I've done Zwift's 4-week FTP builder twice - both times in January for whatever reason - and I was impressed by the results both times. Granted I already had pretty good fitness from the previous season of outdoor riding, but having a structured plan to follow helped. Impressive improvement over 12 weeks though, nicely done.
where do you find these training plans? All I see now is the 10-12 week ftp builder but only able to choose DAys 1-5 with different works inside of there
@@patrickayres I haven't looked in a while, but I'm fairly certain I used to just go into the workout collection and in there I'd see both the 4-week and 13-week FTP builder workouts. Next time I'm in Zwift I'll poke around to see if I can locate it, but I don't see why they would have removed it.
@@patrickayres I think the location probably depends on the device that you’re on? On my iPad app I can see the “Build Me Up” plan on the workouts page when I tab between “Workouts” and “Plans”
Thanks Adam - good luck! Have fun with it - I'll admit this training plan got pretty boring towards the end, but jumping in some group rides really boosted the motivation again.
Great video, thanks for sharing. This looks like a plan that might fit well for a nice structured block for me when the outdoor season ends (Nov - Jan) possibly. Congratulations on the gains!
Thanks Shawn! That was certainly my thinking - give this structured training a shot over the off-season. I think it was a good introduction to planned training for sure, without dropping a bunch of money on a coach.
thanks for sharing. So you have to follow day by day or did you schedule shifted some workouts?looking at the time schedule, christimas is coming and i might be off of the bike for some days... BTW, i did a 2 week VO2 max workout plan and got a 4% increase in FTP. i found not so hard but with a very fast paid off, even an upgrade to Cat B :P
Thanks man - you don't have to follow the workouts as they're scheduled, you can shift them around a bit. There were days that I was supposed to do long workouts, but didn't have time, so did one of the shorter ones instead. That being said - they're arranged by week and build on eachother, so it's best to try to stick to the weekly schedules as much as possible I think. Congrats on the gains and good luck with the B's!
Hey, a bit context: I started cycling in May 2023 and Zwifting in November 2023. From Jan 2024 onwards I did this plan. I was assigned an FTP of 185 in the beginning and 226 in the end. Have to admit though I was pretty clueless in the beginning, so 185 was probably underestimating a bit and likewise 226 overestimating a bit because I was ridiculously motivated when taking the test. Manually reduced my FTP to 210 in Zwift and now in week 11/12 of taking the plan again. Curious what the FTP test next week will look like.
That's a fair increase. I found the plan not ambitious enough with regard to the overall loading. But it does get a result so can't fault it from that respect. I did this along time ago when just starting out like yourself, but, like this year, when getting back into fitness I don't so much look at the ftp number, although in the last 8 weeks I have had almost the same numbers and uplift as yourself from that respect. Initially I focused on the zone 2 stuff, just plodding around, and a couple of fartek rides or zwift races per week, like you just getting dropped and riding at the back solo for a few weeks. What I tried to do here was ride either really easy Z1/Z2 or hard and stay out of sweet spot. Once I was happy with the zone 2 work started being more structured with threshold interval session trying to progress the endurance aspect and Time To Exhaustion. For VO2, I would race a couple of times a week, but think carefully of what I was getting out of the race, which can be route specific. You will push yourself harder in a race than an interval training session, you know you are gonna have a 3 min full gas start, a reasonable first 10 min effort then some sort of climb vo2 effort. I don't worry about positioning doing this, I just drop back to the next group once I have reached an effort goal, sit and rest up in the pack until I get to the next part of the course to the work I want to do. The results from having a flexible approach that it is really enjoyable, might not be as good as a dedicated coached training plan, but you can have so much more fun with it on the platform that will keep you more engaged for longer. Be careful not to have too much fun though especially if you do races for a win, and remember you do have to rest to improve.
Nice results with the zwift training plan. I started similarly doing one earlier in the year and just turned 40 as well. I’m still on the fence about what training plans to use, but I’ve just been doing my own unstructured thing after I started having sciatica issues after doing the FTP ramp test! I wish more of these plans incorporated strength and other aspects. I had been told my core strength was my weak point, but never had any plan for what to do until now. Good luck and maybe 300w ftp will be on your horizon! Gotta have a goals.
