activity is improving uh for glycogen utilization, and even for lactate utilization, and this is you know very complex, it always gets into an argument, but you're beginning to improve your ability to lactate shuttle, which basically means your fast twitch muscles are making lactate as a byproduct, but your slow twitch fibers are using that as an energy and fuel source. Um, those areas of improvements are best. Um, so we see a hormonal change, we see an impact on glycogen and how we're better able to store and utilize that, and we're seeing a better capacity to use lactate as a fuel to improve performance in that next range.

SPEAKER_01:

I I tell my athletes sometimes we're trying to make you like a like a hybrid vehicle, right? Where sure you got to take on exogenous fuel, but you're also producing your own fuel that you can then use. Correct. Right. It that's essentially that's the silly metaphor that we could talk about during the four to eight weeks of of uh uh threshold training. Um I would say when again, when I do this, right, what I see in athletes is you talked about controlling the effort. They now as opposed to like eight minute, ten minute, maybe twelve-minute intervals in that first uh round of training, I'm now going to use extensive threshold intervals, which are 15, 20, uh, 40, maybe even 60 minutes, but they're able to sustain it for longer. So they have that control, but we're dragging it out longer. That's the way I do it in this in this next four to eight weeks. And that's what I'm looking for in my athletes if all the enzymatic activity is uh growing properly under the hood.

SPEAKER_00:

Couldn't agree more. Like in the first early phase in those first kind of one to four, one to three, two to four weeks, you are looking for the establishment of that control. Once the abathletes establish control, to me, that's a progression trigger. Okay, time to move on. Right. And what you're saying is an excellent way to move on. I couldn't agree more. Then we begin to add time and intensity to because that's the increased stimuli. That's the progression that makes sense. I tend to look for control first before I'll add time and intensity. Because what happens when they move into FTP training, like we talked about in the first episode, banister impulse response model, two responses to training. The first couple of FTP workouts create a lot of acute fatigue. So the first week or two, they're struggling with control. Once they're beginning to absorb that fatigue and manage it as fitness is starting to come around, and here we're talking about a specific fitness, then it's like, okay, now they've got it. Let's move on. To me, that's of important. And for everybody listening and coaching or self-coaching, that's important. Like just don't come out of the gate and go crazy until you can do the watts and control them, then progress.

SPEAKER_01:

And I'd say don't go crazy in the way, like when it gets messy, don't let that get in your head. Because I actually tell my athletes, like when they have a hard workout for the first time, I'm like, this might not be pretty. In fact, you might fail at this, and that's totally fine. But what we expect to see next week and the week after is that you nail it. But the first one, it's okay.

SPEAKER_00:

For us, like let's say you're going into FTP and you've done a test, and now you're doing the first week of FTP training on a new FTP test because you got your base training right. I was called that. This is the bake it in week. Like you tested there, but you haven't yet adapted your body to training there.

unknown:

Yep.

SPEAKER_00:

Now we need a week to get you ready to train at that new higher plateau. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01:

So as we as we drag this out, Tim, um I I would say somewhere in depends on the athletes, uh, it depends, right? Um, but somewhere around this kind of 10 weeks, we we probably have this point of diminishing return where the we're gonna plateau the gains of threshold training. And you know, what happens is is you're just gonna kind of hit the ceiling. We're not gonna be able to get too much more FTP out of that athlete. Would you say it's around that like 10, 12 week sort of time period, or when do you see it sort of in your athlete? Or or what's an indicator for you to just kind of move on in the way of a stimulus?

