Should we dial down our FTP after the off-season?
In this latest article, coach Philip Hatzis explores how much we should dial back our FTP after an off-season break, or even if we should!? Read on to learn how to adapt your training after taking some time off.
After some time off, perhaps due to the off-season, an injury, or a break, many athletes will still refer back to their previous threshold values as they re-start. This is true for swim, bike or run. For example, they might have reached a bike threshold PB in September, just before their final race. However, as they restart in January, they have everything set to their previous PB output. The reality is the FTP is only current for that time of year – it is a snapshot of ability. Therefore, athletes should look at dialling down their FTP as they restart after some time off.
How much should I dial back my FTP after a break?
So, athletes should drop the FTP down. The question is, though, by how much? How much is difficult to answer because every athlete will be slightly different. The difficulty is the athletes don’t know what to dial it down to and, therefore, find it challenging to decide. It can also impact their ego if they were pushing 300W and suddenly dialling it back down to 250W. All too often, athletes don’t bother and just push through and hope that it being hard will mean they will train themselves back up to fitness. Though this is partly true and helps people feel the training endorphins, it isn’t the fastest way to get back up to fitness.
After a few seasons, most experienced athletes can have a pretty good feel about the different thresholds. Riding, running, or swimming to feel in the first few sessions can help find what feels right. Once they find that value, we would suggest athletes drop it by another 10%.
Athletes should initially go lower rather than higher for their thresholds and then corresponding training zones. Having a lower threshold will only mean you do more in aerobic or base-level training, which is no bad thing. It is better to be a little lower in the aerobic parts of the sessions, and for harder sessions, it is always easy to go harder if you feel good and have a minimal impact on the session. Going too hard for Z2 work only means training in a grey zone and being less efficient.
So, if you miss a target, it is better to miss the target low than try to go too high. This will also mean that the training impact is lower for the athlete, which is better at this time of year as a rebuild back training again. You can always push on and increase the training intensity a little bit if you feel it is too easy as you get fitter. (which will happen).
Finally, it is much easier to estimate how much harder your FTP should be from an easy zone than to guess how much lower it should be when you fail in the middle of a hard interval! Too hard just feels hard.
Therefore, if you return to training after some time off, drop your targets, and don’t worry if they are too low; they will come back up quite quickly and then when you re-test, it will be easy enough to see where they should have been. When restarting, the danger is always doing too much too quickly, so setting your training zones a little low accidentally will mean there is a lower likelihood of an overuse injury early on.
Philip is the founder of Tri Training Harder LLP. He’s a British Triathlon Level 3 coach, and has been coaching for over a decade and is involved with mentoring and developing other coaches.
Philip has coached athletes to European and World AG wins, elite racing, many Kona qualifications, IRONMAN podiums and AG wins.
Alongside the conventional development through many CPD courses, he has also been fortunate enough to work alongside experts in the fields of Physiotherapy, Strength and Conditioning, Nutrition, Psychology, Biomechanics, Sports Medicine. Putting this knowledge into practice he has worked with thousands of athletes to various degrees, from training camps in Portugal and around Europe, clinics in the UK and online coaching.
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