 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 to raise your FTP. Bumping up your FTP is as much about having a properly written plan month to month and week to week as it is about doing individual specific workouts designed to target your threshold ability. In this video I'll show you how to do both. I'll run down what a proper training month and week should look like as well as what an individual threshold building workout should look like. If you're new to this channel I make weekly training topic videos going over tips and tricks that I've learned in my 12 years of racing and training 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. I also go into the science on your training questions so if you want to learn how to get faster or just more about sports science in general be sure to subscribe and hit the bell notification so you don't miss anything. 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 try my best to get to all the questions in the comments. The first point I want to make is that there's not one way to raise your FTP. FTP is a measurement we use to assess a cyclist's fitness level and if you're a newbie cyclist you could do literally anything except for more intervals on the couch watching Netflix and see that FTP go up. I'm going to assume that if you clicked on this video then you're past that point and you're looking for specifics on how to get that FTP higher. The truth is that every single workout that you do from the low intensity all the way to the high intensity intervals brings up your FTP. The difference is the rate at which it brings up your FTP and how sustainable that rate is. A review on high intensity versus high volume training stated that both high intensity and low intensity training are important components of the training program. They went on to say that short term periods of high intensity interval training can elicit improvements but also that important adaptations appear to occur with low intensity continuous training that are not observed with mixed or high intensity training. Lower intensity work will build up your FTP slowly over time and also doesn't plateau nearly as quickly as high intensity work. High intensity intervals will pull up your FTP very quickly but you also maximize the gains you're going to see from them within a couple months. This is why when deciding to start incorporating high intensity intervals into your program you want to make sure that you're maximizing those gains at your goal event. The second point I want to make is that raising your FTP is as much about how you plan out your training months and weeks as it is about how you plan out your individual workouts. This is important because even if you have perfectly written workouts if you do them at the wrong frequency or plan them poorly within your week then you could be undermining your potential fitness gains. From the same review when training does not have an appropriate blend of both high intensity training and high volume training inserted into the program performance ability can stagnate. Let's start with what your training months should look like and then work down. So out of those four weeks you want that last week to be a rest week. This is important because during the three hard weeks you're going to be building up fatigue and you want a period of time to read your body of that fatigue. If you continue forever without a rest week and a high training load you can very easily get to a point where your interval workouts are no longer effective because you're not able to do them at a high enough intensity because you're always tired. For the three hard weeks of the month you want to increase your training load each week. This is called progressive overload which basically means we're gradually increasing the stress on the body over time. You want to do this because our bodies adapt to the stress that we give them. If you always give your body the same level of stress that it's already adapted to then it no longer needs to make further adaptations and this leads to a fitness plateau. You can increase your training stress by increasing your volume or intensity or both and which one you choose to manipulate has a lot to do with what you're actually training for. For example if you're training for one hour crits then that intensity needs to go up but if you're training for an ultra endurance event then you might want to increase the volume. Some people might call this reverse periodization but really it's just making your workouts more specific to the demands of your race. Let's move down to the individual weeks. I have two videos on how to plan out a training week. One for if you have 10 hours a week and one for if you have six hours a week. I'll link both of those videos in the description below if you're interested. The biggest thing that cyclists get wrong is the frequency of their high intensity or interval workouts. Two or on occasion three interval days per week is optimal and any more than this and your interval days are going to start to suffer because you won't be fully recovered between them and you won't be able to maximize that session. 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 overtraining. You want to do these two high intensity sessions after a rest day so you're as fresh as possible for them and if you want you can do a lower intensity interval session after one of those high intensity interval session days but I wouldn't do this every single week. Once you have your intensity for the week the rest of the riding you do should be in what is commonly referred to as zone two in a six zone model or endurance zone. This is a somewhat comfortable pace that you can hold for really long periods of time. I encourage you to have at least one ride during the week that's a really long ride because there are certain adaptations that you make during a long ride that you just don't see with shorter ones. For example towards the end of a long ride as you deplete your glycogen stores you teach your body to use fat as a fuel source instead of carbohydrates. Towards the end of a long ride you also force your fast twitch muscle fibers to do endurance work as your slow twitch muscle fibers fatigue. You can also throw in recovery rides if you want but just make sure that you're actually doing them correctly because if not you could be completely ruining your training plan with this one workout. Yeah you know it's supposed to be a recovery ride but this guy literally just stole my KOM that I got on this climb and it was on my route today so I had to try to get it back. I don't think I did because I was pretty tired but uh you know I didn't ride that long today so I got a bunch of extra time I think I'm gonna hit the gym if you want to join. Don't be that guy I've got a video on how to properly do a recovery ride that I'll link in the description below if you want to check it out. For those of you that regularly watch my videos that was probably all review for you but now let's get into the nitty gritty. What should a threshold building interval session actually look like? As I previously said any and all work you do on the bike will affect your FTP to some degree but for this video we're going to focus on the specific workouts designed to target your threshold ability. As far as the intensity for these workouts it shouldn't be much of a surprise that you want the intensity to be close to threshold. 