- What's a good power number?
(whooshing)
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(whooshing)
Here at Triathlon Taren,
we will not leave you dangling on that.
(whooshing)
Good morning, trainiacs.
So today we've got ourselves an FTP test,
as in the pain.
Now, somebody asked me a couple weeks ago
what's a good power number?
That is a very big it depends,
but I am going to give you an answer
that gives you some guidelines as far as where you rank
in relation to competitive triathletes
and where you rank in relation to pros
for what a good kinda power number is.
But first, pain.
(upbeat dance music)
Serious!
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Oh my God.
That was not, that was not the greatest.
I didn't have fun there.
Okay, so you hear me talking about FTP,
functional threshold power.
Very quickly for the people
that say that I don't know what it is,
you can do a 20 minute test, max yourself out.
About 95% of the normalized power
that you held for that 20 minutes is your FTP number,
which about the max amount of power
that you can put out over a sustained one hour period.
Alright, I know what it is.
Jeez, you try talking off the top of your head
for 365 days in a video and see if you screw up.
So people often say what is a good FTP number?
Well, it's entirely dependent on a few things.
Namely, how heavy you are is a huge determinant
of what a good FTP number is.
So in my case, I just did a decent FTP test.
My legs are really smashed up from weight training yesterday
so I couldn't expect to have my absolute best FTP test,
which was 273.
I was about 263 there.
95% of that is my FTP number, so we're talking low 250s.
Now, should all of you be going for 253 or better?
No, not at all.
When you start weighing more,
your FTP number naturally goes up.
So I ride with a guy locally here
that weighs about 50 pounds more than me,
and his steady state when we're riding together
is like 310, whereas mine is low 200s.
But if you want to compare yourself to other riders
regardless of weight,
a better measure is watts per kilogram,
and this is simply how many watts you can hold
over a given time period divided by your weight
in kilograms, and this is a fluctuating number.
There are numbers that are good for 20 second sprints,
numbers that are good for one minute, three minute,
five minutes, 20 minutes, 60 minutes.
Here at Triathlon Taren, we will not leave you dangling
on that because we found a resource that gives you
some benchmark watts per Kg.
So let me give you the watts per kilogram based
on an FTP test because that's what a lot of you
are going to be doing to determine your training zones
if you've got a power meter.
Now, a world class cyclist in functional threshold power
will be able to hold 6.6 watts per Kg.
A novice completely untrained rider is gonna be somewhere
in the neighborhood of around 1.6.
I myself based off that test because I am 157 pounds,
71 kilograms, my functional threshold was 252.
Divide that by 71 kilograms,
and I am at 3.5 watts per kilogram on an FTP test,
which puts me in between good, puts me at good.
So you can use that range of six to 1.6
with me being 3.5 and being able to do somewhere
in between a 230 and 240 half Ironman,
tending to do very well, being towards the front
of the better cyclists in a race.
That's a decent number.
What you can also do with watts per Kg
is understand what the mechanisms are
that will make you a better cyclist,
and it's two very simple things
because it's two inputs in that mathematical equation,
one being the watts that you can put out,
the other being the weight that you're at.
And you can get a higher watts per Kg
by either raising the amount of watts
that you're able to sustain or lowering your body weight.
I'm not gonna talk about all the ways that you can do it
because we've got many other videos.
By the way, you should be subscribed
if you wanna make sure that you get all
of those other videos.
If you already are subscribed, high five!
You can gradually increase the amount of power
that you put out.
Conversely, on the other hand,
you can lower your weight.
So this is why you see pro cyclists coming
into the Tour de France looking like borderline dead
or you hear pro triathletes being on a diet
in the months leading up to a race
because they want to have as high a power number
as they can get and be as light as they can.
And then their power to rate ratio is better
because if they're putting out the same amount of power
but they don't have as much weight to push,
they're gonna be faster.
So there you go.
It's not all FTP.
Watts per Kg is equally as helpful.
How nice do these lights look?
Huh?
This is tropical twilight.
This arctic aurora, savanna sunset.
Sounds like a stripper.
There you go, trainiacs.
I'm done, I'm done.
I'm toast.
That was brutal.