Welcome to the Empirical Cycling Podcast. I'm your host, Kolie Moore. Today we are joined by one of our other empirical cycling coaches, Rory Porteous, who's been on the podcast several times before, so I'm sure people are going to enjoy listening to him again. And I want to thank everybody for listening as usual and ask that you please subscribe to the podcast if you have not yet done so. And, well, especially if you're new here and you like what you're hearing, but if you are a returning listener, thanks again for coming back. We love having you. And if you want to support the podcast because you are coming back and you're liking it, please feel free to share the podcast or give it a nice rating. wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you want to donate to the show at empiricalcycling.com slash donate, we would super appreciate that. That keeps the lights on. We've got hosting fees and all sorts of stuff. Maybe we'll get Rory a nice microphone one of these days. And if you would like to kind of visit our ultimate Patreon, that's just emailing me at empiricalcycling at gmail.com. for a coaching inquiry. It's now February up here in the Northern Hemisphere, and race season is starting to get underway pretty soon. And if you are worried about your fitness or something like that, or if you're not, you just want to make sure that you're fit for your races or whatever, shoot me an email at empiricalcycling at gmail.com. And if you want to keep coaching yourself, we can do a consultation. We can sort you out. We can look at your data, et cetera, et cetera, and help you plan for a really, really strong year. So we also have, oh. Instagram, Weekend Amaze, up in my Instagram stories at Empirical Cycling, and of course, that's where we ask questions for the podcast, and we have a boatload of questions, and I'm sure we're going to get a decent amount of views or listens, because every time FTP is in the title, we get a lot of listens. So, let's not fuck this up, huh, Rory? So, why are we talking about FTP and TTE? Well, first, let's define it. Typical version of FTP, right? Because I've talked about this in the podcast before. I define FTP as the, it's like a performance threshold, a fatigue threshold, where below this threshold, you fatigue much slower, and above this threshold, you fatigue much faster. We effectively have really two thresholds, and we're talking about the top one here. So, why do we care about this? Like, why do we care about FTP, and why do we care about TTE, or time to exhaustion? Episode's purposes today is how long you can hold your FTP. So why don't we think about that first before we get into all the nitty-gritty. Yeah, so everyone's more or less familiar with FTP at this point in the sense that you know that it is Somewhat hard intensity, where you can go for usually two lots of 20 minutes, if you're following the traditional 2x20 coaching model. Lots. Intervals. Yeah. And that is effectively just a way of having riders ride at a steady state that they can do for a very long time before they suddenly fatigue. If you've talked... If you've heard us talk about FTP testing in the past, it's usually in the context of like a 35 plus minute test, where the goal is to try and get you to write at FTP until you suddenly can't anymore. That test is sometimes referred to as a TTE test, because if you're just writing at FTP until you can't anymore, that's going to be a variable time length, more often than not defined by whatever training you've done, usually in the past few months. So it's actually really good that you bring that test up, because I think this is where Empirical Cycling first started to gain a foothold. Because way back in the day, in 2015, I think, was the first time I ever gave somebody one of those long-form FTP tests. So it's been, it's, look at my watch, what year is it? My watch does not do that. It is now 2024. And it's been almost 10 years of me giving people these tests. And one of the things that is great about this is the performance aspect of it. We are measuring your performance. We're not assuming anything. And if you want to know how long can I hold FTP, can I hold it 30 minutes, 40, 50, 60, 70, or 80 even? Well, we're going to go find out by having you go ride at it because it's... To me, it's silly to make assumptions when a measurement is not far away. And do we have to go all the way to exhaustion with this stuff? We don't actually. We can actually get a good number and then figure out everything else with intervals as we go. But that's kind of a FTP testing thing. But anyway, so I think it's good we started there. Because it shows that FTP is really two-dimensional. Well, it's not really three. It's definitely not one. One-dimensional FTP is like, here's your number, that's that. But a two-dimensional FTP has a duration component with it. How long can you hold it? Approximately. And it's pretty easy to measure this if your model is well kept up in like WKO5, for instance, or if you've done a long-form test. And especially if you can feel out that threshold and just ride right at that ceiling until your legs fall off, there you go. Yeah, I think there's two things here to take into account of, two dimensions you could say. One of them is about the feeling out FTP part. I think I said before in the podcast, like one of the moments where my own ability as an athlete and also as a coach really turned a corner was trying one of these TTE tests and suddenly realizing, oh, This is what it's all meant to feel like. And then my brain calibrated for me at that point. It all just suddenly clicked into place. And so I think being able to do a test off of basically an RPE indicator primarily. Usually when you're coaching, you'll give people like a rough ballpark. I usually tell people, this is where I think your sweet spot is. I want you to do that for five to ten minutes and then pick it up from there and see where it goes. 99% of people get it in the first test. Some people need a second, but they always nail the second one as well. The other part of this is the duration component. In the past, when we thought about it in that one-dimensional FTP as just a number way, you'd often end up getting, you know, your plan was, I'm going to do about two by 20s. and the next week it's I'm going to do 2x20s and it's just that onward and onward. You can see like what we've talked about in the past in terms of like there's no progression there as we understand it as we're talking about it now but you can see how people fall into the trap in that line of thinking of well if I had 5 to 10 watts this week then surely that will make my FTP go up and to a small extent it might. But that's not a sustainable way to actually train. Yeah, that's like a noob gains phase. That's something I actually want to touch on in depth more later, because right now, I actually want to ask you about, because you're a little more plugged into the forums than I am at this point, and I wanted to ask you, like, with your ear to the ground, so to speak, what are the rumblings that you're hearing about, like, more watts versus holding FTP longer in terms of, like, benefits, drawbacks, like, what's the trade-off, all that kind of stuff? Well, we'd all like more watts. That's a given. I would say, like, from the coaching perspective, the way I'd slow people down is, well, getting more watts is actually quite hard. It's significantly harder than doing more time. I think I've made the analogy before thinking about it in terms of, like, work capacity. Rory Porteous, Rory Porteous, Rory Porteous, Rory From that sort of pop culture internet perspective, TTE kind of didn't take off until Tim Cusick started really talking about it in those WKO webinars, which again, everybody should go check out, even if you don't use WKO, they're an excellent starting point for understanding everything around training within cycling. I would probably recommend it over the things like Cyclist Training Bible or Training and Racing with a Power Meter at this point, not least because we all prefer listening to an hour-long thing rather than reading a 10-hour long thing. 300 pages, yeah. Yeah. I don't recommend the Training Bible at all. I picked that up after Training and Racing with a Power Meter and I thought it was crap. Anyway, Coley's telling me to stay on track. I think the common perception from a lot of people is that they don't know what TTE actually is in reality. They understand maybe the 30 to 60 plus minute aspect, but they maybe don't understand what the actual benefits are here. And you kind of can't blame them because we've gone through decades of people talking about FTP getting bigger is the thing. It's the only thing that counts within training. You do a base phase where you do a lot of just like general easy cycling. You do a build phase where you make your FTP bit bigger, question mark in terms of what that actually means. And then you do race preparation phase where it's about getting ready for your races, presumably by doing a little bit of racing as part of that. But nowhere in that traditional discussion around how to actually get fitter as a cyclist is What we've talked about in terms of how do you progress sustainably and in a managed way where you're able to predict some of the outcomes. We can talk about things like FTP improvement via VO2 max intervals and the like, but for most people that's going to be a month of really hard intervals and then it's going to be, you know... Two weeks to a month of recovering and then it's realizing the actual improvement. And you might not actually get the improvement on the other side because maybe there was some stuff you had to do in the prep phase to do that. Whereas if we think about like the TTE side of things, that's a month of intervals and you've done it in most cases. Like most people can do that in a month to two months. Most people probably land around a month and a half. But you can do an awful lot of the training work to improve TTE in a very short space of time. in a very low fatigue manner, I would say, for the most part. Well, okay, now you're getting way ahead of me. So, let's back up for a second, because let's think about kind of what you already started to talk about, which is, what does it take to improve everything? So, let's talk about, and we'll talk about the benefits and the drawbacks and the counterpoints to everything. And we're going to try to steel man all the counterpoints, too. We really want to make sure that we kind of really focus and give everything a really good, honest assessment. So, FTP. What does it take to improve FTP? Let's step back and think about in the space of a year. How much FTP, for most people, can we realistically gain them in a year? I would say for most amateurs who have been riding for a while, I think we're going to be pretty happy to get anywhere from 5 to 15 watts. I find that if an athlete gets 20 watts, I'm ecstatic. Yeah. 20 watts is like my threshold for we've done so well here. Yes. And I would say on the outside, I am beside myself if we get 30. And this is with professionals too. And especially as you get more and more well trained. and you've been riding longer and your training history gets deeper and you've been doing more high quality training for longer. It is like next to impossible to raise FTP after a certain point because we're basically up against the limits of somebody's recovery. If they can recover faster, we can make them faster, but that's the real limit. And so when it comes to improving FTP, in the big scheme of things, taking a year to like get 30 watts, like unless you're a noob, in which case you might get like 50 watts in a year, it's not going to happen again, so don't. The most I ever got out of somebody in a year was 90 watts, and I think 80% of that was noob gains, but I was very happy with the result. Yeah, I remember, I think my first year, like when I really, really focused on training, I think I got 100 watts. I went from like 180 to 280. Um, because I did a test, like, when I was basically completely untrained. I was actually over-trained, and then I started up again, and yada yada. So, um, and I've, I've helped people to, like, you know, noob gains. Like, we're talking anywhere from 50 to 70 watts occasionally, but for the most part, most people do not respond like that. Um, and I, I was lucky to respond really quickly to basically my ceiling. Um, and a lot of people, not so lucky. Anyway, so. Just because FTP is difficult to improve once we are at a certain point in somebody's training history does not mean that we are no longer trying to improve it. It's not something I ever give up on, and I'm sure you're the same way, Rory. Yeah, it's long-term thinking and coaching. One of the things you have to really emphasize with athletes is we are starting a very long process here in terms of You know, we're going to nudge the needle in this first year. And the second year, the needle is going to go further. And the third year, the needle is hopefully going to go even further. It's not, we're going to do it all in one year, because that's never going to happen. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And if, you know, if you, like, over-focus on FTP, I think we've, Kyle and I did a podcast about this, like, a year or two ago at this point. Like, how much FTP training is too much? Like, when is it? Stopping a Good Thing. There is a point, because at some point, most people need to work on other stuff, like race prep, need to practice sprinting, need to do all this other stuff, because if you just do FTP training, you show up to a road race, chances are, you're going to get blasted out the back the first time they go up that one-minute hill. You're going to be like, oh, I haven't done this in a while, as you watch the Pelotons sail up the road without you. I think this is a problem that a lot of self-coach athletes that are maybe not even thinking about racing can fall into because they maybe think, oh, I'm in perma, increase FTP mode because I've got nothing to get in my way of actually doing that. And one of the things I think we're going to talk about later on is that sadly it doesn't work like that. It's just way too intense to have to do all that such that you could maybe do it two times in a year. three times if you're really good at the recovery side, and you can see some steady progress, but you can't expect it to be a magic 20 watts every single time, because that's just never going to happen. If it did, during COVID, every athlete at a pro level would have suddenly gained 50 to 60 watts, and that definitely didn't happen. Absolutely, yeah. And actually, during COVID was one of the few times when it was like, we've got nothing ahead of us, what do we do? It's like, okay, well, let's shore up all that aerobic foundation. And that's where I started to learn the limits of what people can deal with. Like at some points, I'm like, well, do you want to keep going? People are like, let's try it. And two cycles later, it's been eight months of straight training. And they're like, I'm really tired. And I'm like, I see it in your data. I see you're starting to get tired too. Like, why don't we call it? And then they're like, but what about all my gains? I'm like. Believe me, you need to rest, and resting is going to get you even more improvements. So it's a thing where you can fall into that trap of like, and I think we're going to do a podcast on this later, I've got this in my list, where one of the mistakes people make is always assuming that you can keep getting your noob gains. And anyway. It's a sad, sad day when they suddenly stop. Yeah. The other thing about FTP. is that one of the reasons I really like my test is... The Kolie Moore test, you could say. Believe me, when I Google myself annually, that is the first and last thing that comes up. The test is like, you know, that old saying, like the best measure of performance is performance itself, right? So how do we measure somebody's... FTP, have them ride at FTP. We'll describe what it should feel like. We'll coach them through it. We'll prep them well. And you go execute and give them some cues about what to look for, what not to look for, how you should feel. And then, like you said, most people nail it the first time. Occasionally, we'll have to do a second time. Some people get super nervous on testing, in which case we will test other ways. But we're looking for the same stuff. But when you test your FTP with other FTP tests, 20-minute test, like for me, was always like, I was always at like 90% of my 20-minute power, like 92%, something like that, not 95 for sure. 8-minute power, what was I at like 85, 80%, something like that. And it's, you know, ramp test, forget it. Like I, ramp test probably would have overestimated my FTP by like 80 watts or something like that. And it's really just a function of anaerobic capacity. So depending on how you test, you can think your FTP is still going up when it's actually not. And this is another thing to consider when you're thinking about, like, you know, is my FTP going up? Is this, like, is my training actually working? Because that's something that we at Empirical Cycling are harping on constantly. Is this actually working? How do we know it's working? 

