Taking The FTP Plan Indoors

Before I was forced indoors I had devised a new strategy to try to get over my anxiety of doing FTP tests. Clearly I have an aversion to doing them – which I think is understandable as, frankly, they suck – but they are a necessary evil.

Turns out I’ve been avoiding the ones on Zwift for a good long while:

That’s not entirely fair as I have done others since, as this category here on the blog can attest too.

But anyway, the point is that before I switched back to the turbo I was doing an outdoor FTP test once a week. That didn’t always quite pan out, but the aim was to push myself hard for ~20 minutes for various reasons. The main of these reasons being:

Get over the anxiety
Building up to an FTP test is ‘scary’ for both mental and physical reasons. They hurt, no doubt about it. The idea I had was to reduce the anxiety by doing them more frequently, that way there’s no big build up. Also, if I screw up one week it’s only 7 more days till I can do it all over again 🫠
Get used to it
I reckon the body adapts to specific forms of exericse. Always run 5k? Guess what, your body will become good at doing 5k’s. Always ride for 20 minutes at your maximum? Guess what, you still suck at FTP tests 🤡. That kind of thing.
It’s a great workout
The whole point of me riding my bike is to get a good workout 5 times a week. However I feel about doing FTP tests, there’s no denying that they are a good aerobic workout 💪

Still, it’s been over a month(!) now since I last did a solid effort and I have to say when I woke up this morning I was anxious at the prospect. My legs didn’t feel great.

Then when it came time to get on the bike I had all kinds of excuses popping up:

I hadn’t eaten enough.
My water intake was low / non-existent (just caffeine)
Maybe my time would be better spent doing a race…

But whatever, I ploughed on because at the end of the day the build up is usually worse than the actual effort itself. Well… kind of.

Only having an hour for my dinner break I opted for the Shorter FTP Test.

The skank of it is that you don’t get as much of a warm up as you do on the longer version.

However, you do get a warm up. So that’s nice.

And where things differ from outdoors is that with Zwift you do a 1 minute hard interval, and then a 5 minute even harder interval.

Outdoors I’d do the 1 minute, but I definitely wouldn’t do the 5 minute. I’d go straight into it. An unfair advantage? Maybe.

That was something I was keen to find out.

Going into this one then I had a plan.

Outdoors I’ve managed to hit 258w over 20 minutes.

Amazingly that nails my actual FTP – where 95% of 260w (for easier maths) is 245w.

So my plan was literally to sit at 260w.

The 5 minute hard effort at the start wiped me out. Not gunna lie. I was hurting in the thighs after that. I was sweating profusely also.

One nice thing about being inside though was that I could very easily stop for 30 seconds and have a quick toilet break before jumping back on and getting into the tough stuff. Can’t do that outdoors… and there’s nothing worse than being 15 minutes into a solid effort with your bladder giving you more concern than your heart, legs, and lungs.

Hitting the start arch I felt like I was back to normal though. Maybe that 30 second walk-it-off had helped more than I knew. Whatever, I sat in at ~260w and for the first couple of minutes just found my bearings.

I couldn’t quite find a gear that gave me exactly what I wanted. Ideally I’d have sat at 95rpm for the 260w, but I found I needed to hit 100rpm to get there. That might have actually played in my favour though, over the duration.

A real positive of today’s effort was my pacing.

I’d started off trying to find that right gearing / rpm, but ended up sitting around 240-260w, meaning within the first 5 minutes my average wattage had settled around 254w.

I felt alright about this.

My legs felt decent, and in the back of my mind I was thinking hey, if this continues I could probably tick it up a bit in the second half and bring the average up to ~258w. That’s where I’ve come in outdoors several times so I was confident I could make the numbers work.

Of course once the pain starts to come on, those plans tend to go out of the window and it does just become about making the final arch.

After the first five minutes I figured I’d put down a little more power, try to get the average up and then maybe take a ‘breather’ again in minutes 10 through 15. It was some kind of plan.

I mean… it didn’t work though.

I wasn’t able to consistently put down a bigger number without my heart rate ticking up above 190bpm. And when that happened I intentionally eased off a tad to ensure I didn’t go into that feedback loop whereby everything goes TU.

Definitely the hardest part of today’s ride was minutes 8 to 10.

Never has two minutes seemed to drag on quite as long as those two. Every time I looked up at the screen it had only ticked by a handful of seconds. Excruciating.

Beyond that I don’t remember too much more. I had my head up, for a change. I think that helped my breathing. Sometimes on these hard efforts my head is on my chest, and I think that constricts breathing and makes things worse. I wouldn’t say I had my head held high today, but I was in control.

And then somehow we got to the final minute and the annoying prompts kept popping up telling me what I already knew. The only thing that mattered was putting down as much power as I could. I never changed gear… I think that would have been a mistake to mess up my rhythm, but I managed to find something to finish on a high. Seeing that final arch helped.