Thank you! Good luck with your plan. My thought was that nearly any structured plan was better than nothing. At the very least it would motivate me to stick to a stricter riding schedule, but I actually think it made me a stronger cyclist overall as well. Next off season I may aim to do a more targeted crit specific plan, but this was a good introduction to training plans in general I think. +1 on the core strength! I think mine is also weak and have suffered with lower back pain on/off for the last 10 or so years. A few years ago I started lifting weights more regularly and that definitely helped for a while, but when I put that time into cycling instead my back started acting up again. I think that core strength is a weakness for many cyclists, so if you find a good training plan for that let us all know!
Well done Tim!! I think 9% is a solid gain after 12 weeks. Curious if your weight changed at all during those 12 weeks? Before Swift I was on TrainerRoad for 10 years and did a ton of structured training plans and saw some nice gains almost every time, they really do make a difference. They can be boring and painful but if you wanna get better/faster than pushing the limits is kind of a must. Again well done and hope this puts you in B category cause I don’t wanna see that 3.9w/kg in any C races😂😂
Thanks Chris! I dropped a few pounds towards the beginning, but fairly quickly realized I was under fueling and ended at about the same weight. I’m fairly thin, so not much to take off. Yep - was upgraded to B cat and I’m back to getting dropped every race!
Really? I’ve always thought that Zwift , like most competitive racing, starts at 4😂😂. Granted I don’t do Zwift races; I have a free account, but like you I mainly spend my time suffering in Trainneroad.
I finished this plan this week. I went into the plan with a 237 FTP and in the early stages of the plan hit 245 w for an hour during Zwift Games. I reset my FTP for the plan to match that 245W. The plan then ramped up but I did not see any gains above 245w. I’m sitting around 240w at the moment so I don’t think I can conclusively say that I had any FTP gains from the plan itself. Racing twice a week and z2 the rest of the week seems to be as effective as structured training for me as it took me from 185W to 245W in about 8 months.
Congrats on completing the plan John - it certainly go tough at some points - for me anyways. Sounds like you were a little more structured than me going in - I think part of my gains just came from increased time in the saddle, which sticking to a plan made me do.
I use Mywhoosh FTP buider for 12week from jan 1r to april 1. I went from 197watt avg for 20 mins to 230w for 20 min. The 20min test is more realist because we don't use erg mode. I have 48yo for 69kg at 1m68. Try the 20min test to see if you can get the same 242w FTP. That mean 255watts for 20 mins!!
Nice increase! For sure the 20min test is more accurate - I don't think I'd have much hope of attaining the same numbers. I wasn't too concerned with the actual number though - I was just looking for the percent increase over the 12 weeks. Since the training plan started with a ramp test that's what I wanted to finish with.
Have you also tried riding a race to see if you could get a higher x minutes peak power from that? The race category I was assigned to seems very strength focused and I often find myself pushing through a bit more which leads to higher ftp, of course it could be my psychology holding me back, since I'm not hitting noodle legs in either scenario.....
Yep - I didn’t quite have the extra data to mention this in the video, but now that I’ve done a few more races I can say that I’m pretty consistently about 0.2-0.3 w/kg above where I was at the end of last year (before I did the training plan) for most of the peak x minutes peak power. It’s nice to see this obviously since real world speed is what we’re all after!!
Did you say you were sixty something KG? That’s insane. I’m kind of slim, not skinny and I’m 86kg. 6”1 I’m targeting 80kg but don’t think I can go lower.
I did this in the middle of winter, so didn't do really any group rides during the plan. The first few weeks were light enough that I did do a Zwift race or two every week, but that stopped after the first few weeks as the load got larger.
226W is 3.6w/kg? So you're 138lbs? Damn man, I haven't been 138lbs since I was 12. I would have to do 360 watts to be at 3.6w/kg. 226w is my sweet spot power. Good job on the increase, 3.9w/kg is very good for a non pro.
@@TBBCycling I'd be jealous of your weight if I lived anywhere mountains were abundant, but I live in Florida, so it's very flat. Moving to the mountains in Tenn in a few years though, so maybe I'll have to shed some weight to make it easier on myself.
I probably will check them out at some point. This was the first time I had ever done a structured training plan, so really didn’t know if I was even going to stick with it, so didn’t really want to shell out any extra money (other than the Zwift fee, which I was already paying for obviously). What makes the TR plans are so much better btw - have you tried both? I’ve heard from others that TR plans are better as well, just not sure why.
High standard error might make this difference statistically insignificant. So do it by the book, calculate either p-value / t-stat / z-score and post it here. Congrats completing the course!
