Power struggle

FTP – functional threshold power - is the ubiquitous cornerstone of many riders’ training plans. But is this metric the panacea it’s mooted to be? Cycling Plus investigates…

Words James Witts

Dogma [noun]: a fixed, especially religious, belief or set of beliefs that people are expected to accept without any doubts. There’s a whiff of dogma when it comes to FTP, or functional threshold power. Defined as the maximum power output that you can sustain for an hour and a now ubiquitous metric in any performance cyclist’s vocabulary, FTP, in a relatively short period of time, has gone way beyond cult status. It’s “the god that we all worship” in the words of CycleFit co-founder Phil Cavell, whose unflattering views on FTP and its elevated place in the cycling world back in issue 383 was the impetus for this article. Does FTP have a God-like genius or should we be renouncing it? Or, as usual, is its usefulness somewhere in the middle,…

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Ride Fit (Digital) - 1 Issue, Ride Fit 2023

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