Why Crit Racers Need More FTP Than They Think

Does FTP actually matter for criterium racing?

Coach Adam Pulford breaks down why your aerobic engine plays such a big role in an explosive race, how a higher FTP can reduce the cost of repeated attacks, and why sprinty "crit dawgs" and breakaway riders should approach their training differently.

Plus, why none of those watts matter if you haven't developed the race craft to use them!

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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Resources:

• https://australianfootballstrengthcoach.com.au/3-energy-systems-quick-introduction/
• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK546695/ 
• https://strengthmatters.com/anaerobic-lactic-energy-system/
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=On4W1OVrFig

Transcript

Does FTP Matter For Crits

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Does FTP matter in crit racing? Yes, all intensity matters, but you already knew that. For all the crit dogs out there, FTP training probably matters more than you think or want to admit, and perhaps less than you realize for the all-arounders slash breakaway dogs listening out there. If that's confusing or interesting, stick around and I'll break it down for you all. I'm Coach Adam Pulford, head coach of cycling at CTS. We coach literally thousands of athletes around the world, from crit champions to Olympians, Grandfondians, and pretty much anyone at any level who loves riding and racing their bike with the goals of becoming better today than they were tomorrow. If you're curious about coaching or how we do it, head over to trainwrite.com and check us out. We've been doing this literally since Y2K, and we keep getting better each year. And it's also just super fun and what we're passionate about.

Why Crits Are Deeply Aerobic

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Okay, back to the whole FTP and crit racing thing. The reason I say FTP matters is because whether you're racing a time trial or a criterium, you're heavily relying upon the same energy system to race your bike. That's right. I'm talking about the one and only aerobic energy system. Some of you may be thinking this guy doesn't know what the hell he's talking about, because crits are all anaerobic and you need to sprint in order to win. Not entirely true. Crits are deeply aerobic and yes, heavily anaerobic, especially with a punchy hill or a very active race with heart attacks going left and right. And yes, a good sprint will help you win. That is, if you're there at the end to actually use it. If you don't have a well-developed aerobic system, you'll get dropped when the going gets spicy, and that big fancy sprint of yours don't mean diddly-do. So, why do I say training FTP matters more for some than others? That comes down to the individual level, referring to strengths and weaknesses, which you typically gravitate toward in your own training due to biasy, but we'll we'll talk about that more here in a minute. Either way, if you're racing crits in the US or Cromessus in Belgium, you need to train both FTP and your sprint and repeatability and hard on-off efforts, of course, to race your bike best. And yes, you guess it it all comes down to having a good plan with progressive overload and the specificity of training. Let's get into it. How are we using similar energy systems? Well, for about 90% of a time trial and the majority of a criterion, the oxidative energy system is what your body is using to make its power and recover from harder anaerobic efforts. Additionally, you're using glycogen to fuel your body for both races. This means a heavy use of glycogen from your muscles, liver, and some exogenous carbohydrate that you take in is fueling your efforts. But aerobic metabolism is still important when it comes to the performance on the day. In other words, without an optimized aerobic system, you're not going to race your bike very well in these types of races. In fact, this classic but simple chart, you can see that the aerobic energy system really takes over at any continuous exercise of 75 seconds or longer. Even though shorter races will definitely be more anaerobic in nature, the aerobic energy system is the driver behind it all. In order to show this a little bit better, let's take a look at heart rate response versus power production. And the best way to do that is to take a look at a few race examples. So we're going to take a look at two different race files. And in particular, we're going to look at the heart rate responses and the power production from each. Again, the argument that I made originally was when we're looking at time trials or criterions, we're using that same energy system to really produce the effort and the fuel and race our bikes