I don't know what you wanted to say. Sorry, I also got distracted. I got distracted because I could hear myself over there. Sorry. One more edit. I'm trying to mute as I go. Oh, okay. Unless I have something to say. Well, so, because, Rory, like, you've said something to me before about RAM tests. You're like, look, I can get you, like, a... However many watts of FTP if I just test you on the RAM test, but it's not going to be real performance. Yeah, so like, because we're basically operating on the best predictor of performance is performance itself. If the RPE queues for the FTP test we use is to ride at FTP, and we do so successfully, i.e. you last that, you know, the expected amount of TTE for the amount of training you've done, you're not ending up accidentally short, and you're actually riding too hard. What you'll find is, if you've actually just done, this would probably be quite easy to do as a coach, is to slam someone with anaerobic capacity intervals, such that you just make them super strong for a very short duration, and then make them do a ramp test or a 20 minute test, and you'll probably see that the number that test gives you goes up, but if you did the Test that we give, the FTP and TTE test, the number will go up a little bit, but it's not going to move much. The delta in terms of your previous FTP to new FTP is going to be very small when it comes to an actual FTP test compared to if you did a 20-minute test or, God forbid, a ramp test or an 8-minute test. You can really start to inflate what an athlete's actually capable of there. And if your thing is making numbers bigger, We like bigger numbers, yeah. Yeah, go for it. But there's more manageable and sustainable ways to actually realize an improvement. Well, and actually, there's a further point there on the testing aspect, too, that you mentioned tangentially, which is that the relationship between the test value and your actual FTP is not static. And so this is one of the other reasons that I developed a test I did anyway. So I've also heard, by the way, people saying it's their proprietary test. It's not proprietary if you can do it for free. Go do it for free. I encourage people to do it. I want people to train better. Like, I'm not making money on this. Jeez. But we are making money on coaching. So if you want to coach with us, shoot me an email at empiricalcyclingatgmail.com. Sorry. Okay, so TTE. Measuring TTE, we talked about this already with the FTP test, but what are the benefits and drawbacks? So like FTP, again, it's like, we only get so much per year, it's hard to raise, but TTE, like how long you hold your FTP, this is a thing where, like you mentioned before, jumping the gun on us, Rory, is that it's easy to improve, it's fast to improve, and you can improve it riding fairly low volume. Like, I'm lucky to be working with a lot of really good, high-level professional athletes, and, you know, when you get all that time to ride, and you can do, you know, 20, 30-hour weeks or whatever, it's, yeah, sure, like, that helps a ton, but if you're riding 8, 10 hours a week, you can still get a lot of improvements by training like this, like, in your total endurance capacity, and not just at FTP, so that's a good thing, like, and you can improve it every single session, because, like, once your noob gains run out, and you're You know, you're hammering 2x20s, and every single time you go out, you go a little bit faster and a little bit faster. Okay, great. Then once it stops feeling like FTP, uh-oh, I'm screwed. What do I do? Okay, now it's time to go 2x22. Now you start to extend. Like, it's a real, real easy solution here. It's just... You do a little bit more, where the more is measured in minutes and not in joules, effectively. Well, it's kind of measured in joules, but you're not trying to do joules per second. You're trying to do joules over a very long period of time. Yeah, the total work capacity, the integral of your intervals, I guess. So another benefit of TTE training is that, like I mentioned, it has a big benefit on your endurance and your fatigue resistance. because, you know, like we've kind of mentioned on the podcast a couple times, this is, you know, I always say that there's no shortcuts, but this is like a half a shortcut or like a 30% shortcut because at some level, it can shortcut volume if you are super time crunched. It cannot do it infinitely. You cannot do like eight sweet spot sessions a week and still have the progress that you want. You're probably actually going to start backsliding because that's way too much training. But it's impactful. And that's one of the reasons that whenever I consult with somebody, and I've consulted with quite a few people this year already on gravel races. And the first thing I tell them is, if you've got some climbs around, go do sweet spot climbing, because you're going to need it in gravel races. And even if that's not your gravel pace, like if it's longer and you're riding like tempo. You are still going to have a huge benefit from going out and doing this. And especially doing it on your one long ride every week, two weeks, once a month, whatever it is, you can get a lot of bang for your buck by doing this kind of work. Yeah, these sorts of really long races, when it's stretching out to four, ten hours, your ability to resist fatigue for a lot longer is always going to be significantly more valuable than... 20 extra watts for half the amount of time that you otherwise might be able to do. Okay, so we're going to come back to that point a little bit later. But another point here that's a benefit for TTE training is that it's much easier to train with a higher and faster ROI, especially for well-trained people, and especially if you've got long races, road races. Gravel Races, Stage Races, Take Your Pick. These are, you know, it's not the only thing you should be doing, but the benefits are fairly large. And so the last consideration here is just going to be measurement. So we mentioned the test before, but training is actually, well, what's that saying? Training is testing and testing is training, right? I've had people ask me, like, should I retest my TTE once I've gotten my 4x10 minutes at FTP out to like, you know, maybe a 5x15 or like a 4x20 or 3x20 or something like that? Should I retest? And I usually say, don't bother. Because if, like, especially if you're using a good model like the WKO5 model and you're keeping that well fed, you can use that to measure your FTP and watch the improvements as you go. You can also just see that you have extended it by doing more interval time. You used to get to the end of 4x10 at FTP going, wow, my legs are falling off my body right now. I got to go home and eat something. Great, do that. Then you can get to the same point after 4x20 in like two months because you've now doubled your work capacity. And at the end of that last 20-minute effort, you're going, well, my legs are pretty tired. But they're not dead. If you suddenly did 70 minutes of threshold in a workout, you wouldn't be able to do that unless your TTE was extended, so you can make the assumption. I think the place where some people maybe find it a little bit difficult to work out exactly what's happened is if you're doing this sort of work via sweet spot rather than FTP, because obviously with sweet spot... You know, you can start at least an hour of work when you're untrained from a TTE perspective, and you can maybe take it out to two, two and a half hours. So what does your TTE FTP actually result in? And the answer is, you can probably assume that it's about half of whatever you can do the sweet spot. Obviously, it's not going to be like a perfect... Back Comparison. But if you're doing two hours of Sweet Spot, you can probably assume you'll be able to do close to or more than an hour of FTP. And that's another case where you don't have to then just go and do the FTP test again, because, again, you've trained to accomplish what you wanted to do. Right. And not only that, but making assumptions on the equivalence between Sweet Spot and FTP, this is actually really difficult to do, because... For some people who don't have a lot of natural endurance talent or who don't have a lot of time to ride or both, like me right now, for instance, I could probably hold Sweet Spot for, I don't know, 80 minutes maybe, and I could probably hold FTP for 40, and there's 50% for you right there. But for somebody super well-trained, like a good gravel racer or an ultra-marathoner or just like a super well-trained roadie, You're looking at somebody who can hold their FTP for an hour or more, most likely, and who can hold their sweet spot for probably, what, over two hours. Easy. Well over two hours. And, like, not even blink about it. So, it's one of those things where, at some point, you've got to reassess your definition and how you train somebody who's that well-trained. But, that's kind of besides the point. Think about what's the trade-offs? Like what are the counterpoints to training FTP and what's the counterpoint to training TTE? Why would you not want to do either one of these? So I think the biggest one that I always hear is that a rising tide lifts all boats. If you raise your FTP 50 watts, like, or let's say 30, let's take a nice round number. Like, let's say your FTP is 200 watts, right? And you raise it by 20 watts to 220. Now, 200 watts is your new sweet spot, right? And so, if you do some training there, like, well, before, 200 watts, you can do 40 minutes, let's say. But you raise up your threshold to 220, and now you can do 200 watts for 80 minutes. I mean, that makes perfect sense to me. You? Yeah, that makes sense. But how long is this going to last? Well, hopefully forever. And the question is, how do you get better after that? Because if that was, you know, one of your, like, let's say you've been training for five years, and then you go from 200 to 220 in like six months or so. Now you've got race season coming up or whatever, and now you've, then you finish your season up, and you take a little break, and now it's like, okay, time to go again. What do we do? Next year you get 10 watts. Okay, cool. I did all this training. And the thing is, okay, well, let's not counterpoint that yet. I will say there, like, one of the, I think this specific example is one that applies quite well to people that are still in that noob gains phase, where lifting FTP is easy enough that you maybe put more of an effort into, you know, just riding, doing some hard workouts. Everything, that is an actual instance of a rising tide will lift all boats. The problem is when you get to, you know, your training age is three years plus, you've been racing for most of that time, you're a masters athlete that's been doing this all your life, and at that point, the FTP gains aren't going to come anywhere near easily enough to suddenly make old FTP feel like sweet spot that quickly, and you really need to start parceling out. How am I going to do all these different components? Yeah. So, and, well, I think, okay, well, now you brought it up. So, the other thing is that just training to raise FTP is fucking hard. Like, if that's your only thing, that's all you're focused on, it takes a lot of energy to do that. It takes a lot of hard training, it takes a lot of recovery, and the accumulated fatigue is actually going to cost you in other aspects of your training. And so, like, if you need to do weight training, if you need to do sprint training, if you need to go do, like, any kind of skills training, if you need to do, like, repeated sprint training, like, if you need, like, 30-30s or 15-15s, like, and you're so focused on FTP, you're going to miss all this stuff. Or when you go do it, it's not going to be that good of quality. And the aspects, other aspects of your training are going to suffer for it. And so, So, and especially depending on where you are in your training, like that's why there's no, that's why everything's, it depends, right? Because everybody's a little bit different. Some people are new in their training. Some people are super well trained. Some people have a quick response. Some people have a slow response. Some people have a slow but steady response. Some people have, you got to hammer them and then let them rest. And then we see a response. Like there's all kinds of people out here and it's, and we can't really come up with like, oh, just work on your FTP all year and everything's going to get better. It doesn't work for everybody. Yeah, and if we flashback to the old paradigm of what we thought cycling training was, you know, that base build, race prep, the build phase and the race prep phase often included VO2 max intervals, and that's the point