SPEAKER_00:

Great question. Yeah, anywhere eight to 12 weeks. Like as we one of the general, so we look at these different systems in all these episodes, and we basically are looking at things from lower intensity efforts to higher intensity efforts, right? So let's put that on the continuum. As we move up the intensity continuum, go back to a point I made in episode one: your aerobic is the slowest to build, fastest to lose. Your anaerobic is the fastest to gain, slowest to lose. Again, an oversimplification for everybody, way oversimplified, but it helps us think. This is why I said it. As we move towards the anaerobic side of things, adaptations will occur faster. Meaning we don't need 16 weeks, 14 weeks, even 12 weeks of FTP training because the higher intensity, well distributed, well planned, good rhythm, is gonna probably most of your FTP gains will be locked in eight weeks in. Like, I don't know, it's not that neat and clean, but remember we're in the bell curve throwing fastballs down the middle. Eight weeks is when I'm usually looking, it's time to move on. And as a matter of fact, there's that sweet spot really mainly in that uh four to eight weeks, really three to six. It depends when your rest week comes in. You suddenly see a little bit of rapid gains. Um, to me, eight to ten weeks is where I'm observing for stagnation. I would never go on beyond 10 to 12 weeks. Like that would be my cap for a series of reasons. For me, I'm really looking at a stagnation impact where there is a clear pattern between the subjective and objective data stagnation. The athlete is not really slightly increasing power and they struggle to hold that intensity for one more minute. Like the last minute of the interval is that that's starting. Okay, they're going a couple of watts harder because their FTP has been growing during those eight weeks, but they really are struggling to hold it a little. And then in the subject of data, you know, what are the feelings? Because nothing lasts in cycling, right? You and I had this conversation earlier. You get into this phase, and what fools most athletes, you get about four to eight weeks in, and wow, I'm adapting now. I didn't, I've done a great bass training. I know I'm aerobically fit. I'm in this four to eight weeks, and it's almost like each week you're like superman or superwoman. Like each week's a little better. And I'm feeling I got bad news for everybody. Like, that's not gonna last. And what athletes will do is once they start coming off that high and the gains are slowing, we want to convince ourselves, no, no, no, we could do this forever. But objectively, if you're really honest with yourself, you know you're coming off that gain high, you're beginning to edge into a non-functional stagnation. I would, it depends on your event, but I'd probably move on a little earlier than a little later. Um, but that's you know, a whole complex episode.

SPEAKER_01:

It it is, but I think for our listeners, um, just getting a few little tidbits, I think that's a very great tip. I I think too, if you're seeing, and I just dealt with this before we jumped on the podcast, if you're seeing high heart rates, high perceived effort, and low power, and then that TP comment comes in, I think I'm getting tired. But you got to pull that up from the nosedive, right? And and two, I always tell my athletes that even if we're training really well and we're like third week, you know, crush the training, fourth week comes, coach, I feel really good, but you got recovery week. I'm like, that's perfect. That is when that is actually when we do training the best. Yep. When we pull up before you go down.

SPEAKER_00:

Absolutely. And that's that's the concept when you take that to a bigger picture where sometimes it's better to move on a little earlier than later. Because if you take each phase and extend it out to its absolute max, you're hammering in a lot of fatigue into the system. Yeah. Like so you got to be careful, and that's again two different time responses fatigue and fitness to exercise stimuli. You have to manage them on the you know, at all given times.

SPEAKER_01:

That's it. And so as we talk about those uh uh kind of time course of adaptations, what to expect along these weeks. You know, I'll go back to FTP and what we're talking about here in that first week, especially if it's like a new athlete and I'm trying to like build the FTP, we're we're using something like 91 to maybe uh you know 100% of FTP. So perceived effort of seven, maybe eight, and let's just say hug the low end of zone four. In that next four to eight weeks, I'm gonna up it. But I'll probably keep the low at the low point, which means I just broaden the zone of what the athlete um uh can do in that zone four. So 91 to 105%. And I'll I'll tell the athlete, like, go ahead and hug the upper end if you're feeling good, but it is okay to hug the lower end if you are not feeling good. And also logic should prevail is if we are doing extensive threshold intervals, meaning 20, 40, 60 minute goes, hug the low end until you know you have it in the bag. Right? As opposed to every athlete that's listening, 90% of my athletes that just peg it on the upper end, uh, suffer through, see uh power decouple or you know, heart rate decoupling occur, and then we talk about all of this afterwards. Um now, assuming FTP is correct, uh, I mean, I use perceived effort of seven to eight, Tim. Um, but I use perceived effort a lot. And would you do you communicate that to your athletes and do you uh look for feedback on perceived effort?

