I did a 4×8 min threshold workout outside, using hill repeats. Power was right on target at ~280 W, but one of the intervals ended up short because I ran out of hill — I turned around before the bottom during recovery, so I didn’t have the full length available on the next rep.
I’m wondering if this workout was done on an FTP that’s set too low. I only use eFTP (10-min based), which was calculated from a 12-minute race effort. What concerns me moderately is that even while holding target power, my heart rate stayed quite low — around 150 bpm and never really climbed.
my heart rate appears to be naturally low.. i never seen it past 165 even on all-out grand fondos. so i don’t know if that is an issue or not?
garmin and other training apps do not consider this workout to be threshold due to the low heart rate.
How did you feel on that last 8m interval?
The first three show a HR climbing up to a stable level, but on the last one, HR keeps increasing further. For FTP efforts of this length, you can expect HR to climb to LTHR and then remain fairly stable. On longer FTP efforts, you would rather see the HR climbing up at a slow rate.
If that last one felt considerably harder, you’re probably very close with the FTP value, maybe even a bit too high.
it wasn’t particularly harder.. I could have gone one more.. I refrained from pushing and tried to be as stable as possible.
remained seated tried to keep the 3s on target but sometimes due to gradient it went lower or higher.
i used to do that hill on 12 minutes and now it’s not long enough for 8. i need to change hill. 
Do you have an idea of what your LTHR is? If so, were you close to it?
Firstly, great work on dropping 4 minutes from your climb! That’s some great progress!
Your recovery times are fairly long for a threshold interval. Hard to exactly tell, but the first recovery looks like 3-4 minutes, but then I see 6:23 for one, and then maybe 5 for the final recovery interval? You’re fresher for each of them here than if you do a more traditional 4:1 on/off interval (in your case, 8 minutes on, 2 minutes off). And your second interval is 22 Watts lower than the 1st, which combined with the extra recovery could be part of the reason you bring it back up about 15 on the 3rd.
Obviously you’re going back down the hill and can’t control the recovery as much, and there’s nothing wrong with this, but 4x8on/2off is definitely different than 4x8on/5off, and it’s not surprising you can go that much higher than your eFTP.
There is nothing wrong with any of this! You did a great workout, your power for each interval was consistent through the interval and still easily within a reasonable range of each other, and really it’s only that 2nd interval that’s an outlier. I’m hoping to give you some context on your question in relation to what you did, not to criticize your workout or how you performed it. Since you did great! But your eFTP looks like it’s pretty accurate, based on looking more closely into your performance.
Hello
Thank you for answering. the recovery is 4 minutes on the second interval i turned around the hill at 4 minutes as a result, the hill was not long enough.. and even if I was pushing hard gears at the top, once the road flattened. did not manage to bring the power to the target.
On the following recoveries, I waited until I was at the bottom of the hill, and that is why you see longer recovery times
i may need a longer hill so that i can turn around at 4 minutes and avoid longer recoveries. and not run out of hill.
sincerely i do not know but in cycling i never had it higher than 157-160.
Bit of a tangent - are you only able to hit these power targets on a hill? Power is power, so it doesn’t really matter where you do it, except that if you can’t also do it on the flats on your own or with a group, that’s a weakness in your fitness.
I’m a bit of the opposite. I have no hills. I can motor like hell on the flat or mild rises, but just get killed on the steeper stuff, and part of that is I rarely get to do more than about 30 seconds uphill (Chicago area, seriously this is not a joke).
You may want to consider doing some of these on flatter roads as well. It’s a good mental test as well.