where, like, the way I operate at the very least, and I think the way you operate, is for the most part, you want to get some of that stuff out the way before you actually get to that race period, because You need to start working on TTE again in all likelihood on the other side of that. You need to start doing all the sprints that you need to prepare for for that crate you're going to do. You need to start to work on, you know, that 40 second to a minute power for that road race that's just constant kicker climbs around the inner city of Glasgow. You know, you've got to work on all these other things and if your goal right before in a race event is to just slam VO2 intervals in the way that You know, we all kind of thought was meant to be the way it was done. The outcome of that is one, you're going to be heavily fatigued, or possibly not, because back then you did it off of a percentage of FTP that was possibly way too low for you anyway. But if you did see the FTP improvement, that's great, but probably what we're going to get into in a moment is how much of a benefit did that 10 watts you got? actually give you when it came to the event that soon with all that fatigue, none of the race prep you actually needed. Actually, you know, one of the things is like as I've gone in coaching, I've and I kind of learned the larger quote unquote rules and principles behind everything. I do kind of break out of some of my typical molds that I that I that I find so comfortable, because I'm like, man, I know this person needs X, we're at this point of the season, but I think we can get away with sneaking in a little bit of whatever, like VO2s or something like that. And so once I understand that, and also, especially once I've got working, when I'm working with somebody who has, gives me excellent feedback, can Tell their FTP, both thresholds, both of them, can go ride for five minutes and give me both, like a ballpark number within 10 watts. That's the kind of client where I especially feel comfortable really backing out of typical structures and thinking about, well, other stuff. Let's just put it that way. Because you've seen some of the training schedules I've given folks, and they look... They probably look alien to a lot of coaches, but they're very effective because the underlying principles are all still there. Some of my athletes have, and they'll know who they are because they'll know what workout I'm talking about, have been doing some weird-looking FTP workouts lately to great success. Some of them are... Going into, like, peak races, and this is just something to, like, really get the legs ready for the sort of efforts they're going to do. Some are a way out from race season, and it's just, let's try this different thing and see how it pans out. Let's see if it's something that fits your specific physiology. And, like, I think the real art of coaching is that ability to, like, adapt. I have, in the past, been very much, we're doing this, this block, we're doing that next block, and keeping things quite rigid. What happened the most as I became a better coach was changing, like being a little bit more off the cuff in terms of what I think an athlete specifically needs. I've got one guy right now who is mid-training camp and a week ago, two weeks ago, gave him some anaerobic capacity stuff because I figured I'll rest you going into the team camp because I know that's going to be too much. I'm going to rest you after the team camp. So I might as well just make you do something a little bit hard before you go. because we've got that opportunity. You know, we're 10 weeks out from, like, A races. We can begin the build a lot sooner than we might otherwise, and we can see what happens on the other side of that team camp when it comes back from it. So, like, we're getting way off track here, but, like, the art of coaching is an ability to do a lot of different things to try and accomplish things like the TTE improvement or things like an FTP improvement in ways that you might not otherwise expect to work. Yeah, and especially being flexible is a big one, because this is something that I harp on all of our coaches about, is observing. Talk to your client, say, this is what I'm thinking, this is the potential benefit, these are potential drawbacks, this may not work, this is how long it's going to take to know, and let's see. And this is part of our individualization thing. And so this is actually, you know, I think this is kind of on point, because I think for a lot of people to like, because we don't have any hard and fast rules about you should work FTP here, you should work TTE, you should blah, blah, blah. You could do all of it if you really want to, all at the same time. And you can let somebody... Well, I was going to say, you could let somebody auto-regulate. So like, so for instance, Coach Katie is a great auto-regulator. I usually give her a range of intervals. And if... Her FTP has been going up, she's going to do it at higher power, and she's going to stop at the same point. So like, you know, a couple months ago, it was this many watts, and you know, she was doing like a 4x15, and then I'm like, I'll be like, alright, give me 20 minute intervals, give me 2 to 3 here. And then, you know, like, what, like a week or two ago, like they were at like, you know, 15, 20 watts higher than previously. Okay, great. But she did less interval time, because she's a good auto regulator. And so, when we're thinking about The trade-offs between all of this stuff and coaching it, it makes a big difference because you can observe what somebody needs, observe what's working with somebody, and adjust your coaching style to... to what their needs are. And this is one of the things that I do in consults all the time, is I tell people, like, if this happens, I would do this. If this happens, I would do this. So you've got all these tools now. Now you go figure it out, and you can adjust as you see fit. And it seems to, well, based on the feedback I get, it seems to work very, very well. Yeah, one thing like self-coach athletes in particular can do, but I also try and drum this into the ones I coach, is you will probably at worst in your head, ideally in a training peak schedule, have a plan of what you want to accomplish for like the next block. And if you're doing something like time to exhaustion work where you're just trying to drive, in fact, I don't think we actually said TTE stands for time to exhaustion. I think I did earlier. Okay, good. You were probably like thinking about, you know, shiny objects in your room or something. Not inaccurate. Trying not to fidget. For context. Listeners, I am muting my mic every time I'm not speaking because I can't stop fidgeting. So if you're a self-coached athlete, you probably have that idea of how you want to progress. If you're doing something like FTP intervals to do the time to exhaustion work, you might do a 2x20 to start with, and 2x22, 2x24, 26, etc., all the way up until you've done 60 plus minutes of FTP in a workout. You can kind of skip the line a little bit there if you're actually listening to your body and like paying attention to how a workout goes because the goal of the TTE extension workouts isn't do this many minutes, it's reach this physiological stage where it is all of a sudden it gets harder and you just hold that for a couple of minutes and you're probably done depending on you know what kind of athlete you are but in general like two to five minutes in that period and you can go home and if that means that you're able to do five minutes more than you were maybe expected to fantastic you might have just skipped an entire workout if you're doing less than you were maybe expecting to that's not a wasted workout you've still done good work there but it's an indication that you maybe need to get other things like primarily recovery because If you're getting to that 2x26 and you do a 26 and a 22, you probably just needed a little bit more time before that workout or to take rides before it a bit better, better sleep, better food, nutrition, etc. So this is one of the coaching things about operating with TTE in mind is that now you've got an objective measurement of fatigue. And I tell all of my clients this, I tell all of the consultation clients this, this is one of your best indicators. And, you know, there's a lot more than that. And we've mentioned them on the podcast before. But I want to also go on the counterpoints to, like, why not work on TTE? Like, what's the drawbacks of TTE work? So we just talked about kind of the drawbacks and the counterpoints about FTP. Like, more FTP is good, right? Rising tide lifts all boats. Okay. TTE. I've talked, I've consulted with, and I'm friends with, and you also, Rory, are friends with some of these folks who only ever want to ride long. They only ever want to do long intervals. They don't want to do VO2s ever. They don't want to go hard. They want to go long. They want to hammer. I'd like to apologize in advance to my client who thinks I always talk about them, and I'd resolve to not do that today, but I can see it's about to happen. Okay, so I'm specifically thinking of a mutual friend of ours who has, let's put it this way. He's always mechanicaled out of unbound. Yeah, but that's everyone unbound because they don't do a good course wreck and then they ruin everybody's bikes. Okay, that's fair. Or it's really muddy. Okay, so I think for some people, there's a mental hurdle about pushing hard on a bike. And some people have like legit PTSD. for like breathing hard and stuff like that. And that's a good reason to avoid it, for sure. There's also people who are just like, you know what, I just enjoy doing what I'm good at, which I've been, you know, you've been training, riding, you know, riding along for so long that like you are now like a dyed-in-the-wool diesel, you don't have any get up and go, and you just want to keep doing that. And that's fine, especially if that's the kind of training that you're Events Need. But usually for the people I talk to, it's not the case. Because I talk to a couple people who are doing long gravel races. I've definitely consulted with a bunch of people doing ultras. But for most people, you've got to step up and do some VO2s at some point if you really want to raise that ceiling. Because TTE work is great, but there is too much of a good thing on both sides of this. And also, if you are one of these people that just loves volume, volume, volume, going long, going long, going long, if you've put off doing VO2s for a very long time, you're probably going to get a great benefit of doing them just once. Yes, for sure. Yeah, like do a week or just start folding them in once a week or something like that. You'll probably see really good improvements, especially if you're getting enough recovery. But here's the other thing, though, is that for a lot of people, Not focusing on raising your FTP becomes a problem because, for instance, let's say your FTP is like 300 watts for 80 minutes or something like that, but you need to do a climb at 350 watts for 30 minutes as one of your goal races to make the front group. Let's say that's a thing that you need to do. If you keep just going out and hammering, You know, 4x20s or a sweet spot, 2x40s or 5x40s or however long you're out to at this point, you probably aren't going to be doing 350 for 30 if your FTP has not gone up. And it's not a guarantee that when your TTE goes out that your FTP has gone up. And that's something that we're going to talk about in a second. But especially for cases like this, which is most people, like if you just don't have the aerobic capacity, you Need to Raise It, and that pretty much everything raises aerobic capacity. Like, you've got to do volume, you've got to do TTE work, and you've got to do VO2 max work. Those are like the three sides of the coin? What has three sides? The aerobic triangle. The what triangle? The aerobic triangle. Aerobic triangle. Please don't ever call it that again. I'm going to make another meme on my Instagram, dr.rgp Your second post ever! Second and only, bad memes only. I will say, since we're at this point, we're talking a lot about TT and FTP, and almost like they're in contest with one another, but as we said earlier on, it's a very long-term process, and it's about... How these all fit together. We are TTE evangelists, but, you know, ultimately we would rather that we make your FTP go up 30 watts and then we make it longer. Like, these are not things that we're picking between. We want both of these. We want you to be able to be as fit as we can possibly get you. Well, now you're getting ahead of me, too, because I was going to ask you, like, before we got to listener