POWER STRUGGLE

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, heavily dependent on how it’s wielded by its user? Let’s take a look…

FTP or WTF?

Cavell’s comments came in an interview about his new book, The Midlife Cyclist, which looks at cyclists aged 40 plus and the extent to which they’ve sought to achieve high performance. “For a lot of people, [FTP] is a dysfunctional threshold,” he told us.

“That’s a little strong as it definitely