torque cyclist

that makes sense, considering it doesn't even ask for bike information.

hamster

Well, this segment Mountain Bike Ride Profile | First Group Ride/Road Riding Experience - Easy/Aerobic near Colorado Springs | Times and Records | Strava looks like about 6.7% average grade. Average speed 10.0 mph, on a mountain bike, assuming 70 kg and no wind, power calculator gives me about 290 W. Strava is more generous and estimates 336 W. But, of course, 290 W for 5.5 minutes is not 290 W FTP.

hamster

Yes, it does. Top right corner -> settings -> my gear. It asks about bike type (road/mountain/TT/cross) and weight. Not sure what it does if you never fill this out though.

LMaster

This is indeed what I would expect. It might be possible to compared efforts on a specific bike; but obviously the "watts" on a gym trainer need to be taken with a gallon or two of salt.

It's very possible, and being honest, very likely I'm not. That guess comes primarily from a combination of my hard efforts up shorter hills, and my own road climb I've done seems to give something in that vicinity (4.5M climb @ 3.8% @ 12.6 mph on the MTB) trying to guess from online calc. It's worth noting that every ride of mine is on a MTB (at least for a couple more days ) and the vast majority of my rides are on trails because that's what's closest to my house. Lots of gravel, dirt, and sand there.

Right now I'm probably around 12-13% BF if I had to guess. Definitely nowhere near showing any sign of abs. Pretty confident about dropping back down to 135-140 as right around there is my normal race weight for running. I've dropped a few times from 145 or so back down to mid/high 130s, so I don't expect too much trouble, but I am coming off a 2 year running injury (groin issue turned hip issue) that had me out till early this year, and my weight up into the 170s. It's a bigger drop than before, but I've done the fairly lean to 6% lean part before and have at least a measure of feel for what works for me.


Any particular protocol you recommend for this? I ask because if I recall correctly I've seen a few different variants.

LMaster

I think it's 6.1 or something, not 6.7%

I do get different numbers though even with 6.1. I get speed of 10.14 w/320W using parameters of:

155lb weight
37lb MTB weight
MTB Tire

Admittedly not threshold though. I suspect another 5 minutes of that effort and I would begin to feel like I was really working, and that if I was racing to redline I could hold that effort for somewhere between 15-20 mins if I was willing to go to some dark places.

The only real max effort I have is this one: Mountain Bike Ride Profile | SFT Easy/Aerobic Ride near Monument | Times and Records | Strava - That last .8M climb back to my house was pretty much flat out effort. I sincerely doubt I could have go even another 100m at that point. Of course...that's a 3:30s data point, not sure how well that related to FTP.

TexMac

Started at 70-80 rpm last year summer. During winter I rode on a trainer with good rhythm music (175-190 watts), now i'm comfortable at 90-95rpm. Sprinting 150rpm. Make it an interval to spin at 85-90 for 5 minutes, then off, repeat when you ride and soon you'll get to 90rpm.

IronHorseRiderX

Clearly you are quite fit and with solid background.
Assuming you can get to 62kg and maintain what you have as of now your w/kg will be above 4W/kg for sure.
Which is very impressive if you ask me.

I only did "true FTP" tests - that is rode ~6% 11mi segment every week to see my progress.
It's long and windy enough to cancel most of the wind issues and also since it is over 1h mark I was able to see my true FTP (see my earlier posts in this thread).
I would try this Strava Segment | 2012 Pikes Peak Hill Climb or similar - since I'm not familiar with your area I can not really recommend much.
There's also 20 min test How to Find Your Functional Threshold Power for cycling. Two Test to get started using FTP with assumption that max 20 min effort gives you 95% of your FTP but for me personally it was giving a bit higher numbers (10W higher: my 1h FTP was 256W est and 20min was 280W est which works out to 266W) which is quite common as I learned recently.
Now I'm getting same exact numbers riding with PowerTap so I have all reasons to trust strava estimated numbers.

Thing is if you indeed have ~4W/kg you would end up in top 5 .. 10% on pretty much all popular strava climbing segments - I can almost guarantee that.
Strava is very useful in this regard as it has tons of data and if you look at popular (1000 or more unique riders) climbs you will see that pattern very clearly.
Top 25 riders would be very fit with FTP 5W/kg or more (pro riders and such), top 5% would be around 4 and top 10 just under 4.
But since you ride MTB that equation wan't work for you.

LMaster

Strava Segment | 2012 Pikes Peak Hill Climb - Once I have a road bike here soon (shopping around for what I want atm), this is on the to do list. Brutal climb though, as it starts at 6,600 and goes up to 14,110ft. Not much air up there

So what you are saying is do it the same way a runner would: all out one hour TT race effort. In running there would be a tendency to stay away from this because the recovery time from a 10M to half marathon race is often several days to a week...but perhaps on the bike this is not an issue. 20 min hammerfest should be easy, there are a good number of nice 15-30 min climbs around here.

IronHorseRiderX

I'm in no way an expert in this one
Only riding for a year so pretty much a noob.
That 10K ft elevation & thin air is an issue and I do recall seeing formula somewhere to estimate what effect it would have on FTP but if you want to race there you have to take it for what it is
1h max effort is indeed exhausting but for me it is a good thing as I simply do not have much time to train so all my rides include at least 20mins of FTP or above efforts.
Again from my personal observation this is not uncommon and there's number of top local athletes who actually think this is a way to go namely local climbing star Time-crunched Cyclist | English Endurance this What do I do differently from other pro cyclists? | English Endurance , I also know for a fact that number of local clubs do similar rides on a weekly basis (rides with hard 1h+ climbs of 3K+ ft elevation) so it does not bother me to do the same.
Another approach seems to be to include hard 20mins to 30min climbing efforts and do them more often (daily/every other day - depends on your fitness).
There's of course many more training approaches but those above seems to be employed by most top guns I'm following on strava - so they must be good

torque cyclist

forgot about the bike type. I don't think it requires you input your bike. but I made a run on my mtb the other day and had my classic road bike only logged, so I don't know if I can change the bike used after the fact.

IronHorseRiderX

Click on your rider there's an edit button on the left bottom side (looks like pen)

torque cyclist

thanks, I did it. I think the estimates make a bit more sense now.