Hello,
Yesterday i saw a webinar from Trainingpeaks about the % of FTP in relation to Vo2max power. When FTP increase to 81-85% you have first to increase your Vo2max to make more room for growing FTP. After increasing Vo2max, your % of FTP in relation to Vo2max wil decrease. Now you can again building FTP with more room to grow to 81-85% FTP in relation to Vo2max power.
Is it possible to make a graph that shown the % Vo2max power in relation to FTP?
I’m not a specialist but there are probably no exercises that only build Vo2Max or only FTP 
Not agree…
You can focus in periodes on Vo2max or FTP. Vo2max in the range 120% of FTP and FTP build in the range of 88-92 (sweetspot) and 100% FTP. And ofcourse, this is never 100% only vo2max or 100% only FTP, but it is possible to focus on a main target.
When you focus on sweetspot and FTP you push up FTP, but your gain is limited when your vo2max is not high enough (nearby 85%). When you focus on vo2max, you push down FTP and make room for increasing FTP.
I strongly recommend the podcast by/called Empirical Cycling, there is a series on various aspects of VO2 max one of which cited a study where ramp tests with varying length “steps” were carried out, all elicited VO2 max but the power at which this happened varied enormously. It’s well worth a listen.
I tend to do a an equivalent of the Sufferfest full frontal every 2/3 blocks (ie every 2months) and then would among other things look at that ratio to check what to focus on the next blocks, but I am not sure that past values would be of any use? and how you would do that as for now there is no estimate of the MAP here?
Anyway to have anything meaning full you would need relatively regular testing of both values, which I don’t think many people do?
Hello Aurelien,
I tink the 5min power is a good indication for your vo2max power. Important is to use everytime the same timeframe. When you take your FTP or CP % of 5min power (vo2max power) you have a indication… When you reach a plateau between on FTP - Vo2max 81-83% you can first increase your vo2max power with a example 6 weeks block with vo2max trainingen.
I am going to be looking at vo2max estimation this weekend. Would be very nice to have a running v02max estimate like eFTP and to compare them as described above. One problem is that your eFTP might well be determined by your 5m power which might also end up being used to estimate vo2max
Hello David,
Thats great!
One problem is that your eFTP might well be determined by your 5m power which might also end up being used to estimate vo2max <
Iam not a sports scientist but i believe that power @ v02max and eFTP is connected. So when eFTP increase, V02max will also increase, but not as much as when you do more VO2max intervals. There is always a overlay between different energysystems. You never train only FTP or only VO2max etc.
Example to make it clear with random percentages:
When you do FTP workouts your benefit for FTP is 80% and 20% VO2max.
When you do VO2max workouts your benefit for VO2max is 80% and 20% FTP.
So i said iam not a scientist, so correct me if iam wrong.
I am not a scientist either so that makes two of us You are correct in that you are never just training one energy system whatever workout you are doing. So if you eFTP ends up moving along with your vo2max because you have been doing a lot of vo2max work then thats good. The problem is that if I use 5m power to estimate vo2max then it is only going to change if you do a max 5m effort. So you won’t see it moving up if you only do longer duration stuff. But it likely will have improved.
David,
It’s really important what you are saying! I dont think that a rolling power vo2max estimation doesnt work, because, as you say, you need to have max 5m efforts to make a good estimation. I like no information more than wrong information. The most important thing of WKO5 is that you need a lot of good power input to fill the PDC, otherwise you got wrong information. That is directly the disadvantage. When you have done your 5min max, you can also calculate your pVO2max by yourself without a program.
In trainerroad i read something about V02max power is between 118% and 126% of FTP. In my case it is: 342-365. My 5min max is 359w, so i think thats plausible. I also believe that pVO2max is not a hard point. It is mostly a range of power, like your zones.
Which is also important is to know that a lot of VO2max and anaerobic work, wil decrease your FTP because of the create of lactate. VLAmax from INSYCD is based on that principle.
I believe in the fact that you dont need to know exactly your FTP or pVO2max. When you know it in a range of like 10w it is enough to make good training decisions.
This would be really cool!
From the little bit of reading around I’ve done there seems to be more quantitative information out there for running estimation than there is for cycling estimation. Would be very interesting to see how any implementation within intervals.icu compares to that obtained direct from Garmin etc.
If you’ve not seen it, there’s an interesting firstbeat White paper which describes the principles used in Garmin devices (https://www.firstbeat.com/en/aerobic-fitness-level-vo₂max-estimation-firstbeat-white-paper-2/), and it looks to me like the Cooper test formulae could be implemented relatively easily (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4314605/). I say relatively easily… it would definitely be far too complex for me to do!
I’m not a trainer either, but for my proportions it’s 40% to 60%
Do you understand this?
When (the best power from 20 minutes for the last 42 days*0,95) /
(the best power from 5 minutes for the last 42 days) >
83%.
Train eight-minute intervals in zone Z5
So i said: random numbers 
I have been reading some papers and have found several ways of estimating relative Vo2max (ml/min/kg) from power data.
Lamberts, Lambert, Swart and Noakes 2011
V02max (ml/min/kg) = 10.97 x PPO + 2.598
PPO = peak power output from continuous ramp test 20w/min increase
Hawley, Noaks 1992
VO2max (L/min) = 0.01141 x PPO + 0.435
PPO = peak power output from step ramp test 25w/150s steps
Critical Power and Anaerobic Capacity of Grand Cycling Tour Winners - Charles Dauwe
VO2max (L/min) = 15.8 x CP (little less than FTP)
This one I can do.
Now for the ramp test PPO formulas what duration can I use from the power duration curve for each? I tried 5 mins for myself and got quite different results.
I haven’t looked at trying to figure this out from HR data yet.
Hello David,
It’s difficult to answer your question, because iam not a scientist…
what do you think it’s the best to use?
Garmin devices generate an estimate of VO2max (by sport!), but not FTP (at least, not my older FR 920XT). I don’t know exactly how this is done, but as someone else mentioned here, Garmin seems to depend on Firstbeat for many of their estimates of this type…
EDIT…I forgot to add that the last of three VO2max estimation strategies in david’s post is probably not ideal as it is a linear association with FTP. As david implied and others have mentioned, although there maybe a correlation between these two measures, physiologically, they should have some independance, especially during training of a single athlete over time (v a population metric taken at a snapshot in time).
My Edge 530 does FTP too. Either estimate is not bad. My VO2Max was last (lab) tested end of summer last year and it moves up and down around that.
david: Todd Giorio has pointed to a potential issue with all of these ways of estimating VO2max.
They are all cross-sectional. In other words, these are studies of PPO or CP and VO2max in across a sample of estimates. Such studies could in principle help me to calculate a VO2max and compare it to yours. Is this what we want to estimate?
Or do we want to see if our VO2max changes over time? In which case, we would need a longitudinal studies – ie, of athletes over time. The problem with using cross-sectional data to estimate a longitudinal relationship is that changes that occur in me over time as I train are assumed to mirror the differences between athletes at a point in time. Furthermore, the cross-sectional studies provide the mean relationship between PPO/CP and VO2max, whereas there are going to be some with VO2max above and some with VO2max below what is predicted for their PPO/CP – and that’s critical. [This is comparable to the well known issue of VO2max intervals – some people need to be at the lower powers in this range and some at higher, depending on where their FTP is in relation to their pVO2max.]
Or do we really want to know pVO2max? Since the PPO formulas use a method that corresponds to a standard way of estimating FTP, they both are in effect assuming that pVO2max is linearly related to FTP.
What is it that we want to know?
Is there a possibility to make that visually so we can work towards individual target zones for optimized intervals.