SPEAKER_00:

Absolutely. I am a firm believer in this statement. Um at first, when you're new to training or when you're new to training with data and new to training specifically with power, because it'll make more sense if I don't have power. First, we use power to calibrate our feelings. If you want to continue to improve, then you need to use your feelings to calibrate your power. Right? And that's the difference between an immature and a mature athlete. By immature and I mean how long they've been training. Like we should at first, you have a power meter and it says go 300 watts, you know, and you're on an indoor program and it says 300 watts on your screen, or you give a range that's 270 to 300, they go 300. That's the execution you think, because you think more is more. That's the right answer. That's gonna help me get adapted better, faster, stronger. You'll all mature eventually to the point and mature by training maturity where you know that FTP isn't a set point, and this happens in all intervals. It's not an exact number. It happens, it moves a little each day, it's a range of transition. That you have to learn to feel what FTP should feel like and allow for the adjusting of power. Days where it's a struggle, a little lower. Get in the work, just do the work. Days where you're feeling great and you can get five more watts without going too crazy, got to be careful. Take those five watts. Don't leave something on the table. But learning early to use that targeting by power to then be like, oh, this is what this should feel like. And then later, as you become better at being the athlete, uh, this is my feelings. Look what my power is. That's the transition of, by the way, knowledge to mastery of training.

SPEAKER_01:

100%. And I think too, what people need to realize is hugging the lower upper end could be like the difference could be a good night's sleep. It could be a bunch of pasta the night before. It could be two days off of training because work got crazy and now my glycogen is super full, right? As opposed to I've been really consistent for two weeks in training and I'm a little depleted because I've just been super busy, haven't been really, you know, like eating, taking care of myself. Depletion, depletion, depletion. And then like the low end is like kind of struggle bus, but you're still doing it. Rest, pasta, upper end. It can be as simple as that.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, and well, just one quick add to that, because it's so great for everybody to hear this. As I just talked about this continuum of training through the season, and and we tend to talk about it. Does it doesn't come out this neat and clean? We start a little easier, and then as the season goes on, we do higher and higher intensity. The more important it is that you're actually managing and thinking about those things. Sleep becomes more important, fueling becomes more important. You need to control the variables as the intensity load comes forward. And when you're in higher intensity load phases, those things are intensely, they're as important as the workout itself, but we tend to make them very secondary.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, yeah, that's it. Um, Tim, just a just a couple uh points. People people can look up in in look up podcasts, look up articles uh from you, uh, but some durations that we're working with, uh, I don't really go much lower than six minutes if I'm doing a threshold uh interval, that's about where I start, and I go all the way out to about 60, maybe 75 minutes. I mean, that gets a little long. Would you agree with that time span of doing intervals or time in zone at FTP?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I probably don't go as low as six. Like I try to use 10 as my minimum, but I'll use some six to eight minutes in the like let's say you're you know, tomorrow we're starting a cycle of FTP. The previous week, uh, before the athlete rested, maybe I would put in a couple shorter just to get them used to that intensity. So I don't really, you know, I might not put that like here's a full block or full training day, but I might put one six-minute effort or eight-minute effort at FTP, and I get one or two of those in the bank before we move into that field, just to get people remembered. Oh, yeah, that's how painful that is. Um so that we get on top of that control. For me, I like to use 10 minutes as a minimum. You know, I will tend to think more in that, like 10-minute intervals with a little more rest in between, and that's uh that's a real independent it depends variable. Um I love from an interval sense, 10 to 30 minutes probably is my sweet spot of FTP work. Because when we look at the demands of most of the events where you're heavily focused on FTP development, that's what you'll need. Like it will tend to almost always come in that time range. So beyond the the physiological benefit of raising uh FTP, I also want event performance specificity to have slight impact on what that length of work is.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, that's that's a good summation. And I would I would definitely agree that's what I'm doing probably 90% of the time. But I I will say I've had some you know green athletes, some young athletes where I'll go down into the six just to get control of the interval. And it's completely appropriate to do that, in my opinion. But I think for all the listeners, it's just like know that threshold is actually longer. Like you should be going longer with the threshold intervals to get the full benefit. I sometimes see like some stock workouts in things like threshold work, and it's like four by three minutes with three minutes in between, and it's like it's not threshold.