95 to 100% of your FTP is ideal. Perhaps the better question is how much time should you spend at this intensity and how should you break that time up into intervals? The answer is that it depends on your ability as a rider. For a more novice rider they might shoot for 30 minutes of work at threshold during one interval session and for someone like a pro they could potentially do an hour or more of interval work in a single session. For interval length I've found that the sweet spot tends to be between 10 and 20 minutes. There are exceptions to this where I might prescribe threshold intervals that are shorter or longer than this but the majority of the time they'll fall within this duration. Shorter than this and it becomes easy to overshoot your FTP and have a higher percentage of the power you're producing being produced anaerobically and then longer than this and it becomes harder to hold your FTP and usually you dip under your FTP by the end of the interval and it's really hard to repeat this for multiple intervals. Remember that even though your FTP is theoretically what you can hold for an hour this is when you're fresh and most of the time you'll have some level of fatigue which means that holding your FTP for longer than 20 minutes becomes really difficult. For the rest period between intervals I would shoot for one fourth to one half of the work interval so for a 20 minute interval this would be five to ten minutes. How long you decide to rest between intervals can depend on what your specific race goals are. For example if your race has back-to-back efforts with minimal recovery in between then choose a shorter rest interval but if for example your race has a long climb at the very end of the race that's going to decide the race then choose a longer rest interval because you want to maximize that work period as if it's the end of that race and you don't have to recover afterwards because you'll be done. Let's put all of this into practice by looking at a couple of example workouts. For a more novice rider looking for 30 minutes of work this might be three 10 minute efforts at FTP with five minutes in between efforts. For a more intermediate level athlete this could be three 15 minute efforts with seven minutes in between or four 10 minute efforts with five minutes in between and for a more advanced rider this could be four 15 minute efforts with five minutes in between or three 20 minute efforts with 10 minutes in between. For the warm-up you can do 15 to 30 minutes of endurance zone two however long it takes you to feel warmed up and ready to go and if you want you can throw in some opener efforts and just do them based off of feel. Don't tax yourself in the warm-up just get yourself to a point where you're ready to go hard. The cool-down should be at least 10 minutes but I often add hours after I'm done with my interval session and if you have the time this is a great way to add hours to your week. Your interval sessions don't necessarily need to be low in volume. Just make sure you do the intervals at the beginning of the ride when you're fresh. As with everything there are exceptions to this and there's sometimes where you might want to do intervals at the end of a long ride but for the majority of the time you want to do them at the beginning of the ride especially if your end goal is bumping up your FTP. If these workouts seem really simple and straightforward that's because they are. If you're used to seeing complicated workouts just know that there's not a lot of science to back up this complexity and a lot of times they're made that way just to hold your attention. Yeah so I'm gonna start with a seven and a half minute ramp from zone two to zone 4.3 and then straight into some 30 20s and then after that I'm gonna ramp down from zone 9 to zone 3 and then I'm just gonna hold zone 4 for about six and a half minutes and then sprint at the end of that. This guy at the bike shop told me that's a perfect way to boost your FTP. A workout doesn't need to be complicated hitting multiple zones for varying degrees of time it's just about accumulating time at your target zone to signal adaptation. Like I said at the beginning of the video all the work you do affects your FTP not just your FTP focused interval sessions and in the case of high-intensity work it can actually pull up your FTP quite quickly. What I mean by high-intensity intervals is interval lengths under five minutes and usually as hard as you can go. It only takes a couple sessions of these intervals for you to see fitness gains but you got to be careful about when you use them because it doesn't take long for you to maximize the adaptations that you get from them. I would do high-intensity intervals in the month or two before your A priority race as a way to maximize every little bit of fitness gain you can get before that event. It's also good to do these in a race specific way. What this means is designing a workout that has a power file that looks a lot like the power file of your goal race. If you're racing crits for example this might be a 30 30 workout or maybe you just go on a hard road group ride with lots of sprints and attacks. Alright let's review real quick. When planning out your training month you want to employ progressive overload which means the training stress each week should be going up. You can do this by increasing your volume or intensity or both. If you constantly give your body the same amount of stress it's already adapted to then it'll stop making adaptations and you'll hit a fitness plateau. You also want to have a rest week in there to rid your body of the fatigue that you've built up over the course of the month. When planning out your training week you want to have two or on occasion three interval days per week. More than this won't make you faster and it'll likely have you burnt out after a couple weeks. The rest of the rides that you do during the week should be in endurance zone two and doing them harder than this will just mean that your interval sessions won't be as high quality because you won't be recovered between them. A threshold focused interval session should be done at 95 to 100 percent of your FTP and have interval lengths that are between 10 and 20 minutes. You want to have rest periods that are roughly one fourth to one half of that and for a more novice rider we're looking for 30 minutes of work during the interval session and for someone like a pro that could go up to an hour or more. High intensity intervals will bring up your threshold quickly but you also maximize the gains that you get out of them quickly so use them in the months before your important race and make sure that you do them in a race specific way. Thanks for watching and I hope you guys found this information helpful. If you like this video be sure to give it a like, share it with a friend and be sure to subscribe for more training tips. If you want to see more coaching content be sure to follow me on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook and if you want to follow my training leading into this upcoming season be sure to check me out on Strava. Finally if you're looking for a coach shoot me an email at djonsonandtrainright.com