questions, is this all kayfabe? Is this all a fake fight? Is this East Coast versus West Coast rap battle to sell albums? Because I am a child of the 90s, sorry. Yes. Okay, cool. That's my thesis. That's your thesis. What is it selling, though? Is it selling like, I don't know, because I, you know, what I'm selling is performance. What I'm selling is individualization, you know. I think the problem is what I said earlier around like old ideas behind what performance is drilled down to a single number. And the way that we work is that we think improving each number in tandem with one another is going to result in that number is going to get bigger quicker than if you just focused on the number on its own. But also... If you are trying to sell a training program, inevitably people are always going to come back to, will it make my FTP bigger? It's something that occasionally clients come back to. I had one recently, who I don't think listens to the podcast, say that he felt like he hadn't improved in the last few months. And part of that is because he had COVID. And the second part is because we did a whole bunch of TTE work. We did the doubling your work capacity thing, and now he's doing VO2s. And his endurance was great, but his number didn't go up, and he was like, where's my fucking number? Yeah, and that's a legacy issue that I think good coaches really need to push back against in terms of, there's a lot more to fitness in terms of a number, there's a range of numbers it turns out. We could talk about TTE in a lot of different ways, because ultimately TTE is just, you know, how long you can last at a given intensity. We're talking about it at FTP here, but it could also be important at, you know, VL2 max type intensities. If you're a pursuit rider or you're at the British National Hill Climb Championships, your ability to push a really high number for longer is going to be something that becomes much more valuable to you than 20 watts. Yeah, and having a lot of really good endurance training before you get to that type of training. It shores up, like, the metaphor kind of works with this, where, like, you've made the base of the pyramid larger so you can build the peak bigger. It kind of works. It kind of falls apart in some ways, but it kind of works. But I wanted to ask you also, you know, because, well, actually, to summarize, you know, when we're thinking about this, we're thinking about long-term planning and trade-offs and what somebody needs, like, in the short-term and in the long-term both. And that's why there's not a lot of easy answers around this. And I think also a lot of people could mistake empirical cycling for, you know, being a TTE over blah, blah, blah, or whatever. But like, you know, don't forget like the, you know, the VO2 Max podcast for raising your FTP. Like that's been, that's been out there for years. Like this is something that we really focus on too. And we are focused on a very holistic version of fitness and also, you know, happiness and having fun with the training too. Also go into a lot of the background as to how this all happens. And we wouldn't go into the background with that much detail if we didn't think it was going to end up being important. Yes. Okay, so here's a quip that I cribbed from Tim Cusick back in the day. It was one of his WKL4 webinars, which I think has now been taken down off YouTube. But the WKL5 ones are still up. He said a lot of the time he would rather have, like, What was it, like, you know, 10 or 20 minutes more TTE than 10 or 20 watts more FTP or something like that. And I remember I got into an argument, shall we say, with a person on a forum when I quit this, thinking about Tim and thinking, man, I really, really, I really appreciate this quote. I just said it. I was like, I'd rather have blah, blah, blah than blah, blah, blah. Because for most cases, there are some exceptions. I would rather have more TTE. I would rather have somebody have better endurance than watts. And I'll give you an example. I've talked about this in the podcast before. I've got a client who I'm still working with who, when he came to me as if he was like 330, and he was doing a lot of polarized, and he was hammering those 3x8s and hammering the VO2s all the time, doing lots of easy stuff otherwise. His TTE at FTP was like 30 minutes. But when we started, his FTP, because he stopped pushing on VO2 so much, because he's an older athlete, so we stopped hammering him with that, and I started thinking about, okay, let's get more longer efforts in, let's get more repeated sprints in, let's do the whole thing, instead of just hammering polarized VO2s all the time. He's racing way better, he's got better endurance, and he still doesn't like that he's missing that 10 watts of FTP. Despite the fact that his performance across the board is way better, that one number, he's like, ah, and I appreciate that. He worked hard for those 10 watts, but, you know, in that, you know, both short and long term, that trade-off has been way more than worth it. Yeah, it's about outcomes. If your desired outcome is FTP to be higher, then sure, go do ramp tests and... Make the number bigger if that's what makes you satisfied. But if, you know, your measure of performance is, I want to finish that Gran Fondo, I want to be competitive in my age group at a gravel race, I want to do well at a crit series, you need to get more specific about how you manage all of this and more specific about the things that are going to help you actually achieve a better performance. Yeah. And so, like, let's talk about some exceptions to the TTE thing, though, because... I just talked about most of the time I'd rather have it. When would I rather not have it? An easy one is if I'm coaching somebody in the pursuit. There's a, you know, two and a half to like four and a bit, sometimes five minute effort, depending on how fast or slow you are. You need a lot of really quality training. Like you got to build that base of the pyramid out to have that nice big VO2 max once you start training it. And as we've seen, like as you mentioned before, somebody's been, you know, if somebody's got like an 80-something minute TTE, because that's all they do, like they are actually set up really well to get a good bump from VO2 max stuff, as long as the recovery is there too. And so in the short and the long term, if somebody's like a track racer, I'm going to want to hammer the long stuff early, then as they get more into the track season, because the races are like what? 3, 10 minutes, like a long one would be like a 30-minute race on the track, like a 30-minute points race. That's a long track race. And that's when we don't need that much more endurance. We need somebody to be able to hammer for 10 minutes super hard. And after they've been on and off a VO2 max for 10 minutes in a scratch race, we need them to make that last move and get across the line first. Yeah, if you're training someone for, like, a tempo race, where it's going to be, like, real short, it's going to suddenly get really, really quick, guess what, you're training for a ramp test. Like, it's the perfect example of, like, where, you know, trying to really emphasize that short portion of the power curve starts to come more in handy. And again, like what I mentioned before, like, British outclaim sort of races. They usually don't get longer than about 12 minutes, and to do well at 12 minutes, you need to do over 7 watts per kilo, whereas I think this year is like a 3-4 minute effort, you know, it's basically a pursuit race with higher force on the pedals, and that's just going to be about... A lot of really hard intervals. Muscular endurance, good VO2 max, good anaerobic capacity, like all of it, like good neuromuscular power, like all of it in one. And you get everything else done in months beforehand, and then you basically accept that you're going to reach that tipping point where doing more time to exhaustion work or trying to lift FTP very specifically isn't going to pan out. It might be that you get benefits afterwards to that. doing an event where it's going to end up being four minutes long, and as part of your prep you're doing a lot of four minute max or near max intervals, then yeah, it's probably going to pan out similarly to a VO2 block, but that's not the outcome you're looking for. The outcome you're looking for is the four minute power, and so that's the thing you should focus on. Yeah, and so actually you make another interesting point, which is that like, because I know a lot of people though, who will say like, oh, I need to improve my 8-minute power, my 10-minute power, something like that. And I'm like, well, it still comes down to the same stuff. You get like improving 10-minute power, like to a certain extent, go out and do some 10-minute intervals for sure. You got to learn the pacing, you got to practice and all that kind of fun stuff. But in the long term, if you want to raise your 10-minute power really well, it behooves you to work on your VO2 max and work on your TTE. Both, because 10 minutes is like, you know what a catenary arc is, by any chance? Absolutely, no idea. So if you have two points of a rope, and you pull the rope tight, then you slacken the rope, the arc that gets made is called a catenary, that hangs between the two things. And so I think about a lot of power in between those things, like between sprint power, like VO2 max, and like your FTP's TTE. I think power in between hangs kind of like as a catenary. And so if you improve one of these things, like if you improve VO2 max by 50 watts, and you've improved your FTP by 50 watts, it's not like, oh, I didn't do any 10-minute intervals, my 10-minute power hasn't gone up. You're fucking right, it's gone up. Yeah, it's the inference from, you know. Other things you've done, we don't need to do another TTE test because we know TTE goes up when you do those intervals. You know your 10-minute power has gone up when you've already got a fairly good TTE and you've done a bunch of anaerobic capacity work on top of that to actually lift the roof even more to give you that extra bit. Yeah, and sometimes one of the things that happens when people go to actually express one of these efforts is, and they don't see any extra watts, a lot of the times, honestly, it's fatigue. you are still fatigued from your training, like you've got to reassess your sleep and your nutrition, potentially your tapering strategies, et cetera, et cetera. So all that stuff aside, I also wanted to address one other thing that is tangential to this whole conversation, but it's important because I know probably a lot of people are thinking about it, which is if you extend your, and I get Instagram questions on this all the time. and I've gotten a couple of consultation questions on it too. If you extend your intervals at FTP out to like an hour or past an hour even, how do you know how much your FTP's gone up by? A dribble of watts at most. Potentially a dribble. If you are new to training, it's potentially gone up quite a bit. Yeah, that's when you'll get. Yeah. So the answer is simultaneously, I don't know, and it depends. And so when you're thinking about this kind of stuff, the best measure of performance is performance itself. And this is where, I've mentioned this on the podcast before, where a lot of the time, if I think somebody's FTP has gone up, I'll have them go out and smash a 30-minute time trial instead of... doing a TTE thing, because a lot of the time, you can wear a rut in a number, you can have a mental rut, you can have a physical rut, because your brain is used to, I only get to push this hard for FTP, and when you've gotten, let's say, 10 or 20 more watts of FTP, let's say 20, that's a pretty good, pretty healthy bump. If your FTP has gone up 20 watts, you have to recruit a lot more motor units to get that extra 20 watts out. And that is new in itself. It doesn't necessarily follow that you can feel out your FTP as easily. It's nice. Basically, the muscle motor memory becomes almost roped to what you were used to. Yeah. And this is, honestly, this is a potential drawback of doing too much TTE training, where you just wear a big rut in that number and your body doesn't like to go out of it. Well, we've developed ways to get people out of that rut easily, but that's not the point. The point is that if your TTE has gone out, you cannot make assumptions about if your FTP has gone up or not. You have to measure it more objectively, because at some points, your RPE is not to be trusted, I guess we could say. And I also don't like assumptions in general. because very, very, very few times, if any that I can think of offhand, is there a static relationship between any two points