It would certainly be interesting to try and calculate the standard error, but I think it would probably be mighty difficult. I'm guessing the biggest error is how repeatable my performance is and I don't really have any interest in tracking all the variables that could effect that (nutrition, mood, motivation, fatigue, health, just to name a few) while taking a bunch of ftp tests. I'm also not a statistician, so wouldn't quite know what I was doing! I may do something similar next off season and will look into trying to do something a little more scientific.
@@TBBCycling you should see continuous improvement over time as you get more fit, that’d be a key indicator without getting into the weeds. Otherwise, just having a point estimate doesn’t tell much.
@@avav30311 : did you just see the word "statistically" and use it in each sentence to look smart? The fact you say "9% is statistically not significant" is proving you're full of bullshit. p-value is generally an affaire of convention, but, in any case, 9% is huge and "statistically significant". But beyond the figure itself, if we wanted to draw statistical conclusions it would be necessary to carry out numerous tests on numerous subjects, under controlled conditions, and not on just one. In this case, requesting "statistical results" on a single subject would require: - Either repeat the same protocol; that is to say that the individual should wait to lose all the level acquired and redo the training followed (therefore falling back to 226w of ftp and starting the 12 weeks of training again). - Either repeat the same training from the current level, which would of course not lead to the same results in terms of percentage of progress; the latter not being linear. Of course he will not progress by 9% each time if he now starts the same training again, but that is a well-known fact and no one has claimed the opposite here.
How funny to see how FTP change from person to person. I am 192cm with 110kgs (14% fat), my FTP is 272W and I wouldn't be able to follow you at all. 😅😅 I also have a 12 week plan now to improve, let's see how it goes.
Thanks very informative. Just started a structured ftp workout plan on zwift.
Nice - let us know how you make out!
Nice work finishing the plan... it's a butt-kicker for sure, and helped me develop my endurance, FTP, and VO2 power for sure.
Thanks Man - definitely brutal! I agree though - certainly seems to have helped boost that base fitness.
I've done Zwift's 4-week FTP builder twice - both times in January for whatever reason - and I was impressed by the results both times. Granted I already had pretty good fitness from the previous season of outdoor riding, but having a structured plan to follow helped. Impressive improvement over 12 weeks though, nicely done.
Thanks James - Good to know that it's repeatable as well!
where do you find these training plans? All I see now is the 10-12 week ftp builder but only able to choose DAys 1-5 with different works inside of there
@@patrickayres I haven't looked in a while, but I'm fairly certain I used to just go into the workout collection and in there I'd see both the 4-week and 13-week FTP builder workouts. Next time I'm in Zwift I'll poke around to see if I can locate it, but I don't see why they would have removed it.
@@patrickayres I think the location probably depends on the device that you’re on? On my iPad app I can see the “Build Me Up” plan on the workouts page when I tab between “Workouts” and “Plans”
Nice video, trying to get fit here and im only at 1w/KG atm a LONG way to go.
Thanks Adam - good luck! Have fun with it - I'll admit this training plan got pretty boring towards the end, but jumping in some group rides really boosted the motivation again.
Great video, thanks for sharing. This looks like a plan that might fit well for a nice structured block for me when the outdoor season ends (Nov - Jan) possibly. Congratulations on the gains!
Thanks Shawn! That was certainly my thinking - give this structured training a shot over the off-season. I think it was a good introduction to planned training for sure, without dropping a bunch of money on a coach.
thanks for sharing. So you have to follow day by day or did you schedule shifted some workouts?looking at the time schedule, christimas is coming and i might be off of the bike for some days... BTW, i did a 2 week VO2 max workout plan and got a 4% increase in FTP. i found not so hard but with a very fast paid off, even an upgrade to Cat B :P
Thanks man - you don't have to follow the workouts as they're scheduled, you can shift them around a bit. There were days that I was supposed to do long workouts, but didn't have time, so did one of the shorter ones instead. That being said - they're arranged by week and build on eachother, so it's best to try to stick to the weekly schedules as much as possible I think.
Congrats on the gains and good luck with the B's!
Thank you for the video, I feel am progressing and on on week 10😅
Nice - keep at it! Those last couple of weeks are tough. Let us know how you make out!
Hey, a bit context: I started cycling in May 2023 and Zwifting in November 2023. From Jan 2024 onwards I did this plan. I was assigned an FTP of 185 in the beginning and 226 in the end. Have to admit though I was pretty clueless in the beginning, so 185 was probably underestimating a bit and likewise 226 overestimating a bit because I was ridiculously motivated when taking the test. Manually reduced my FTP to 210 in Zwift and now in week 11/12 of taking the plan again. Curious what the FTP test next week will look like.
