Why Power-To-Weight Is Crucial In Cycling & How To Improve Yours!

power to wait a simple but very important ratio simply put how much power can you produce for every kilo of your body weight since forever it's been considered to be the gold standard of cycling performance every time you go uphill it's the main determinant of your speed and and really and want to improve it from beginner cyclists through to Tour de France Champion now on the one hand improving your power to it ratio is straightforward get more powerful get lighter or both but on the other hand it's not just a ratio it's a balance and the stronger you are and the lighter you are the more delicate that balance becomes with not just your cycling performance but potentially even your health on the line fear not though because that is only when you take it to extreme in this video though we're going to give you some Sound Advice we're going to cover the basics and also dive a little bit deeper and it won't come from me [Music] to find out I've come to meet up with Ollie Beckinsale a pro cyclist of 16 years who had an insanely good power to weight ratio and he was now a top coach more than that though Ollie is the most common sense individual I have ever met he can cut through any ball which is quite a skill and so given that this topic needs some Frank and straight answers who better to ask than Ollie and as well as him we're also working with training Peaks on this video it's a platform that I think just about every top coach uses including Ollie and while there are different ways to play and record and analyze your training training Peaks have been the market leader for a long time hence why we're making this video with them and using their platform to illustrate however the tips and advice we're giving don't rely on having a training Peaks account here you go mate perfect right then pass away okay which cyclists need to be concerned about their power to weight ratio I would probably say the majority I think anyone with a cycling goal um and I think that power to wait especially these days with with power meters it's on screen I think a lot of people think it's for professionals yeah you know it's what power did he do is this achievable et cetera Etc but I think ultimately if we break it down that power threshold power let's talk about threshold power that's you know FTP um to wait is what's going to help get us up the hills whether you're a starter Rider you know if you're uh you know beginning and it's your start pointing cycling the reason why you find Hills hard yeah is a lower power to wait that threshold Point there's numbers of ways that people can describe it but let's just let for this let's call FTP yeah what we can sustain for 40 minutes or 60 minutes or so below that we're very efficient yeah you know we can use some fat for carbohydrate we're working predominantly aerobically and we can sustain that for long periods of time once we go over that fgp or into the red and use turbo it's really inefficient so as an example you can hold your FTP power maybe 40-60 minutes 10 over that you're not going to last any longer than you know five to seven minutes or so yeah so you don't have to go too far over the top so if your power to weight isn't good enough and you hit a climb that's too steep you will go into the red you're working efficiently you'll burn a lot of carbohydrate so you can't sustain that you can't do three four five climbs like that and you're more likely to blow up yeah and run out of glycogen okay that makes a lot of sense then and so for most Riders most objectives on a bike yep power to weight then is going to be critical but I suppose there might still be one or two people for whom their objective it's not as influenced by power to wait no so I've got if I look at my clock 95 of clients probably the power to weight is an important factor and something we're working on um I've got yeah one one example what's the guy's goal it's 10 and 25 mile time trials you know so therefore it's flat he's up at speed so therefore it's it's power to drag yeah then the aerodynamics kick in his weight actually isn't really you know it's not a factor no um so for him it doesn't matter if he's um you know the weight side a couple of kilos heavier than he could be the most important thing is power and drag yeah but for the majority of people most Road cyclists uh and off-road you know cross-country or site cross we've got to get some up some hills we need to accelerate and their power to weight is important when you look at the numbers the physics behind it on an eight percent climb if you drop one kilo in weight that's equivalent to in speed rather increase to improving your power by seven Watts okay it's huge yeah so there's two ways of looking at it what how do you approach it so I mean I think I ideally I'd focus more on the power side um I think that's that's a safe thing to look at it's very manageable you can train towards it the weight side is a bit more delicate um and it's a lot of that depends on so many factors but I think yeah so start with power and then I say wait was something we will look at I think let's crack on go for a ride and let's talk about how to boost power then shall we Power It Up cool oh [Music] right and Ollie the million dollar question then how do you improve your power over those longer durations like 20 minutes plus and the key is I'll probably say break your 49 almost like an engine okay so below that threshold FTP look at that as the size of the engine on top is your turbo your turbo boost okay okay so we want to increase the size of that engine first of all so it's longer durations you know your zone two work of course there's some benefits of that but really if we're thinking of really hype targeting um the longer efforts you know zone free zone four sweet spot okay you want to control your breathing so if you're gonna have a conversation like we are now yeah that's probably a Tempo pace and that's what we're looking to climb at in your longer rides okay and in my writing thinking as well to get those meaningful changes it's about consistency over longer periods of time like no just kind of get fit quick in a week type thing yeah I mean you can get some quick changes especially for kind of speed efforts tolerance to harder efforts but yeah your engine building that's weeks months we need to count back and slowly incremental increases in duration but also the amount of