In order to increase cycling FTP successfully it is important to try to follow the science as much as you can while adapting it to your body and available time. BitCrew will help you do exactly that.
Probably the most highly regarded metric to look at when training for cycling is functional threshold power, or FTP. FTP is generally considered to be the power, measured in watts, for one hour of sustained effort on the bike. When training to increase cycling FTP, the two variables that matter the most are time and intensity. Spend the right amounts of time at the right intensities and you will get much stronger and faster on the bike.
Historically, coaches of endurance sports have often pushed hard on their athletes to do a large volume of high intensity or threshold work. The theory was simply that high intensity effort is hard, so doing more of it must make it easier.
In practice, however, high intensity training alone simply doesn’t work for most people. Athletes focusing primarily on high intensity effort frequently either burn out or get injured. Indeed, it is nearly impossible to do repeated high intensity effort and avoid failure.
Worse, it makes training something to dread instead of something to enjoy. If you are not enjoying your training, you simply will not do as much of it as you need to in order to reach higher levels. Many athletes leave the sport they love with the misconception that they will not get any faster because they cannot keep up with the intensity required for training. They have been trained to believe levels of training that are impossible to sustain are required to reach higher levels in their sport. If you made it through, that often meant you were either born with excellent ability to recover, or lucky enough to avoid injury.
Products available on the market frequently push the high intensity mindset even further. Many indoor exercise bikes promote high intensity interval training while ignoring low intensity effort. HIIT gyms and spin studios will promote high intensity interval training as though it’s the only thing you need to do well to get fit. In actuality, that may be the very mindset that is preventing you from getting fit and pushing you towards burnout or, worse, injury. That may be why many of these fitness bikes end up as expensive clothes racks.
Even your local group rides may not be ideal if you’re trying to get faster. Group rides make it very easy to over-exert while trying to keep up with a group that may have more base fitness than you do. The group itself is often over-exerting just because of peer-pressure and other social dynamics. While very fun, they are only good as a component of an overall training model.
What they’re all missing is that low intensity effort actually causes our bodies to make adaptations that cause us to get stronger in ways that do not occur in the body with high intensity effort alone. Science has shown that in order to get stronger and faster, we must spend much more time doing low intensity effort than previously understood. Even in the most elite athletes in the world you will see this same pattern of high volume of low intensity effort, complemented by a much lower volume of high intensity effort. The amazing thing is it also works for beginner and experienced athletes as well. You need both of these to actually get fast and do it as safely as possible.
As someone new to cycling, or cycling training, you actually want to avoid high intensity effort altogether for a period of time while you build up your base fitness. For cyclists, this means going on lots of rides that you would probably consider to be far too easy to even be effective with regard to yielding gains. But stick with it. On these rides, as soon as you feel your legs begin to burn, or your heart rate gets too high, simply back off for change gears until it is comfortable again. The more of this you do, the faster you will actually become.
You don’t have to work hard. You just have to put in the time.
Training in this way is counterintuitive, particularly in cultures that celebrate the no-pain no-gain mentality. But the reality is that training at low intensity is what actually changes your body to give yourself the ability to get you to the next levels.
These facts are unfortunate if you’re someone who is marketing an expensive spin bike. But they are very liberating if you’re someone who actually enjoys cycling.
The coffee rides you’re doing are actually giving you much more fitness than you probably realize.
If you can commit more time at low intensity by spending an increased number of hours on fun bike rides where you feel very little burning in your legs, over time your body will actually grow stronger mitochondria (your cells that produce power) and capillaries (the source of fuel for your muscles) to support that kind of effort. Going on long, low intensity rides is actually the key.
The more low intensity you do, the stronger mitochondria and capillaries you have. The stronger mitochondria and capillaries you have, the more power and fuel your muscles will have for high intensity effort. Suddenly your high intensity effort feels less intense than it used to. And that was always your goal.
If you love it, keep your spin class. Or your group ride. Just do it intentionally, and be sure make it just one component of your overall training. Just make your group ride or spin class part of your 20% high intensity effort. Then pair that with low intensity rides around your neighborhood for coffee and longer low intensity rides on the weekend to the beach. When you do, you will improve much more dramatically than if you only do high intensity effort alone.