Thanks for letting us know - I'm super curious about the repeat results as well - keep us posted!
That's a fair increase. I found the plan not ambitious enough with regard to the overall loading. But it does get a result so can't fault it from that respect. I did this along time ago when just starting out like yourself, but, like this year, when getting back into fitness I don't so much look at the ftp number, although in the last 8 weeks I have had almost the same numbers and uplift as yourself from that respect. Initially I focused on the zone 2 stuff, just plodding around, and a couple of fartek rides or zwift races per week, like you just getting dropped and riding at the back solo for a few weeks. What I tried to do here was ride either really easy Z1/Z2 or hard and stay out of sweet spot. Once I was happy with the zone 2 work started being more structured with threshold interval session trying to progress the endurance aspect and Time To Exhaustion. For VO2, I would race a couple of times a week, but think carefully of what I was getting out of the race, which can be route specific. You will push yourself harder in a race than an interval training session, you know you are gonna have a 3 min full gas start, a reasonable first 10 min effort then some sort of climb vo2 effort. I don't worry about positioning doing this, I just drop back to the next group once I have reached an effort goal, sit and rest up in the pack until I get to the next part of the course to the work I want to do. The results from having a flexible approach that it is really enjoyable, might not be as good as a dedicated coached training plan, but you can have so much more fun with it on the platform that will keep you more engaged for longer. Be careful not to have too much fun though especially if you do races for a win, and remember you do have to rest to improve.
Nice results with the zwift training plan. I started similarly doing one earlier in the year and just turned 40 as well. I’m still on the fence about what training plans to use, but I’ve just been doing my own unstructured thing after I started having sciatica issues after doing the FTP ramp test! I wish more of these plans incorporated strength and other aspects. I had been told my core strength was my weak point, but never had any plan for what to do until now. Good luck and maybe 300w ftp will be on your horizon! Gotta have a goals.
Thank you!
Good luck with your plan. My thought was that nearly any structured plan was better than nothing. At the very least it would motivate me to stick to a stricter riding schedule, but I actually think it made me a stronger cyclist overall as well. Next off season I may aim to do a more targeted crit specific plan, but this was a good introduction to training plans in general I think.
+1 on the core strength! I think mine is also weak and have suffered with lower back pain on/off for the last 10 or so years. A few years ago I started lifting weights more regularly and that definitely helped for a while, but when I put that time into cycling instead my back started acting up again. I think that core strength is a weakness for many cyclists, so if you find a good training plan for that let us all know!
Well done Tim!! I think 9% is a solid gain after 12 weeks. Curious if your weight changed at all during those 12 weeks? Before Swift I was on TrainerRoad for 10 years and did a ton of structured training plans and saw some nice gains almost every time, they really do make a difference. They can be boring and painful but if you wanna get better/faster than pushing the limits is kind of a must. Again well done and hope this puts you in B category cause I don’t wanna see that 3.9w/kg in any C races😂😂
Thanks Chris! I dropped a few pounds towards the beginning, but fairly quickly realized I was under fueling and ended at about the same weight. I’m fairly thin, so not much to take off.
Yep - was upgraded to B cat and I’m back to getting dropped every race!
Really? I’ve always thought that Zwift , like most competitive racing, starts at 4😂😂.
Granted I don’t do Zwift races; I have a free account, but like you I mainly spend my time suffering in Trainneroad.
I finished this plan this week. I went into the plan with a 237 FTP and in the early stages of the plan hit 245 w for an hour during Zwift Games. I reset my FTP for the plan to match that 245W. The plan then ramped up but I did not see any gains above 245w. I’m sitting around 240w at the moment so I don’t think I can conclusively say that I had any FTP gains from the plan itself. Racing twice a week and z2 the rest of the week seems to be as effective as structured training for me as it took me from 185W to 245W in about 8 months.
Congrats on completing the plan John - it certainly go tough at some points - for me anyways. Sounds like you were a little more structured than me going in - I think part of my gains just came from increased time in the saddle, which sticking to a plan made me do.
I use Mywhoosh FTP buider for 12week from jan 1r to april 1. I went from 197watt avg for 20 mins to 230w for 20 min. The 20min test is more realist because we don't use erg mode. I have 48yo for 69kg at 1m68.
Try the 20min test to see if you can get the same 242w FTP. That mean 255watts for 20 mins!!
Nice increase!