SPEAKER_00:

You you make a really good point. Let me correct. For newer athletes, absolutely like we tend to think as endurance athletes, pass fail, like everything's pass fail. Like, well, ten minutes has all the benefit in the world, and six minutes doesn't. No, for newer athletes, that's an excellent uptake. Like you have to learn to be able to perform and control at those levels. And you are still introducing a higher stimuli and stress load, and you're responding. And as you mature as an athlete and begin to optimize your training more, you're going to be doing longer. So I that was a great correction point because it's super important that new athletes, you know, four times 10 minutes can be very intimidating and just they're just physically, they haven't, they don't have the neuromuscular capacity yet because they haven't been riding bikes long enough to execute that. So they fail and then feel bad and then fail and feel bad, where simply reducing the load like that is an excellent solution.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. And I'll say, you know, another little tip here too is if you're just getting going again, or if you're newer to the sport, um oftentimes threshold could be like a two to one work to rest ratio, like Tim was saying, uh, you know, 10 minutes of work, five minutes recovery. If you're working on the lower end of things and you're just trying to get that control, you know, six and in like two or three, you can manipulate the recovery periods um to progressively overload or or increase that stress that we're talking about or the strain to adapt. So just play around. It's not super hard and fast um all the time, although um starting with science, starting with the fastball is always good to do when you're creating your own workouts like that. Um but Tim, can you give some more general recommendations? Like how many times per week would you have a high volume athlete hitting a threshold or an FTP session? And would that change for a time-crunched athlete?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I when we think about answering that in reverse order, you know, somebody who has a lot of time, everybody can define that as let's say 12 to 16 hours a week, like a higher volume, but yet non-professional athlete training range. Um you are doing more work overall and you actually need less of that intensity. And actually, it's not about what workout you can finish, it's what workout you can adapt to. Like that's the mentality. So you could take a higher volume athlete and say, hey, let's do FTP work three or four times a week, and I'll do a fast group ride in between. You might be able to do all that work, but are you really adapting to it? Is a much better question. To me, I limit that type of work to two, possibly three with a high volume, but pretty much tend to avoid three, maybe an overreach week or finishing out a cycle before a rest week type of deal, but two is pretty much my number. Um, I think for uh in FTP training, it's one of the biggest challenged areas for the time-crunched athlete. Because when you think about the best way to raise your FTP, it really is this: you need to be doing the aerobic capacity work. Like the best FTP gains come when you're focused on aerobic capacity, what we talked about in episode one, and FTP work and really uh merging those two together, really being able to execute good aerobic training and good FTP training at the same time. For a time crunch athlete, you don't quite have the time range to do that quite as well. So you need to do, I would do one more with a time crunched athlete. And again, there's a lot of it depends here and lifestyle because you're time crunched for a reason, probably working more, family life, things like that. So if you can feel good and recover and you're sleeping well, three, but I also would do some specific manipulations within there to try to get more out of the intervals. A time crunched athlete, uh, I might use uh formats like hard start formats for even for FTP work. We're doing a minute or two above FTP, 105, you know, because VO2 kinetics, we want the fast component. We want to get you to a higher strain level quicker in the interval and try to get a little extra benefit out of that. I would also do probably a little more in the time crunch, even though I would do this with a high volume athlete, a little more crossover style work, a little more manipulation of the intensity within the interval itself, because you're dealing, you're on the razor's edge of lactate and acidic management. Um, being pushing you over and bringing you back is an excellent way to get a little better optimization out of that tile style of work.