in somebody's power curve or their RPE or anything like that? And so I want to measure it. I mean, I think assumptions are ass. That's why it starts with the word ass. Assumptions are ass. I don't like them. I'd rather measure. I want to test. And you don't necessarily need to test, test, test, test, test, but... We talked about other ways around testing, like shortcuts for FTP tests and whatnot. So those are things to potentially do, but you cannot make these assumptions, in my experience. And for some people, okay, great. If it works for you, and it always works, great, that's fine. But in my experience, I want something to work the first time, every time, because our clients pay us a pretty decent amount of money. And out of respect for that and their time and their trust, I want to make sure that we are fucking it up as infrequently as possible, which means making less assumptions, basically zero, as much as possible. That's why we try as much as we can to give really good guidance around, you know, here's what you're meant to do and fuel for an interval. Like my text for the FTP test, I think, says self-regulate according to how you feel, you know. Ignore the head unit is very specifically said, I think in most of my FTP workouts, because ideally I don't want people to get too attached to a number because that's part of developing that mental rut of just settling into one intensity. You want to be able to respond to it on feel as much as you can. Let's also think about long-term planning, because we kind of mentioned this before. I actually talked a little bit about it before, quite a bit. But one of the things I've got as a personal standard for development riders, for pros, who have all the time in the world to train, if they've been training for 15 years, it's a different story. But if they've been training in the first five or 10, I would really, really want to see their FTP getting up 15 to 30 watts a year. That's like a minimum for me. And if we can accomplish that, and we can keep those improvements year to year, and keep building on them in the long term, that is excellent. But here's the thing. If we need to get somebody's FTP up, let's say it's a potential World Tour Pro. You're starting with a 350-watt FTP for a man. And you need to get into the... Load Mid-400s at your weight and your abilities to get a contract and be worthy of your spot. It's going to take years to build up that ceiling, potentially, unless you are a very quick responder. Even people with this potential, the response rate and the potential ceiling are, in my experience, not that related. Some people can respond fast and then plateau fast. Some people can respond fast and then keep responding fast. Some people respond slow and have a very, very high potential ceiling. And so building up that VO2max year to year to year is a long, long, long process. Anybody who says they can do it in a year or something like that, they're lying. Yeah, like the rising tide lifts all bolts thing. that we mentioned before, that is often mentioned alongside, well, if you have a higher FTP, you'll race better. And I think at a low level of racing, sort of like cat to and below in like a US system, I don't think that's that true. I think that skills will get you far more than like 20 to 30 watts of FTP ever will. It helps, but it's not going to be the be-all and end-all. Whereas if we're looking at people that are that cat one to domestic to World Tour Pro, the actual improvement you get out of the bumps in FTP is substantially more valuable to you than it is to an amateur. Not just because, yeah, there's like... contractual things that that can act as a benefit from. I know, for example, that Anna Shackley, who's a Scottish rider on SDWorks, I believe that she got her job with them during the pandemic because someone sent them her numbers and that was enough to get her a contract with them. But also, you're at the point of, you know, you're at the very top of racing where The assumption is you've probably got the skills. If you don't have the skills, you must have a fantastic FTP. Well, everybody at that level has a fantastic FTP, and you absolutely need the skills. So you're right, like, especially, yeah, Kattu and below, domestically, here in the US, and I would even argue in the UK as well, and Australia, and, you know, probably to some degree, like Belgium and the Netherlands, even though I know even the amateur racing level is a bit higher there, because especially... They have the skills, though, is the difference. They really have the skills. They're really good at that site. Yeah, everybody who goes there, yeah. You look at cyclocross world championships and it's just two flags. Yeah. So where was I going with that, Rory? Help. Oh, so that's like the FTP ceiling thing. Like, you know, we're always working on it, especially for the pro development riders. The fatigue resistance, though, honestly, I would say I would say there's some selection bias here because the people who come to me, the budding pros and the actual pros who come to me to consult and say, you know, I'm having these issues, how do I improve my fitness? Most of the time, and this is why I think there's selection bias, because if everything were going fine, they wouldn't be coming to me for these things. Most of the time, they are completely lacking one of two things. The first one is fatigue management or progression. Usually they go hand in hand. But the second thing is working on fatigue resistance. Like, there's very little progressive training, there's very little volume, and these things are absolute necessities. So, for instance, like, if I look at a lot of my, you know, actual pros and my, you know, development people for the pro ranks, in like, two years-ish, depending on where they start, but for most people, We're looking at for fatigue resistance. You can usually get somebody to an extraordinarily high degree of fatigue resistance in probably two to three years. And I'm talking like 0% power loss across everything at 50 kilojoules per kilogram. Zero. Yeah, this is one of those things where like there's a real difference in terms of how we talk about it in terms of like amateur athletes versus pro athletes where With a pro athlete, because of the duration and intensity of the races, you're looking at someone needing to, and frequency, yeah, you're looking at someone who needs to be able to do their all-time best powers or close to at the end of a five-hour slugfest, you know. One of the reasons that a race like Flanders is so good is because it's really stressing people's ability to actually go and produce that effort to get them through that last 10 miles without anyone else with them. It's one of the reasons why something like Milan-San Remo is maybe less interesting than that because it's 200 kilometers of people doing less than 100 watts. doing an all-time best off of very little fatigue to begin with. But not everybody can do that, for sure. Like, even Cavendish has said, like, you cannot put a pedal stroke wrong in Milan-San Rim over. You're going to pay for it in the final. Yeah. But from the amateur perspective, like, your key race might not be longer than two hours, even if it's like a road race. If it's gravel, it maybe becomes a little bit different, but gravel's its own weird thing as well. And so, like, your ability to resist fatigue, you don't need to go to the extreme lengths that... Pros should ideally be that in order to be competitive. But that's still something you're thinking about in the very long term is how can we make sure that when you get to that decisive 15-minute climb at the end of the race, you are ready to drop the best effort you can do this year? Yeah, actually one of my pro clients just recently started their season and and started like a stage race a little bit fatigued, but by the end of the road race was one of the strongest people in the field, despite the fact that the legs were really only like 80% there. And this is where that kind of fatigue resistance and that depth makes a huge difference because a lot of the competitors at the start of the road race, like, you know, a long race, like, you know, we're talking hours and hours and hours at the start of the race, like everybody's nice and fresh. And my client was like, oh, my legs aren't great. I was barely hanging on. But at the end of the race, like, you know, we're talking like, you know, we're talking like people can't come around because they're just smashing too hard up this hill when everybody else is tired. It's like, like, it's like everybody else's level went below this person's level who. who's, it didn't, didn't drop. And that's one of the benefits, because if you don't have that kind of depth, you get to the end of a five-hour road race, like, where are your legs? Like, if you don't have a good fatigue resistance, if you don't have good depth, they're nowhere. And this is one of the reasons I, I'm an adamant believer in this, that this is why Wout is so good, because Wout at 80% is still better than most people at 100. And that's why he could race so much and still be really Anyway, well, you've all seen it, I don't have to go into it. Tade Bikacar and Jonas Vindegaard wouldn't win the Tour de France if they didn't have the ability to compete in week three. Because, you know, that post after rest day two has always been the death point for many GC attempts. Because people just, they've reached that third week of racing and they just no longer have it in them. And there might be multiple reasons for that. But an awful lot of the time, if they were, Training to be able to ensure that they can survive that third week, they'd be better off. I think it's a thing that Roglic struggled with for years as he faded in the third week of the Tour de France every single year. And he also turned up to the Vuelta where no one else was feeling good and felt great. I think last year he really showed, you know, he got to the Giro, felt great. He also got to the Vuelta and felt great. I think there's other things that happened there. But, like, it's a great example of how just making sure you stay really on top of, you know, what is the performance outcome you need your training to satisfy. For a GC racer, it is, after 21 days of racing, I need to be able to drop the time trial of my life. For a crit racer who's got, you know, six races throughout a several-month period, it's... I need to be capable of doing the best performance I can at every race, recovering in between, going in fresh every time. There's different requirements for different fields. And like you said, it's all about the performance requirements, and this goes, yeah, and it really goes for amateurs too, because if somebody's limiter is their pack handling skills, I'm going to push less on the training attributes, and I'll be like, you've got to go hit a practice crit every week. You need practice, you need skills. and it's going to come at the cost of another workout, but it's going to be worth it in the long run if that's a skill that you need. And I've definitely got people on my roster where that's the trade-off that we're making. And it's not like something I do unilaterally. I discuss it with people. I say, this is the trade-off I think we need to make and they'll either push back and I'll try to convince them and we'll usually meet in the middle somewhere. I have a client who I started with. Today, who I know will be listening to this, because he told me he's listened to every episode, who told me that he doesn't think he wants to race this year because he doesn't think he'll have the fitness for it, and I told him that the fitness isn't the thing that's going to stop him being good in races, it's the fact that you're not racing. Yeah, and it's sort of like, here's an example, it's sort of like staying at home and building a bazooka. when everybody else has like a BB gun. And you come out and you don't know how to aim the bazooka. Everybody else is a deadly shot with a BB gun. They're going to get you. I can probably think of a less violent example, but that's the one I can think of offhand. I mean, that's the way I used to play StarCraft. I would hunker down and just build up this massive Zergling army, but I couldn't skirmish with anybody in the meantime. That's how I played as well. It usually didn't go well past the 10-minute point when I ran out of an arm. Yeah, exactly. Same thing. Yeah, I always got my ass kicked in that game. But it was fun doing it. Yeah. So... The other, just fittingly for the bazooka argument, is one of the downsides when you develop that level of fitness but you have no race experience is you're more likely to explode and take other people out with you. 