Time Trial Data And Threshold Heart Rate

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during that. So let's take a look at this shorter time trial from our Elite Roads National Championships this year. This rider in particular, racing in the elite U23 field. And here you can just see the power production. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to hide everything and just bring up heart rate. And you can see very predictable, right, with what we would see from a heart rate response from a time trial, goes up high and hard and stays and hangs throughout the whole duration of the race. So if I show the zones here, what we should expect is that as I hover over here and I have the heart rate zones that I use for her training, recovery, endurance, zone two, up to zone three for tempo, zone four threshold, and VO2 max zone five and above here, with the horizontal black dotted line being her functional threshold heart rate. You can see that as she starts her effort, builds up and up and up. You can see that we're right at threshold, maybe five-ish minutes in, and we finish over threshold toward the end. Okay, so the majority of the time heart rate being in that zone four threshold time trialing toward the end, sort of heart rate response. Not too big of a shocker there, but you know, a lot of FTP power and FTP heart rate going into that. So, you know, there again, if we show this, ironically, we didn't have our normal power meter on for this one. I won't get into the details of that, but this it'll show how she made her efforts, but the absolute power production is false. It would be higher, and this is not showing where she was in the zones. The zones here that you see are for heart rate only. That's just the power file right there. The major takeaway that I want you to see here is when we look at that heart rate response, definitely in the zone four sort of power, right? If we take a look and show the power, like I said, it's gonna be a little understated just because this power meter is not the same one that we normally use. You can still see though, as we start hard, anaerobic capacity, and then we kind of drop in here that horizontal dotted line for FTP, that is a little bit lower. So just a quick nuance there. This would all be up there a little bit. Okay. So maybe I could have chosen a better file, but the heart rate response is what I really wanted to show you, and then steady power production with a few turnarounds as well in the

Crit Power Chaos And Anaerobic Battery

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power. Okay, let's go up to maybe just like Tulsa Tough. I'll pick a random day here. We'll go into analyze the whole race. And here you see a bunch of squiggly lines, right? If we hide everything except heart rate, heart rate is squiggly here. However, if I show the zones, we can see that again, functional threshold heart rate, that horizontal black dotted line. And she's starting up in tempo essentially. Okay. I'm gonna hover down here just a little bit, right? Spending more time in tempo, and then with about 15 minutes into the race or so, now we're up in that zone four heart rate. And toward the end, staying still in that zone four. So again, from a heart rate response sort of standpoint, good hard day of racing, but a lot of that heart rate expression is in that zone four threshold. So that aerobic system, the oxidative system, it is heavily relied upon for both of these efforts. And that overarching system is what's allowing her to make her power recover from it and keep on producing that power. Okay. Now, when I show power, we can see power is all over the place, very squiggly, as you would expect from a criterium. But the heart rate just doesn't respond as quickly as that. It hangs high. Even though we're producing a lot of anaerobic power production, the expression from the body, the expression from breath rate, the expression from breathing is steady, high, and hard, like we would see sort of in an all-out time trial. This would be almost just like a technical time trial, punchy time trial, right? That's an overstatement. But as you can see, the power drastically different. One thing I want to show you here is this is going to be an oversimplistic explanation of things, but one of the newest aspects from training peaks is something called the anaerobic battery or dynamic FRC. FRC stands for functional reserve capacity. Effectively, this is her anaerobic capacity. When we start, we're at 100%. Okay. Assuming that we're fresh and ready to go. As soon as we start racing our bike in a criterium, this anaerobic battery goes down. And I'm here, I'm looking at the gray line for that anaerobic battery. The purple line is her power production. So in a crit, you can see, you know, she's staying suppressed and gets really suppressed and kind of drains that anaerobic battery uh within that like 15 minutes. And that's when the heart rate responded very, very high. And as she stays suppressed, then the race lets up a little bit and she's able to regenerate the anaerobic battery uh a little bit, but she's still very suppressed, sitting here at you know, at 70% from where she started at 100%. Race, race, race, race, race. And deployed a sprint, wasn't there in the superfinal, right? But as she sprints, this is really where the race was uh overly dynamic, but this is where the end where she kind of drains down to that 42%. Now, what's interesting about that is I'm gonna flip it back to that time trial, and you can see how the power production, especially when we go into Analyze 360 and we look at the dynamic FRC or the anaerobic battery. Here, I don't have the whole race highlighted, but she's waiting in the start box and she rolls off. And you can see how deeply anaerobic the start of a short time trial can be. Okay, because she starts super high, it drains, right? And then it comes back up. Now, this isn't perfect because what we would see with her real power meter is that this would stay suppressed, it's just like lower, but the same trend would happen. She would kind of drain it here because it's a short time trial. Use this power to drive the speed up, then settle in and take it home. Probably drain it a little bit more at the very end. Either way, there are big anaerobic contributions to both of these races. However, that heart rate hangs, you know, very high as we're stressing and straining the internal systems, and the power can be all over the place, you know, when when it comes to how the race is actually being done. But when we look at, you know, the efforts that are given from the cranks versus from the chest, uh, you know, but those are very different. But that internal, the cardiovascular, the central system, again, that is what I'm talking about in terms of right here, in terms of showing you how that aerobic system is very much so needed in order to hang throughout the whole race of a criterion. So I hope that shows it fairly well. And really, you know, thanks to this athlete for allowing us to use her data. You won't see her name on there or anything like that, but I think that this shows everything really well from that

