 Hey, what's up everyone? Welcome to another video. My name is Dylan and I'm a cycling coach at CTS, and today we're going to be talking about how much you can expect to raise your FTP. We're going to get into some studies on how people respond differently to training. I'll talk about my own experience as a coach and what kind of changes in FTP I've seen athletes make. And if you have hit a fitness plateau, at the end of the video, I'll talk about how to break through that and get a bump in FTP. If you're new to this channel, I make weekly training, racing, and gear related videos going over tips and tricks that I've learned in my 12 years of training and racing experience that have gotten me to the top of the Ultra Endurance mountain bike game in the US and as a cycling coach at CTS. If you want to learn how to get faster or just more about the science of training in general, then be sure to subscribe. And if you have a training question or a topic you'd like to see me cover in a future video, be sure to leave it in the comments section down below. I do my best to get to all the questions in the comments. A question that I get quite often is how much do you think I can raise my FTP? Yeah, I figure I need to bump it up like 100 watts before the summer to be competitive. That's doable, right? I mean, I've got like, what, two weeks? This is a difficult question to answer because obviously there are a ton of factors that determine how fit you can get. And unfortunately, one of the biggest ones is out of our control and that's our genes. There are a wide variety of responses to exercise, even if everyone's doing the same amount of work. For example, in this study on responses of maximal aerobic power in capacity to aerobic training, they put 24 subjects on a 20 week aerobic training program and found that the individual responses range from just 5% to 88% for maximal aerobic power and 16% to 97% for maximal aerobic capacity. That's a huge difference in considering that the training was identical for these individuals that points to a large genetic component here. Other studies have found the same thing. There is a large difference in how individuals respond to training. Some have found differences of almost no gain up to a 100% increase in large groups. After that, you may understand why it's hard to predict how many watts you can gain in your FTP. According to these studies, you may be stuck where you're at, or maybe you could double your FTP, but without knowing your genetic predisposition, it's hard for me to tell you. I really don't understand why you can't give me a full genetic assessment based off the information that I gave you in my YouTube comment. However, you shouldn't just give up on training because you assume that you have poor genetics. In this study on the adaptive response to endurance and sprint interval training, participants completed three weeks of both endurance and sprint interval training and concluded that wall training elicited significant improvements in all variables at the group level. Considerable heterogeneity was observed in the individual. Further, individual patterns of response were not related across endurance and interval training, and appear to be training protocol dependent. Basically, some people respond better to endurance training, while others respond better to high-intensity training, but everybody responds to something. And there are studies that go against this notion that non-responders even exist. In this study refuting the myth of non-response to exercise training, 78 subjects were put into five groups comprising of one, two, three, four, or five 60-minute exercise sessions per week, but otherwise following the same endurance training program. The results showed that in groups one, two, three, four, and five, 69, 40, 29, zero, and zero percent of individuals respectively were non-responders. Give the body enough stimulus and it will respond. Still, it's evident that some people don't respond as well to training as others. This is often what separates the elite. They're high responders. This is why somebody who trains 15 hours a week can still get beaten by someone who trains just five hours a week. Beyond genetics, the biggest determinant of how much you can raise your FTP is how well trained you already are. A sedentary person getting up off the couch has the potential to gain a lot more watts than somebody who's already been training for a long time. Basically, as you gain fitness, it gets harder and harder to get more fit. Many season riders often describe hitting a fitness plateau and breaking past this plateau can be extremely difficult. I'll go into how to break through a fitness plateau in a minute, but first I'd like to talk about my own experience as a coach and what kind of gains in fitness you could potentially expect to see given your current fitness level. I want to reiterate that I don't have any data to back up these numbers. This is just based off the pattern that I've observed from coaching athletes of various levels. If you've never trained in your life before, you could potentially gain 50 or more watts in your first year. Some may gain more, some may gain less, but I'd venture to guess that that's about the average given that you follow good training practices. With each year that you train, the amount that you could potentially increase your FTP decreases. Given that you stay consistent the whole time and you use the best training practices, you could probably expect to gain half as many watts as you did the previous year. So if you went from 200 watts to 250 in your first year, you might get to 275 in your second, 287 in your third, and so on. This is by no means a hard and fast rule though, because fitness breakthroughs do happen where you experience a huge jump in fitness one year. And by contrast, some may struggle to see any fitness gains year to year. Proper training and changes in weight can have a big impact and lead to fitness breakthroughs. Take note of any types of workouts that you did when you had a fitness breakthrough and keep that in mind when planning your training plan. And of course, there's the factor of age. For junior riders, this probably doesn't apply to you because your development will increase your performance substantially. And by contrast, older athletes will see less fitness gains each year as their natural VO2 max decreases. If you're a seasoned older athlete, then the game becomes preserving your FTP, not necessarily increasing it. So with all that said, what can you actually do to raise your FTP? First things first, you want to understand the concept of progressive overload, which means you're going to have to stress your body more and more to make fitness gains. Once your body has adapted to a certain level of stress from exercise, it stops making adaptations until you stress it further, usually by increasing volume or intensity or both. Usually in a training block, you want your training stress to be increasing