Oh, all right. Well, at the danger of overextending the metaphor. No, let's not do that. So, all right. So why don't we do a little bit of summary? Because we got some listener questions and we've gone on for quite a bit now. So FTP versus TTE, is this a real debate? No. FTP versus TTE. Do you have to do one instead of the other? Also, no. Are there trade-offs to make? Yes. Do you need to work on both? Absolutely. There's no way around working on everything. There's no one thing that's going to be like, oh, I only did this thing and I got a thousand times fitter. It's not going to happen. Oftentimes, what's happening realistically is somebody's missing a piece. Somebody's training is great and they're just missing, oh, you need VO2s. or like you need race experience or you need like better fatigue resistance or anything like that. So that's the... There's two sides of the same aerobic triangle. Sure. I never wanted to be one of those people who's like, oh, like you've just, just like, remember your aerobic triangle, like figure out what side you're on or... I, cause the thing is like, I also don't like that because it sets up, you've got to pick one. Um, but it's, it's just, it's all the same. Like I think about it in terms of adaptation and, and systems improvement and what's the physiological limiter and stuff like that. Uh, and so it's, um, it's, yeah, it's not a real debate. This is not a thing that you need to think about. It's like, if you're missing something, this is probably the biggest thing. If you are missing Fatigue Resistance. How would you describe somebody as missing fatigue resistance? You feel really fit for 10 minutes and then you blow up in the last three laps of a crit, something like that. That's a good fatigue resistance thing. You get to the end of a road race and you think you can sprint. Your normal sprint is like 1,500 watts and you get there and you got 1,000 maybe. If you're the kind of person that... You know, and the weekday group ride can do really well at the sprint in the end, but when it comes to the weekend ride where it's several hours longer and you can't, you're not very good at the sprint in the end, you're the sort of person that needs to really think about this. Yeah. And here's the other thing. The other side of this argument is if you are thinking about how do I just work over FTP more? How can I develop my ability to ride over FTP more for hours and hours and hours and hours? I've coached a lot of people who've asked me this. Like, oh, I just need to work over FTP more. It's like, here's a for instance. This is an exact example. I had a client, his FTP was 330. He was racing in the elite races up in New England, the Cat 1-2s. He was not really being judicious with his energy expenditure in the first like hour and a half of a three, four hour race. And so he would blow up. and if he didn't get shot out the back he would be relegated to the Gruppetto or like the main peloton because the brake was gone and everybody's going to block and you're just like racing for I don't know seventh or something like that and he was like how do I make the brake like I just I need to be able to and I was like no first of all you need to manage your energy better and second of all we need to raise your threshold because You are doing a lot of surges at 350 watts, and if 350 watts were your threshold, you would race 10 times better, because now those surges are aerobically easily, you're easily capable of them. And it's no longer going to be pulling teeth to get you to ride at 350 watts over and over again for, you know, because before, like, what can you do, like 40, 50 minutes in the course of, like, a couple hours of a race over threshold? But if that's your threshold, you can go so much longer. Because below this threshold, you fatigue slower. Above this threshold, you fatigue faster. Nice and simple. Significantly faster. Yes. So that's really kind of what it all comes down to. Those are all the sides of the coin. I hope we did a fair job kind of representing the different sides of this argument, which I didn't even know was an argument. People have been telling me, oh, you're the FTP versus TTE guy. Like, and I'm like, I am? Like, I didn't know I started this debate. I thought, this is all stuff I picked up from smarter coaches, and some of it we've developed ourselves, but, you know, anyway. So, any other thoughts, Rory, before we head to listen to questions? No, I think we've covered a lot. I think the important part is, like, this is the same, we're talking about the same thing here. When we're talking about FTP and TTE, these are... Absolutely things to work hand in hand. And I think if you are only doing one of them, if your training plan is only doing one of them, I think that's something to definitely address because you're not going to improve as much as you would in that one direction, which is inevitably always going to be the number than you would otherwise if you were trying to do both. Yeah. And having your FTP set properly. Thank you for muting that, Rory. That was distracting. Having your FTP set properly. is a really good first place to start. And don't worry, our tests are totally free. Just go read the article, everybody's seen it. Okay, listener questions. Our first listener question took me a little bit to get my head around, but the question is basically, can you progress well with like total weekly intervals versus like daily intervals? So here's the example. Can you do three days of 2x20, and now we've done six 20-minute intervals in a week, or can you do one day of 3x20? Is the three days of 2x20 better? It's a weird equivalence, right? I can sort of see where it's going for in terms of, like, does the accumulated fatigue over multiple days add up? Not fatigue, time and zone. because if you are capable... The fatigue of doing more in that period. Well, the accumulated load, training load, let's say. I don't coach like that, so it just doesn't make sense to me from the perspective of why would you do that. Okay, so I'll give you the right answer, which is, or what I think is the right answer. The answer is no. And here's why. Because this is the first thing you touched on because this is the thing you always touch on, which is progression. And I'm... I'm so jaded at this point, or maybe not jaded, it's so ingrained in me at this point, I don't even consider it that much, it's like a reflex, like progression and stuff like that, so to me, if I'm looking at three days of two by 20, it doesn't even matter if you put them back to back, it doesn't even matter if you have them in a week, if your body is capable of, sorry, if you do two by 20 three days in a row, let's say, versus like, you know, Here's what it comes down to. If your body is capable of 3x20, and 2x20 is a fucking snooze, you are doing nothing by doing a 2x20. Unless you're in the noob gains phase, where 2x20 is raising your FTP, good for you, keep going, that's great, that's what I would do too. If you are at the point where doing 2x20 is no longer raising your FTP, you've got to... Bring the time out and out and out because you've always got to be working towards that point of fatigue that you mentioned earlier, Rory, where it starts to get hard, ride there for a couple minutes and then stop. You are done. Go home. Because you have now exposed the limits of your muscular endurance. And that's what we always want to find when we're doing progressive overloading of TTE work. So that's the answer. Yeah. I think that if you're thinking along these lines in terms I think it's probably because you're maybe a wee bit time limited and you can't afford the time to do 90 plus minutes of sweet spot in a workout and at that point do FTP instead or do still under FTP but not as low as whatever you think your sweet spot is you know adjust the time for the workouts that you've got Oh my god, Cole's just showed me how many questions you've all asked about. About half of these came before we started recording, and half of those, so a quarter of these that I know of so far are way off topic. Hooray. Yeah, one of them is like, I think is referring to a question that didn't make it. I think somebody forgot to hit send. He just says, mostly kidding, I hope you talk about X's progression. I'm like, I don't know what you're kidding about, dude. Sorry. So the first question, I like this one. What is the second question? Sorry, second question. This is the first Instagram question. The other one was submitted by a Discord buddy. Question is, what is the second, sorry, what? Rory, look at you, this is my brain. I didn't do that. Too much coffee did. What is the ceiling for TTE and what limits it? The longest I've ever seen somebody do an FTP test was 83-ish minutes. And that's, well, let's put it this way. That's enough. for almost every purpose. And it was one of those things where, okay, let's raise, I actually had two clients at that time do an 80-something minute TTE test. And yes, we confirmed it by raising the power like 5%. How long can you do this? The answer was not nearly 80 minutes. It was like 25-ish, 20, something like that. And that was my confirmation. Above this threshold, you fatigue very fast. Below this threshold, you can go forever. When you have a TTE like that, one of the big limiters is really just, well, there's a lot of limiters. Rory is looking like he's gnawing his arm off, and the answer is, right, yeah, it's food. It's food. It's how much can you ingest? Your liver glycogen is probably one of the limiters. Like, if you don't eat anything during that time, during your test, you're probably going to bonk. So, don't do that. That's a big limiter. Don't do that. Yeah. Well, here's the thing. One of those clients was a road racer, and I was like, well, what am I going to do? Give you 2x40 as your beginning FTP progression for the next block? No, that's ridiculous. Let's do VO2s. Yeah, like the real reason here for when you decide that you've capped out on TTE improvements is, is it worth doing more? Yeah. If you're an ultra cyclist, then yeah. Extending it out past what you might do for a crit racer or a road racer probably makes a little bit of sense in terms of just, I'm doing a six-hour ultra TT. So the other client was an ultra racer. And I was like, well, we could do VO2s, but you've got a bunch of races coming up, and so I really like where your endurance is at, and you're going to have some good performances. And he really has some good performances. So, yeah, like you said, the practical... Limit of TTE is the time people have to work out. And that's a lot of the time why a lot of people like sweet spot stuff, but if you are time limited, I'm like, just do FTP instead. And that's your best tradeoff for time. Oh, Rory, maybe you understand this question, because I don't think I do. When a measure becomes the target, it ceases to be a good measure. Re-FTP Obsession. That's kind of what we've talked about a lot in terms of number go up, number get bigger, feel good. When in reality, like yeah, when you're just focusing on that number going up, you're neglecting everything else. Yeah, and sometimes that's fine. Sometimes it's an easy thing to push up, like we said, but a lot of the time for most well-trained people, yeah, it's tough. Okay, we're going to skip a question on resting between intervals. Read the prompt, folks. We're going to ignore the off-topic questions because we get so many. So sorry. Oh, is the... I will actually answer something quickly there in the rest between