Keep your training activities compartmentalized, intentional, and well distributed, and you will see gains you thought were never possible.
They key, therefore, becomes keeping close track of your time in intensity zones, and making sure that it tracks with a training model that works for you. BitCrew will keep track of all of your training time and your personalized training zones.
All you need to do is select a training model and then get out and ride.
Training models describe the amounts of time we spend in low, medium, and high intensity. For beginners especially, you want to use a training model that favors low intensity. The polarized model, also known as 80/20 for 80% low intensity, 20% high intensity, is a very good training model for athletes at any level. Pyramid is a similar model with about 70% low intensity, 20% medium intensity, 10% high intensity. Maximum aerobic function, or MAF, is another, which looks at things from the low intensity perspective entirely at 100% low intensity.
Training models allow us to describe how we want to spend our time in intensity zones independent of how much time we dedicate to training. So whether you can spend 5 hours a week on the bike or 20 hours, your training model will decide how many of those hours you should spend in each zone.
When doing work on the trainer, we suggest a polarized model (a.k.a. 80/20). On the trainer it is easier to stay in a more strict 80/20 distribution of intensity. When doing more outdoor work, the pyramid model naturally fits better, because variations in the real world like hills, traffic lights, wind, etc., can push you to work more in the threshold zone than a strict polarized would allow. If you’re really just beginning, MAF can be a great model to start with to build base fitness. Do as much time as you can below your MAF heart rate and you will feel yourself improve dramatically.
Whichever model works for you is fine. All three are very great ways to increase your aerobic capacity while also building your anaerobic ability and avoiding burnout and injury. With BitCrew you can choose any of these, or switch between them at any time. We will track your time at your personalized levels of intensity doing all of your activities and report back to you to ensure that you’re on track to make the most gains that you possibly can while still thoroughly enjoying your time on the bike.
We’d all prefer to be training out on the road in beautiful weather all the time. Unfortunately, that’s not the reality for most of us. In order to maximize your efficiency increasing your cycling FTP, your trainer can become an invaluable tool. But you have to use it right. BitCrew can help.
For example, polarized (or 80/20) training has been shown to be extremely effective in many athletes for improving overall ability on the bicycle to increase cycling FTP. It has been shown to be effective not just for elite athletes, but beginners as well.
With polarized training in particular, it is important to remember to actually go light on your 80% low intensity days, because that helps your body to make adaptations and build upon your base endurance.
In practice, however, it is both counterintuitive and difficult to train this way out in the real world. Even with the most carefully curated route, you will often find yourself pushing too hard in many situations: trying to beat a light, get up a hill, or get home before dark.
Similarly, you may be chasing someone down in a virtual world who has absolutely nothing to do with what you’re optimizing for with your workout session. These are easy high intensity traps to inadvertently fall into.
Conversely, you may be stuck at a light or at the beginning of a long descent when you actually need to be going harder at that stage of your session. These things may not have a huge impact on your training, but they are, by definition, inefficient use of your training time.
Real world situations often make it impractical or impossible to train the way we actually need to in order to optimize our gains.
Because we can make them consistent, trainers are actually our best tools to help us eliminate the risk of inefficient training time. But that is only true when you combine your trainer with the best software to drive science backed workouts designed to get you to your goals.
There is a lot of software and hardware out there that is simply designed to make you sweat. But it is important to understand that just jumping on and pedaling or picking a random workout is not necessarily gaining aerobic or anaerobic fitness efficiently. In fact, doing too much can actually set you back very easily, and it can be very tempting to do exactly that.
BitCrew will customize and guide you through efficient training sessions customized for you as part of an overall training model to help you increase cycling FTP. You never want to do too little, or too much, when you’re trying to optimize around your abilities and your schedule.
You will find no squirrels to chase in BitCrew. We leave the racing for the real world. Trainers are for training.
Why choose between something that’s fun and something else that will optimize your training time to maximize your performance on the course or out on the trail or road?
Why not have both? BitCrew is fun, motivating, captures all of your data in a way that can easily be reviewed to chart your progress, while simultaneously offering expertly crafted training sessions and training plans. All in one place.
Crews are groups of users who can join private sessions together. Crews make it much easier to repeatedly invite the same group of users to multiple sessions and manage that list of users over time.