SPEAKER_01:

So we might call those underovers. I call those underovers where it's kind of like spiking it um throughout, right? Or front-loaded threshold. Um and that's what Tim's talking about, where it's just like drill it real hard at first, and what you'll see is the the heart rate goes up, it hangs high. And probably what's happening, well, not probably, what's happening under the under the hood, lactate spikes up, hangs high, and builds. And it's actually there's there's some really good uh specificity of work to um work on there, but acidosis spikes high and hangs high. You kind of get uh uh I want to say a better bang for the buck, but it's just a different way of doing threshold work. And I do find with a time crunch athlete that's a very effective way to do it.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I mean you basically are, you know, when we think about VO2 kinetics, right? Like how you uptake oxygen and all the because uh lactate is a byproduct of how you're making, it's an indicator, it's a it's a proxy for how you're making energy, but it's it's a limiter, right? So if we can take a 10-minute interval and get to a level where we're producing a high volume of that faster, fast component, that will help us tolerate if it's not creating so much fatigue that you can't execute the interval. That's always the other side. So you have to build into things like that. But for a time-crunched athlete, they they will improve if you can manage the fatigue, will optimize your time a little better.

SPEAKER_01:

That's right. And and Tim, I mean, what kind of gains do you see with uh like some of your green athletes as well as some of your established athletes in the way of FTP gains? Because we keep on talking about hey, if you're uh you know, fresh off the couch or uh coming back from injury or haven't done this before, we're gonna see massive gains quickly. Yeah. Can you talk about changes in FTP that you see uh with athletes like that and then uh changes to expect in an established athlete?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, the good news as a whole, like for the first, like you you come off, like you get into cycling as a sport. Your FTP is has one of the largest ranges of change, like this ability to improve this. Remember, it's an it's a metabolic marker. You could call it a marker of your metabolic fitness. Oversimplification again, right? You have excellent gain to be made in that. And it's one of the most trainable, uh developable, improvable um elements in the first four years of cycling. So you should expect large gains throughout the boat. Now, let's say you get into cycling for the first four years, you hire a great coach, you do it all right, you're training 12 to 14 hours a week. So you're a higher volume trainer, probably about three to four years, diminishing returns are really kicking in at that stage, and you should be looking for minor gains in FTP. There are other things to chase to improve performance at that point in your development career, um, like durability, resiliency, efficiency. There's other areas to gain, but you see a nice gain in that. So, you know, it's encouraging, it's energizing. That's why, you know, I always point out though, but on the downside, like kind of once you arrive there without a significant change in training volume, your FTP will probably change 5% a year. But you might have changed 30 to 40 percent from when you started to train or more if you really truly weren't fit and coming off the couch. You'll have a huge change in those first couple of years. And that's what sometimes set people up for failure. They expect that to keep happening, but at some given point you begin to bump up against the ceiling.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, that that's exactly it. But I think you know, the key takeaways for our listeners is you know, the aerobic glycolytic energy system is the most trainable system we have in our body. And that's why we spend a lot of time training it, right? Um, and we can spin it up pretty quick, and we can um also spin it down pretty quick in the way of detraining. Um, but meanwhile, you know, it builds best on an aerobic foundation. So building aerobic capacity, then building threshold power is a great kind of progressive overload or logical step process in building your endurance machine of yourself as an athlete. Um, anything that you want to add to today's episode, Tim?

SPEAKER_00:

No, I think that's an excellent summary.

SPEAKER_01:

Excellent. Well, uh, for all of our listeners, um, hopefully you're getting your whole fix of Tim Cusick. And don't worry, we have two more episodes to come with Tim, where we talk about the time course of adaptation to VO2 Max training as well as anaerobic capacity. So don't forget to come back next week to hear more from Tim as we talk about VO2 Max training. Thanks, Tim. 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 trainwright.com 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.

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