intervals, and that is... A lot of people do ask this, yeah. Yeah, if you're doing a bunch of, like, TTE work, if you rest more and you've got time, you can do a little bit more interval time than you might otherwise expect, and that's maybe one of the times where you'd... You know, give yourself 30 minutes between your intervals, and you can probably have a pretty good workout off the back of that. But if you're just doing normal intervals, like 5-10 minutes, it doesn't really matter. Yeah, well, if you're doing intervals over like a 5-hour ride and you want to work on your fatigue resistance, that's a great way to do it, is to do like an interval an hour. Fuck yeah, I love that. I give people that all the time. It's great. Next question is, what is the key connection between the Size Principle, quote-unquote, pre-fatigue, and training to extend TTE at FTP? Here's the thing. there if you have because I know a lot of people who are like you got to smash everything and yada yada oh here here's a good example a really good example just because something feels harder so this is especially concerning pre-fatigue if just because something feels harder doesn't mean it's better for you so if you do 2x20 at FTP, but your body's capable of doing 3x20. But 2x20 is all you got in your legs today, and it felt like pulling teeth. I think some people would be like, man, that was hard, but I got a lot of good work in today. It felt harder than usual. I only had to do two intervals to crush myself instead of three like usual. I think that's bad. Your body is capable of more, and you are not letting it express itself. I saw an example recently, somebody was saying like, it's like if you're drunk and you, it's like if you can solve differential equations when you're sober but you can't when you're drunk, did you lose your ability to solve differential equations or did you just lose your ability to express it? So pre-fatigue is a bad thing. So I always want to make sure people are at least capable of progressing from where they were previously and like you said earlier and like I've said earlier or many, many times, if you are Doing less interval time, that's probably a sign you really need some rest. Yeah, if you get to, if you're doing 2x25 and your next workout is a 2x27, if you go to do that 2x27 workout and you can only manage the equivalent of a 2x25, that's maybe a bump in the road. If you're managing less than the 2x25, that is a major red flag, something you need to take care of. Recovery, Food. Yeah, and everybody who's done a consultation with me is like, wow, this sounds really familiar. Yes, it does. Okay, so expected differences between FTP and TTE in different positions, as in standing, regular, arrow. There are some differences, and part of like standing versus seated, and I've got a lot of people asking me this over the years about, should I measure my FTP differently standing versus seated? One of the, this is a weird question to me because I don't really, in a way, they're going to be a little different, just like being, just like being in your regular road bike position and versus like being in a super crunched up time trial position. Because one of the things about going from a regular road position to a TT position or to like bolt upright, like you've got a city cruiser and you are standing like, you know, you are like up like a mass on a ship. That's something 400-watt City Bacon for 60 minutes. The efficiency changes because of the biomechanics in part. You would be using less oxygen to create the same amount of power if you're bolt upright. There have been a lot of studies on this kind of stuff. You can go look them up. But that's one of the big differences. In some ways, you can get to a point where your FTP is effectively dropped. Like, one of my clients has a super, super aggressive TT position, and he's like, I don't want to give specifics, but he's losing a significant amount of power, but he's going very fast. And so... It's performance. The goal was to go faster. The FTP was just a number in this case. The fact that he's gone faster is good. The fact that there's a delta between FTP and race power is not good. But if you shrink that delta, you improve performance in the long run anyway. But the fact that you lost that power, you know, the benefit was still. Yeah, and in my experience, there's only so much you can shore up that delta because it does come down to biomechanics and like circum... you know, like fascicle lengths to start me or overlap and things like that. So, um, anyway, next. Also, if you're the kind of racer that's racing in a particular position for a long time, you should be doing your training like that anyway. Um, right. Uh, okay. The eternal question, when to raise watts versus when to train TTE? Um, the answer is yes. Winter. Winter time for both, actually. It's great. Uh, let's see. A lot of questions are like this. 90 minutes at 90% done, as in 90% FTP, I think, as in Sweet Spot. That's easy. Is it time to evaluate FTP? Maybe, if you feel like your FTP has gone higher, but like we just mentioned, just because your TTE has gone out does not necessarily mean your FTP has gone up. It's nice when it does, but it's not always the case. One of the great things about the FTP and TTE test is that it's just an FTP interval. So in reality, if you're curious about whether your FTP is going up, just go do the test because you're just doing an FTP interval and you'll go a wee bit longer than you might have last time. You've done a good workout if you've rested up appropriately and you'll have whatever number it is. Let's see. TTE increases when FTP follow eventually. Let's see. Was detrained, now riding, FTP rising fast. When to adjust FTP and when to chase TTE? This is something that comes up quite a bit when you get athletes that are really new to training, is that how quickly do they start to outstrip the workouts you're expecting them to do? And the answer I find is usually just... Fuck about it and let it happen a wee bit. Yeah, and also, especially with new folks, teaching them what FTP feels like and signs that you've been over FTP or signs that you're under FTP and what that should feel like. Like, that's where we always start as coaches. And so this is one of those things where I would always be asking for somebody's feedback. Like, does this feel like your FTP? It's like, is this your card? Is this your FTP? Is this your FTP? It's like... They'll have that workout where they just go out and they're like, oh, all of a sudden I feel like I had... 20 more watts than I did a few months ago. And like, that's the indication that it's worked. Please explain clearly why a longer TTE is not a higher FTP and how do you test that? Oh man. Is what you said earlier, you'll add 5-10 watts and all of a sudden you're doing less than what you'd expect for a low TTE FTP test. Oh, here's an interesting one. What's the best workout to set FTP without a test? As in 4x15, 2x20? This is another one that's actually difficult to assess because somebody with a very, very long TTE, like 60 minutes or more, can probably do 2x20 a little over FTP. And so just because you can technically do it does not necessarily mean like that's your FTP, especially for shorter efforts for somebody like me. Like if it were like a 4x10, And here's the other thing, too. Yeah, 4x10, I could easily do 4x10 well over FTP. Well over. But if you are somebody who's got a short TTE like 30, 35 minutes, you doing a 2x20 is going to be maybe a little bit of a stretch. You doing a 4x15 is definitely a stretch. And so... That's one of those things where having a single workout that's going to work for everybody, that's one of the reasons I don't have one, because it doesn't work for everybody, and I hold myself to a higher standard than that. I hold us to a higher standard than that. Rory, you'll tell people in our meetings. Use the RPE queues. If you think FTP is different, then it will feel different when you do the old FTP number. It will feel marginally easier. You'll add 10 watts, it might feel like FTP. If you're lucky, you had 25 watts. Again, feel it out. Learn what it actually feels like. Are there performance benefits to extending TTE outside FTP, as in your time to exhaustion at various power levels? Like, let's say, your 5-minute power, you want that to be your 8-minute power, your 2-hour power, you want it to be your 5-hour power, something like that. And the answer is... Yeah, the question is, is it good training? And are there other ways to improve this? Because to improve the power output you can do for, let's say, three hours does not necessarily mean you've got to go out and ride as hard as you can for three hours all the time. It means you've got to do long endurance rides, threshold work, VO2 max, like all the aerobic stuff, and your three-hour power is going to improve. And of course, practicing sometimes, pacing is a big deal, fueling is a huge deal, and all that stuff matters. So like, yeah, but the question is like, you know, how are you going to train it is the question I really have. And so this is where I would want a specific duration for an event, and then we're going to train towards that. So Rory, this person has a very good question. What are signs your FTP has gone up? I get so used to a power of the RPE decouples. We kind of touched on this, but like, what's a sign? that you use to say FTP's probably gone up. Because I use stuff like the relationship between heart rate and power is a good one. Or resting heart rate's dropped a lot. That's sometimes a sign that FTP's gone up or something good is happening anyway. Or I'll just hear something. I'll say, go give me 2x20 at a reasonable hard pace that feels like FTP again, after somebody's rested. and their legs are kind of fresh. Like, this is something we'll do, testing for 30 minutes. You know, what do you got? Yeah, this is kind of the... Oh, WKO5 model works too? If you choose to use it. If you choose to use it. This is kind of what we talked about in terms of like finding yourself in that muscle motor memory rut of just can't quite... Feel Myself to the Next Level. One, make sure you actually have improved by writing a little bit over what your old FTP is. Again, part of how you get to being good at doing longer intervals is it's practice at sticking to a specific power target. And you kind of need to relearn that again when you make the FTP improvement, because you need to add the 10, 15, 20 watts, whatever it is, and learn to just sit at that new number if that's what it takes. You know, just go out, do, if you look at that original FTP test article, Cole wrote for TrainingPeaks, one of the ways those test protocols try and help you show that you're not stuck in a rut. is that they give you a slight progressive ramp at the end where you deliberately raise power a bit more. And if one of the ways you can show that you're out of the rut is that you can do a lot more in the final five to ten minutes of that interval than you maybe could have, you know, a few months prior, then that would be an indication that you've likely improved FTP. Ultimately, it's just down to you're going to have to show it in some way. Yeah, using performance as your benchmark, for sure. Okay, so we got a couple questions from a coach bro that are way off topic. Sorry, coach bro, we are going to have to not answer those. Let's see. Why does raising FTP not increase TTE at the previous FTP power since it's a smaller percentage of Macs? Aha, my friend, it does. 