The Simple Math Behind Higher FTP

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standpoint. So, probably the best example of this is a more simple one. Let's say, in a very simplistic example, that all the surges during uh crit are at 600 watts, and then you're pedaling that 250 to 300 watts otherwise. If your FTP was 300 watts, and each time you'd surge up to 600 watts, you'd have 300 watts of anaerobic fatigue going on. Now, if you raise your FTP to 330 the following year or whatever time period, and you did that same crit, surges at 600 watts, you now have 270 watts of anaerobic fatigue each time. And if we know anything about fatigue, we know that once you're over threshold, it starts to hit a lot harder than below threshold. So the higher your FTP is before the crit season hits, the better you off you are. Now you can't forego anaerobic training altogether. Obviously not. Crits are deeply anaerobic, and if you don't do that hard, punchy training, you'll likely get spit out the back as soon as the hard attacks start coming, no matter how high the FTP is. It's just that so many crit racers overemphasize the need for anaerobic training versus aerobic training.

Training Advice For Crit Sprinters

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Let's come back to something that I said in the opener. FTP matters more for some than others. Why would I say that? It's because the typical crit racers with a good sprint are generally less good at long grindy efforts, which require bigger FTP and long TTE work. Likewise, the breakaway rider can do that all day and they love doing it. Breaking away from the pack, hopefully dropping the sprinters and increasing their chances of winning from a reduced field. Breakaway riders are typically less anaerobic and more aerobic than the crit dogs, who are more snappy and anaerobic with that race-winning sprint. Now, on rare occasions, we do get a very good combination of both, and they love that color green. What this means for listeners, if you are more of a crit dog, anaerobic sprinty type, look back on your training. Did you do good base training? Did you incorporate longer FTP work in the early season? And did you build your FTP up to its highest level, maybe 10 to 12 weeks out from your first or most important race block? If yes, good for you. You probably raced pretty well this season. If not, how are you feeling right now? Missing a level in the last few laps, fading after big attacks, or don't care because you just sit in and wait for the sprint. That too is a good strategy. But if you get caught in the break and can't handle it, good luck, man. If you're still in season right now, try doing some sustained threshold work if you have a month or even a couple weeks before your next big race. Or if you're in the middle of a big race season and you need to focus on next season, try adding a bit more volume to your long rides in the base and then doing the longer steady FTP work in the build phases. This will train where you are weak and add another layer to make you stronger. Then once you hit those hard crits, you'll have more capacity to handle both high-pace steady work as well as the surgy on off efforts during the race. Having high aerobic capacity and high FTP will only help crit racers. Recall from earlier my example of how increased FTP will help fatigue less. For a deeper dive on examples of FTP training, check out my how to build FTP video in the link below. However, you don't want to do this as the main focus coming into your race season. You want to build it high, then change to VO2 work, the on-off intervals and sprint training to specifically prepare best for your races. And this should come about eight to ten weeks out from your first race block and peak phase. Now, I won't blow smoke to anyone out there. At some point in the season, you come up to a timing issue where you just have to go hard to prepare for the coming race. Six weeks out. If your FTP isn't optimized, or if you've been dragging your feet on volume, you just have to hit the intensity because crits are hard, and that specificity is important in order for you to succeed. I'm just saying, if FTP typically gets overlooked for you, or if you can plan it better next season, do it. It'll only help you. Then intensity and racing will go a hell of a lot better.