throughout the block. For example, in a training month, perhaps you might do eight hours in the first week, 10 hours in the second week, and 12 hours in the third week. And then that fourth week might be a recovery week where you bring the volume down to five hours. That recovery week is important because it gives you a chance to rid your body of the fatigue that you've built up. If you ignore this, you can easily get to a point where your workout quality suffers, and that will stagnate your progress as well. Speaking of workout quality, it's important that you have the right number of intensity days per week. Too much will not necessarily make you faster and will actually likely have the opposite effect. Two or on occasion three, high intensity days per week is optimal, and any more than that in your workout quality will suffer because you won't be fully recovered between workouts to do those high intensity sessions. A review on the best practices for training intensity and duration distribution in endurance athletes advocated for two or three high intensity or threshold intensity sessions per week, and that additional increases in high intensity frequency do not induce further improvements and tend to induce symptoms of overreaching or over-training. You want these two high intensity sessions to be after a rest day so you can be as fresh as possible for them, and if you want you can do a lower intensity interval session after the higher intensity one, but I wouldn't do this every week. For most weeks you should have two recovery days where you either ride extremely easy at zone one or take the day completely off. The rest of the rides in the week should be done at zone two in a six zone model or endurance zone, and as always you want to be honest about what your FTP is. Almost everyone overreports their FTP and the only thing that does is makes it really hard for you to complete interval sessions and it makes your easier days too hard. Yeah, I don't really find that I need to test my FTP. I'm pretty in tune with my body. If it comes up in a group ride or something I'll just ask the person what their FTP is and then I'll add 10 watts to that. I've got a whole video going into much more detail about how to raise your FTP and I even go into specifics about what the workouts should look like and I'll link that in the description below if you're interested. Those are the general best practices for training and doing them correctly will get you a long way, but let's say you've done that and your fitness gains are starting to taper off and you're starting to experience that plateau. What can you do to break through to a new level of fitness? This may be a good time to try something different like block periodization for example. Block periodization can be done in a couple of ways but the most common way is to preload your training month with an intensity block in the first week. For example, in the first week you might have five interval sessions and then in the following three weeks you might just have one interval session per week to recover from that extremely high intensity week and this training method appears to be pretty effective. For example, in this study on one month of block periodization they found that in the block periodization group mean power during high intensity workouts increased with each session along with power at two millimolar lactate, max power and maximal oxygen consumption. None of these changes occurred in the control group that stuck to a more traditional training pattern and this study that looked at doing block periodization for 12 weeks had a similar training pattern just stretched over a longer period and found that the block periodization group had a greater increase in VO2 max power at two millimolar lactate hemoglobin mass and power during a 40 minute time trial. Block periodization may be just what you need if you found yourself in a rut and that may just be because you're changing things up. As I said if you keep giving your body the same amount of stimulus it'll stop adapting so trying something new every once in a while is probably a good thing. If you want to learn more about block periodization I made a whole video about it and I'll link it down in the description. One thing that I and many other athletes have found that works wonders for fixing stagnating performance is taking a mid-season break. A mid-season break is not a recovery week where you do shorter easier rides. During a mid-season break you don't want to touch your bike for five to seven days. You also don't want to run or go to the gym or ride with your kid because it'll be easy or take the dog for an extra long walk. Just take a chill pill and hit the couch instead of the bike. Maybe when you get home from work watch some TV or better yet even more on my youtube videos. The point is this week needs to be a complete break from exercise. A week of no exercise? But I've never done that before. What will my Strava followers think? When you get back on the bike after this week you'll feel absolutely horrible and think you've made a huge mistake but if you give it a week your power will start to come around again and give it two weeks and you'll probably be putting out bigger numbers than you previously were. I've done this for the past five years and it works like a charm every time. I know I need it when my results start to suffer and my power numbers start to go down. This year I took a break two weeks before the Mohican 100. This obviously isn't ideal but I desperately needed it. With a week of riding in my legs before the race I went on to win the race and set a course PR and I felt 10 times better. Before the season hits take a look at your calendar and try to find a time where you aren't racing that much where you could take a mid-season break. Your results later in the season will be better because of it. Alright to summarize there's a vast range of responses to exercise so predicting improvement can be difficult. If you've been training a while making improvements will get harder and harder and fitness plateaus will start to become a regular occurrence. However proper training techniques can go a long way. For those experiencing a plateau it may be worth giving block periodization a try and if you're midway through your season and your performance has started to dip it may be time to take a week off the bike instead of continuing to bang your head against the wall. Thanks for watching and I hope you guys found this information helpful. If you're interested in getting a coach if you sign up through CTS be sure to use my code CTSDJ to save $40 by waiving the registration fee. Details are down in the description. If you like this video be sure to give it a like share with a friend and subscribe and if you're looking for more training and racing content be sure to follow me on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook and if you want to check out my training be sure to follow me on Strava.