As in, if your FTP goes up 20 watts, he's asking, how come you can't hold on to that previous FTP for longer? You can, that's the point. Below FTP, you fatigue slower, and above FTP, you fatigue faster. And if you raise that point, I mean, there's a reason that a lot of people go, oh my god, this pro's FTP is like 450 watts, I could barely do that for two minutes. How do they do that for an hour? It's like, well, once you raise that point, It makes a big difference. I remember when I started riding way back in the day, my off-the-couch FTP was probably like 150, maybe less. And so I could probably do, what, 250 watts for five minutes, something like that. And then eventually it was my FTP. And then eventually it was well below my FTP, and I could do that for a very long time indeed. Simply add one more wall. Every time you do a 60-minute interval, and it will become your FTP. Don't do that. Don't do that. Rory, you cannot see Rory's face, not that it's very expressive at the moment, because he's being very sarcastic. Bad Rory, no. Okay, now there's that smirk. Now he's like, ha ha. Okay. Fatiguing neural drive via weight training or hard intervals prior to FTP rides. Amplifies TTE Training? No, it's going to reduce TTE. Anything that reduces your ability to get to your muscles' endurance capacity is not good training. And so if you are neurally fatigued and you are brain dead from doing heavy deadlifts or something like that, because I sure am, if I did heavy deadlifts and later that day or the next day I had to go out and do a TTE workout, I don't think I would make it past one effort. Besides my legs falling off my body, my brain would be like, I cannot recruit this many motor units again, I'm still exhausted, please help. Yeah, it's the feeling of when you get to the end of a five-hour ride, and all you've done recently is two-hour rides, and it's just like, I can basically just tick over these pedals, even at endurance pace or light tempo. It's, you, you, you know the feeling when you get there of just, I can't quite do more than this, and doing more, even though it's under FTP, requires a lot of concentration, and that applies all the way up the power curve. Yeah, for sure. Okay, next question. FTP sessions, gym, and sprints work in the same week for a sprinter? Oh, come on, that's way off topic, dude. Viable? Yes, if you, I do that all the time with my sprinters. Yeah, of course, it's viable. How to choose the correct timeline for your testing protocol, like specifically without software. I mean, the reason I, well, okay, so let's actually go back to the testing protocol. The reason that they're, they start with a rough duration, and I believe, it's been a while since I looked at them, and they end with like a one by whatever at your Target Power, whatever it is, that's basically your FTP by feel. One of the reasons for the progressions as they were is because they're designed to get you to feel out your FTP. The actual goal of all that stuff is to just start out a couple watts low, then build up to your FTP and just hold it because you know where it is. You can push a little higher and go, oh, that's a little too much, pull it back, keep going. And so there's no duration. If you want a TTE number, if you want to test that, Then you just go until your legs can't hold that number anymore. If you just want the number and you don't care what the TTE is, go to the number and stop. You don't have to crush yourself. And sometimes that's not what we want to do at all. I've got clients where I know they're FTP, but we haven't tested their TTE in like weeks or months because they've got other shit going on or they're tired or who knows. Remember that one of the things that Cole had to do when he wrote those tests into that Training Peaks article is write them in such a way that anybody could try and execute on them. And the simple measure of the test is write at 20 watts below what you're fairly sure FTP will be and then pick it up to what FTP feels like and keep going. But when we're doing our job as a coach, When we're working one-to-one with an athlete, we're able to give them a lot more specific guidance. We're able to give them a better rough target of what they're going to end up doing in that test. Whereas if you read that article, it's very much feel it out. Here's a few different ways in which you can do it. Eventually, like the final progression of that is, isn't it like five minutes at like five watts below FTP and then just start. going until you can't anymore. Pick it up if it feels like you've got a little bit more in the tank. Something like that. I think it's like 5% lower. But yeah, it's approximately. Like a short, slow ramp into it, and then once you're there, you're there. And just hang on. So, oh, okay. What role does heart rate decoupling over time at FTP play in designing training to extend TTE? You might be surprised to learn this. It doesn't play a role at all. I don't think that there's any such thing as threshold heart rate. It's a complete... No, we talked about this in the zones. Yeah, it's a complete artifact. Yeah, well, because, well, first of all, heart rate zones annoy the shit out of me. Just because heart rate zones reflect so many things. Like, if you have caffeine or you slept badly or dehydrated, all these things can affect your heart rate. You know, if you're on stimulants of any kind, like Adderall can change your heart rate for your exercise, all this kind of stuff. And also, if you are like a slow twitch, if your muscles are like slow twitch, Type I fibers, all the way up to like 80 to 90% of your muscle mass, and you know, you start riding and you're recruiting, let's say like 60 or 70% of threshold, and then you get up into like 80-ish percent, you don't even touch your Type II fibers at all. You're not going to decouple at all. I've definitely had clients where we saw no heart rate decoupling at all in an FTP test. Most clients we see quite a bit. And because most people are kind of a mix. And so as you get into those less efficient larger motor units, you're going to get more heart rate output. But physiologically, your FTP is not changing. And it's not like you've got to reduce your power output to maintain your FTP because FTP is not dictated by heart rate. Yeah. if I'm setting people intervals the thing I'm looking at most with the heart rate trace is does it reflect the expected pattern that I'm expecting for a given interval and for each individual athlete what do I roughly expect their heart rate to be at not in the sense that they're in a particular zone but in the sense that Oh, did they do their workout indoors this week? And they overheated, and I can see it because their heart rate's maxed out, and they're doing a sweet spot interval when it shouldn't be. So, like, that's when heart rate really comes into play. Actually, here's another interesting question. So, does reduction in heart rate decoupling over one hour at FTP indicate more TTE, more FTP, or both? I think if you're FTP... got up to an hour, then that's the indication your TTE's gone up. Yeah, I was going to say, performance is the best indicator of your TTE going up, but in another way, like if your heart rate usually starts at like 170 and finishes at 180, and it takes longer to get there because your TTE's gone out, and sometimes it's a sign of just better endurance. that you are fatiguing into larger motor units in a slower rate than before. That can be an effect of more mitochondria, more glycogen storage, better buffering capacity. There's a number of things that go into the fatigue here. So it can sometimes indicate that the FTP has gone up, and sometimes it doesn't indicate shit. So it's hard to say, and there's no one answer, unfortunately. Don't fixate in your heart rate too much unless it's just weirdly high or doing weird things. It's the best advice you can get. I don't know what that event is, so I cannot tell you if you should prioritize TTE over FTP. Sorry. For the well-trained, why does doing FTP intervals only improve TTE and not raise FTP? I would say the big... Can you turn me off, Rory? Thank you. I would say the big reason for this is that a lot of noob gains when it comes to FTP and pretty much anything, any kind of training is going to raise it, comes from... We're going to talk about a really good paper on this in a couple podcast episodes, but we're going to talk about... Regulation of Plasma Volume and Where Noob Gains Come From. And so we're going to talk about regulation of this stuff and how that increases heart stroke volume. And so one of the reasons is that once you get pretty well trained, you need a very, very particular stimulus for, I would say, for like 90% of people, 80, 90, something like that. Most people, let's say. need very high-intensity training to raise their VO2max once they're pretty well-trained. And this is really just a factor of how the body adapts to VO2max training and all training. And so, yeah, this is just basically like noob gains versus not. So, yeah, we'll get into detail on this in a future episode. Let's see. What's the easiest way to increase FTP? Do everything. and Ride More. I think this person's shitposting, so we're going to ignore that. Are sweet spot TTE and threshold TTE directly correlated? Yes and no. Somewhat. All right, so we only have a couple more, don't worry. See, Rory's giving me the... We're at two hours mark or hitting close, which is usually when our listeners turn into pumpkins. So I've got limited time. Do I do more power if I can't do big TTE workouts? My sole long ride is used for Z2. Okay, yeah, this is an interesting one because you can do intervals on your long Z2 ride. Did you know that? I actually strongly encourage people if they've got one long ride. Unless you are absolutely wrecked from other intervals that are going well, in which case, leave those alone. Keep that long ride nice and easy. That's fine. But if you are, let's say you've got a sweet spot workout to do that's a key thing for like a gravel race or something like that, go do it on your long ride, please, by all means. If you go into your workouts and you increase your power by like a watt a week or something like that, If your FTP is not actually going up at some point, you are just going to start hammering yourself with fatigue, and you're going to end up pretty fucked up, unless you are one of those few people whose FTP is going to start going up by that, because you are basically starting to do VO2 max training. Which would be cool, doesn't usually work with most people. And it's not something that I would personally want to chance or advise anybody to chance. So yeah, do your long stuff out on your long ride. 

Yeah, that's it. So it was really just like eight different questions asked 10 different ways. All right. Much like you know, this is two concepts that are actually the same thing. Yes, there are two sides of the same three-sided coin. What was our... Aerobic coin. All right. So what are the big takeaways? They're really... Oh, God, I... I wish I'd been bullet pointing this as we were going. So FTP and TTE are both valuable in equal measure. However, depending on the performance outcome that you're looking for, for given event, personal goals, whatever, you probably want to make sure that when it comes to executing for that performance that you've prioritized the right one. And that probably means, especially when we're thinking about like aerobic development, doing that. well in advance of whatever event that ends up being, or in the very long term, thinking about how that fits in around all the goals that you have in terms of enjoying riding your bike. And also thinking about periodizing. This is a really good thing to think about from a 10,000 foot view. How do I structure my season? And of course, if you're just starting to train, like you got sick or you got injured or something like that, and you've got events coming up shortly, figure out What's going to work? What do I expect to work? Do I expect FTP work to raise my FTP? Do I expect VO2s to raise my FTP? What do I need in my races? All this kind of stuff makes a big difference in what you prioritize, especially if you are time crunched on getting back to fitness. And if you have any questions on that, shoot me an email, empiricalcyclingatgmail.com, because I will consult with you. and we can talk about it and we can give you a good plan. We can give you all the tools that you need to plan your own training effectively and adjust it. of course, and all the stuff that I would use if I were coaching you. So reach out for that. If you would like to coach with us, we have spots. We always have open spots. We are taking in amateur athletes, especially professional athletes, of course, and people who don't race, students, people with low budgets, pros and students. We are very negotiable on our rates, so please don't hesitate to reach out. If you're looking for a coach, if you want to consult, yada, yada. If you like this episode. Even though it was a bit rambly because it's me and Rory, sorry. Please share it on forums and we really appreciate all of that. If you want to toss us a donation, keep the lights on and... I'm holding out my hat so Rory can get a nice mic and a new set of headphones because he's currently sitting here headphone-less without a microphone. Just donation at empiricalcycling.com slash donate goes a long way. We really appreciate all that. If you want to ask a question, please hit me up on Instagram and the stories at empiricalcycling. And just check out the Weekend MAs if you just want to watch out for that. I've heard a lot of people say, this is the best thing I do. And I think it's because the answers are short. Really, really, really short. And frequently sarcastic. Hopefully not too sarcastic. Anyway, bye everybody.