Breakaway Riders And Building FRC

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Alright, for the breakaway riders out there, if you're pretty good at FTP work or long-stayed hard efforts, but you're getting swarmed in the final every single time, you'll likely benefit from doing more anaerobic training throughout the season. Where I would start is in the late base and early build phases. This is where typically athletes are incorporating longer tempo sweet spot or low threshold work and high volume, ramping up loads and intensities found in a typical periodization plan. Instead, because the anaerobic may be more of a weakness or an opportunity, we want to train that further out from the race so that it's less of a weakness when we get into the season. Do a block of it in the build, then perhaps swing back to some higher intensity threshold work than your specific crit anaerobic training like VO2s, on-offs, and sprint work in the final six to eight weeks before a big crit block. So, speaking of that high intensity, since I gave you an example of what it would mean to increase your FTP and be better off for it, let's actually take a look at what it would look like to increase your anaerobic capacity or that functional reserve capacity that I was talking about from earlier when we were looking at some race file examples. So, by definition, functional reserve capacity is the amount of work in kilojoules that you can do above FTP before you fatigue in a continuous time period. So, what this means is like how many kilojoules over FTP can you do uh before you have to fatigue and pace down? It's a one-time effort, it's not measurement of the repeatability necessarily, but it's a very important marker and tracker for that anaerobic performance. Okay. So I made this schematic again, it's a little overly uh simplified here, but let's just say you went from one season where FTP was 300, and now you're into this other season where it's now 330. What would happen if you would increase your anaerobic capacity and the FTP didn't change at all? If you're to take a look at the race examples here, where again, if you're spiking up in that 600 watt region, but now I have more anaerobic capacity, you can handle it way more because you can repeat it over and over. Typically speaking, when this goes up and FTP is still nice and high, you can usually repeat a lot better, typically speaking. If the anaerobic capacity is less, you won't because when you spike up, say at that 600 mark, it hurts you more over time. So then you have to pace down. So you can pause it here and take a look at what I'm talking about in summary, but you know, the main takeaway is down here. If we can keep that same FTP but increase FRC or anaerobic capacity, you're gonna be a hell of a lot better criterion. Now, you still need FTP work, but you don't need to focus on it as much if it's usually there for you.

Racecraft Skills Beat More Intervals

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Finally, it doesn't matter how big your FTP is or how hard you can sprint if you can't drive your bike. Here's where some of the training advice in the way of intervals, data, and numbers goes out the flipping window. If you're terrible at racing and you want to race, you need to refine your skills in training. You need to race more often, and you need to get more experience in order to improve. No amount of intervals, long rides or sprint training or torque training is going to help you with racecraft. Racing inside doesn't even help with outdoor racing. Sorry, folks, just speaking the truth. Racing outside helps with racing outside. Group rides help with race tactics and with racing outside. Skill clinics with trusted coaches like CTS coach Josh Whitmore, for example, who I've interviewed multiple times on this podcast, can help you build confidence in cornering, cornering at speed, exit speed, and help take that nervous edge off if that's holding you back come race day. Local races early in the season helps everyone to get dialed back into race brain and handling after a winter on the trainer. And if you're young or new to the sport, there's gonna be maybe a season or two where maybe you just forego, you know, the perfect training schedule in exchange for racing to get smarter, to improve, to get that experience. Then you can add layers to your FTP and sprint after that. There's a ton of super fit people out there that don't know how to race their bikes well. If you're one of them, and if you have goals of winning a bike race or cadding up soon, you don't need my advice on FTP work or interval training. You need my advice on more practice. Do more group rides, skill clinics, fun race games, and find your tribe that will help you with this. Local bike shops, Facebook groups, uh local clubs or teams that will organize these rides. And and maybe it's uh found in a group chat where everybody sends out a link to where to meet up in order to play bikes. Get on it. It will definitely improve your competence, your skills, and increase the fun factor way more than this goofy interval stuff. And if you like outdoor bike stuff and events with people, that's my best advice.

Key Takeaways And Coaching Help

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So, in closing, I hope you've learned that in order to smash some crits, it takes a combination of FTP work as well as repeated anaerobic efforts to be there where it matters most in the end, ready for that sprint. If you're a breakaway rider, you may need to train FTP less. If you love crits and sprints, you probably need to train it more. Just hit that training further out from your race block, and you'll hold up way better when the season finally is here. Finally, if you're super fit but can't do well at the races because of your handling or skills, take it down a notch on the whole solo interval training and hit group rides and skills clinics. All three pieces of this advice will set you up to practice more of what you need in order to develop when the fun stuff happens. Racing your bike and doing events. If you need help with any of this, that's what we do here at CTS. We're a group of certified professional coaches offering coaching camps and clinics to get you trained up and equipped well to hit your next goal. Head over to trainwrite.com for more information, and we'll see you back here soon for the next one.