Hey, Coach?

The guy in that picture is Matt Wilpers and he’s oddly familiar to me. He’s a Peloton instructor, or coach as he likes to put it. Familiar because I’ve spent many, many hours staring at him while I make sweat puddles. It’s an asymmetric relationship – arguably not even a relationship. Still, I’ve learned lots of insights and his broadcast encouragement keeps me going when I entertain doubt.

He’s one of a handful of instructors that do Powerzone training, essentially a training framework based on a metric called Functional Threshold Power (FTP). More about that below.

One of the insights I’ve learned to embrace is that fitness isn’t a climb up a mountain, so to speak. Rather it’s a bunch of ups and downs, cycles. Not sustained, continuous improvement but higher and higher peaks. It’s been a healthy mental shift and below, I’ll do a quick dive into my Peloton data over the past few years.

Powerzone Training and FTP

It’s pretty simple – seven zones of effort (not to be confused with HR zones) based on your fitness level, assessed by an FTP test. The FTP test is brutal. 20 mins of all out effort that doesn’t let up, in fact it gets harder throughout.

Health benefits of Zone 2

A quick detour by way of Peter Attia, MD. He has a great podcast, The Drive, highly recommend. Lots of interesting experts that don’t shy away from deep topics in medicine.

He often talks about the value of Zone 2 training and purported benefit for longevity.

I used to really find zone 2 unbearable. Mindless watts...Now, I look forward to it for 3 hours/wk (usually 3 x 60 min or 4 x 45 min). There are fancy ways to test zone 2—highest output with lactate between about 1.7… https://t.co/R7MBqyJwKB

— Peter Attia (@PeterAttiaMD) June 11, 2019

Peloton Data

Circling back to my point about ups and downs, I pulled the data and wanted to look at my FTP numbers over time. Lots of data to play with (and at some point want to explore time series data from Strava’s TCX files). Here it is:

## Rows: 694
## Columns: 18
## $ `Workout Timestamp`  <chr> "2019-12-16 13:15 (EDT)", "2019-12-17 08:54 (EDT)~
## $ `Live/On-Demand`     <chr> "On Demand", "On Demand", "On Demand", "On Demand~
## $ `Instructor Name`    <chr> "Ally Love", "Alex Toussaint", "Robin Arzon", "Co~
## $ `Length (minutes)`   <dbl> 20, 20, 30, 30, 20, 30, 30, 30, 30, 30, 20, 30, 2~
## $ `Fitness Discipline` <chr> "Cycling", "Cycling", "Cycling", "Cycling", "Cycl~
## $ Type                 <chr> "Beginner", "Beginner", "Beginner", "Intervals", ~
## $ Title                <chr> "20 min Beginner Ride", "20 min Beginner Ride", "~
## $ `Class Timestamp`    <chr> "2019-07-02 14:00 (EDT)", "2018-12-19 14:21 (EDT)~
## $ `Total Output`       <dbl> 112, 87, 159, 169, 99, 159, 173, 164, 186, 199, 1~
## $ `Avg. Watts`         <dbl> 94, 73, 89, 104, 83, 95, 96, 91, 103, 111, 88, 11~
## $ `Avg. Resistance`    <chr> "36%", "33%", "37%", "43%", "37%", "38%", "39%", ~
## $ `Avg. Cadence (RPM)` <dbl> 84, 79, 78, 70, 78, 78, 78, 68, 73, 72, 78, 78, 8~
## $ `Avg. Speed (mph)`   <dbl> 15.49, 13.76, 14.98, 15.98, 14.84, 15.35, 15.67, ~
## $ `Distance (mi)`      <dbl> 5.16, 4.58, 7.49, 7.24, 4.94, 7.16, 7.83, 7.45, 8~
## $ `Calories Burned`    <dbl> 101, 114, 209, 375, 218, 363, 342, 348, 380, 381,~
## $ `Avg. Heartrate`     <dbl> NA, NA, NA, 151.97, 131.64, 143.22, 135.66, 137.0~
## $ `Avg. Incline`       <lgl> NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, N~
## $ `Avg. Pace (min/mi)` <lgl> NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, N~

So What’s FTP?

Peloton’s approach, and the most common is a 20-minute FTP test. Though there are many other versions, good description here.

It’s your average power output * 0.95.

If you want to dive deeper, check out this Training Peaks article on FTP.

I typically do 6-8 week cycles of FTP training. Will continue to track this over time and hopefully make some improvements!