For sure the 20min test is more accurate - I don't think I'd have much hope of attaining the same numbers. I wasn't too concerned with the actual number though - I was just looking for the percent increase over the 12 weeks. Since the training plan started with a ramp test that's what I wanted to finish with.
Have you also tried riding a race to see if you could get a higher x minutes peak power from that? The race category I was assigned to seems very strength focused and I often find myself pushing through a bit more which leads to higher ftp, of course it could be my psychology holding me back, since I'm not hitting noodle legs in either scenario.....
Yep - I didn’t quite have the extra data to mention this in the video, but now that I’ve done a few more races I can say that I’m pretty consistently about 0.2-0.3 w/kg above where I was at the end of last year (before I did the training plan) for most of the peak x minutes peak power. It’s nice to see this obviously since real world speed is what we’re all after!!
@@TBBCycling Nice! I would kill for such an improvement!
Did you say you were sixty something KG? That’s insane. I’m kind of slim, not skinny and I’m 86kg. 6”1
I’m targeting 80kg but don’t think I can go lower.
Yep - about 62kg. I'm only just barely 5'8" though - that extra height makes a big difference.
Did you still do any group/outsoor rides for the duration of the plan?
I did this in the middle of winter, so didn't do really any group rides during the plan. The first few weeks were light enough that I did do a Zwift race or two every week, but that stopped after the first few weeks as the load got larger.
226W is 3.6w/kg? So you're 138lbs? Damn man, I haven't been 138lbs since I was 12. I would have to do 360 watts to be at 3.6w/kg. 226w is my sweet spot power. Good job on the increase, 3.9w/kg is very good for a non pro.
Yep - I probably average a couple pounds less now - I'm only 5'8" so I'm sure there are many larger 12 year olds!
@@TBBCycling I'd be jealous of your weight if I lived anywhere mountains were abundant, but I live in Florida, so it's very flat. Moving to the mountains in Tenn in a few years though, so maybe I'll have to shed some weight to make it easier on myself.
@@shepshape2585 Good luck in the mountains!
Trainer roads plans are 10000x better! Jumped insane numbers check it out!
I probably will check them out at some point. This was the first time I had ever done a structured training plan, so really didn’t know if I was even going to stick with it, so didn’t really want to shell out any extra money (other than the Zwift fee, which I was already paying for obviously). What makes the TR plans are so much better btw - have you tried both? I’ve heard from others that TR plans are better as well, just not sure why.
High standard error might make this difference statistically insignificant. So do it by the book, calculate either p-value / t-stat / z-score and post it here.
Congrats completing the course!
It would certainly be interesting to try and calculate the standard error, but I think it would probably be mighty difficult. I'm guessing the biggest error is how repeatable my performance is and I don't really have any interest in tracking all the variables that could effect that (nutrition, mood, motivation, fatigue, health, just to name a few) while taking a bunch of ftp tests. I'm also not a statistician, so wouldn't quite know what I was doing!
I may do something similar next off season and will look into trying to do something a little more scientific.
Do the thing yourself and post it on UA-cam. 9% increase = statistically not signifiant ? On which kind of drugs are you ?
@@TBBCycling you should see continuous improvement over time as you get more fit, that’d be a key indicator without getting into the weeds. Otherwise, just having a point estimate doesn’t tell much.
@@dupondavignon869 Can you prove it statistically or just don’t like something?
@@avav30311 : did you just see the word "statistically" and use it in each sentence to look smart? The fact you say "9% is statistically not significant" is proving you're full of bullshit. p-value is generally an affaire of convention, but, in any case, 9% is huge and "statistically significant".
But beyond the figure itself, if we wanted to draw statistical conclusions it would be necessary to carry out numerous tests on numerous subjects, under controlled conditions, and not on just one.
In this case, requesting "statistical results" on a single subject would require:
- Either repeat the same protocol; that is to say that the individual should wait to lose all the level acquired and redo the training followed (therefore falling back to 226w of ftp and starting the 12 weeks of training again).
- Either repeat the same training from the current level, which would of course not lead to the same results in terms of percentage of progress; the latter not being linear. Of course he will not progress by 9% each time if he now starts the same training again, but that is a well-known fact and no one has claimed the opposite here.
Rodriguez Linda White Angela Martin Helen
How funny to see how FTP change from person to person. I am 192cm with 110kgs (14% fat), my FTP is 272W and I wouldn't be able to follow you at all. 😅😅 I also have a 12 week plan now to improve, let's see how it goes.