Welcome to the podcast is dedicated to making you a faster cyclist the ask a cycling coach podcast presented by trainer road

I'm coach Jonathan Lee with our head coach Chad Zimmerman. Alright, buddy

Our CEO Nate Pearson. Hello, and we're going to answer more of your cycling and triathlon related questions today

You can submit them at trainer road calm slash podcast

Let's get right into questions this time guys

So let's go with Matt's question first one. He says hey guys love the podcast

Just started trainer road a couple weeks ago, and I'm loving it

I'm just getting going with the Criterium training plan as I'm hoping that will help with the upcoming race season

I'm just curious how that training plan will affect my FTP and for those that don't know what FTP is if you're new to this

Functional threshold power. That's roughly equivalent to your lactate threshold in terms of power

Obviously, this is great training for crit racing with the quick intervals and quick rest

Can I expect this to increase my FTP as well? This is my first year of some serious structured training

So definitely room for my FTP to move up

Matt when we move into the specialty phase of training

It's much less so than with base and build we're not so concerned with increases in FTP at that point

It's not to say they won't still happen, but that's not really what we're after specifically more we're looking to

Make you better at whatever it is your race demands

And in this case with Criterium it happens to be doing a lot of efforts with not a lot of rest

That in and of itself can affect FTP though

Basically, it's gonna force you to operate out a really high oxygen uptake really high level of stress and do so

Frequently so which in a lot of cases is is enough of a training stimulus to increase

Capabilities whether or not it'll affect your FTP as much as it affects other aspects of your fitness is

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