bike test

Tom Roth

when testing am I aiming for the highest watts I can push for the 20 mins. how important is the cadence do I strive for the 90 -95 or just watts. Or is it at 90-95 the watts I can hold for 20 minutes?

John Withrow

There are different opinions on this. Personally I am aiming for the highest watts possible. But keep in mind that you are trying to determine an FTP that will be used in training and that will help guide your race strategy, so grinding at 40 rpms for 20 mins is unlikely to give you a number that is useful to use. I usually do at least 10 mins or so in my sweet spot of cadence which for me is right around 90. But then to distract my mind from the pain, I'll sometimes drop it down for a minute or so, or crank it up. Whatever it takes to get me to the end as the tunnel vision starts to happen.

cgres123

Yes the goal is to aim for the highest watts you can hold for the 20 min. The difference is the flavor on how you are going to do that. For instance, as you suggested, using a high cadence, using a lower cadence and pushing more power to finish your 20 min and of course starting out at 250 watts, your goal per say, and hanging on for dear life. Then again, using the 250 watt idea do you start at 230 and build or 240?
See lots of different ways to finish the test this was just an example.

I do my warm up and pick a start number out of a hat then build up to where I think I am based on how I have been riding And as JW said your sweet spot cadence is key as well so don't mash or spin yourself out.

tgarson

I'm like the proverbial broken record on this so I'll try to keep it brief this time. I don't disagree with the guys above just keep in mind what you are going to use the result for.

For training, I'm fine with shooting for the biggest number possible and there are a lot of ways I can do that, grinding a bigger gear at a lower cadence than I could ever hold in a race is one way, incorporating sprints/hills/surges is another way you can inflate NP. Just know that by doing some of these things, you can come up with an estimation of your FTP that there is no way you could hold say 85% for 2.5 hours in an HIM, let alone run off of.

So for racing, you have two options. Test more realistically (more even pacing, appropriate cadence, etc) and/or just use your race rehearsals and other long rides to validate what the actual wattage is that you should pace off of in a race is rather than just going with 85% of an estimation based off of a 20' test.