climbing in a ride I wouldn't overthink the intervals or the climb length just think of adding load so 20 minutes to Tempo climbing 25 30 Etc until you built up to a good volume okay and how do you measure load then so yeah on training Peaks we could use TSS okay that gives a workout a score so you can compare like with like yeah so that's a good indication of how difficult a similar ride was um so that helps or just timing Zone okay you can go back look at your timed in zones are we logging a chunk of you know an hour zone free for example in an endurance ride would be good okay and what about if like many of us out there you don't have long periods of time to train like how do you get a meaningful training load building that engine in an hour or less yes I think that those Tempo blocks zone three Sweet Spot yeah you know very popular kind of pulling out a favor maybe a little bit but I think that sort of worked really good okay personally I use uh outer's lift yeah um I think that's a fantastic effort and I think I can do loads of stuff on that and if I had to sit on a trainer and do one session I'd probably sit at 90 of my FTP all the way up yeah um in control but that's going to be similar to a hard the closest I can get to a hard Mountain climb I'm in and off in an hour [Music] if you've talked about building your engine then for those longer durations but what about building your turbo then firstly is that important still for people that are looking to do 100 miles and huge mountains I mean it goes back to that shopping list for your event yeah and then working out which ones are worth them you can get your best bang for your buck from so if someone is doing the adapter tour it's obviously going to be 2016 minute if we're looking for those metrics um if somebody wants to do any sort of racing you know dynamic racing cycle across roads criteria mountain bike those one in five minutes super important yeah uh Strava Kom beating your mates yeah it's all power to wait over those short periods of time and then we're talking turbo okay so there's harder efforts ultimately if we've got that engine bigger good chance as well that that's going to push up your overall level in your higher intensities will be better as well um but yeah no super important okay that's how you do it then how do you how do you build your turbo that goes back to your old school intervals again yeah and there's a million ways you can do it whether it's you know the famous your 40 20 to 2040s the list is endless but those sort of sessions will build that tolerance yeah um and if we're dropping a bit of weight at the same time obviously that power to weight on those one to five minute climbs your race winners really yeah uh will improve okay so a little bit of those like real anaerobic capacity intervals sure like one to five one to five minutes those big Punchy of your traditional intervals really yeah but I mean out on the open road you know you can do them on a trainer which works really well but you might pick a you know an hour and a half Loop that contains free climbs and you might say well actually everyone's going to be a a Kom and really give it a varying length and actually do it real world yeah but you're probably thinking if you're designing an average week for an average guy you know one two of those sessions a week and then the others would be you know more the engine building we were talking about before foreign obviously it doesn't literally improve it yeah but what are the advantages and I guess we've got to say you are a coach now but as a rider you were both coached and self-coast during your career yeah I think for both times I've got a wide range of people people think that coaching is just for elite athletes yeah um but I see it a different way it's more for anyone looking to achieve a goal okay so if you want to achieve a goal best way of doing it we talk about consistent training yeah you need to be motivated yeah and you want to get the best out of every session yeah so where it probably works even better you've got you know an elite athlete you know you're talking about trying to find a percent here or there yep and actually there's a risk of overtraining so they've got all the time in the world probably most of my clients uh got families they're very busy they're limited on time yeah so it's trying to Chisel out those four hours that they've got in a week yeah and maximize the benefits so yeah they've got one client we look at a guy called Ben he's off to the outs in July very busy guy so it's trying to how are we going to increase his 20 60 Minute Powers Yeah with limited time and um so he knows that when he comes home with that evening that's the indoor session he's going to do yeah on the weekend we're aiming for this and it kind of he can delegate that to me yeah he's accountable to me yes I think ultimately there's a better chance the training being successful that way yeah nuts and bolts of it and I mean it is a it is a big outlay yeah financially isn't it and so it's not essential but I mean on the spectrum of Investments you can make as a bike rider to improve your performance where would you put it yeah I mean it's the classic one you could say well I could buy those new set of wheels yeah for a grand for my trip to the Alps so I could get a coach a year or six months you know and I think you'll probably get I'd like to think if it works well you climb faster um you might not have that shiny you know bike to pervert in the garage but yeah depends what you're after I mean some people they don't like the structure so they don't want coaching yeah it's too stressful yeah that's a downside to it you are accountable um and if you don't do the sessions that can be a bit stressful and kind of ruins the enjoyment of it yeah and so some people will just use it for a patch yeah you know three four months whether it's coaching or or in even an individual self coaching yeah I'm putting their head down saying right four months I'm going to go for it that's long enough to get a good response so we talked now about improving power at longer durations we've talked about improving power at Short durations the other side of the equation then is weight so in your mind what's the best way of approaching it we can't ignore weight no you know it's really important and so I think I I when I'm working with guys I almost think there's one of four levels I put it into okay um so it's very simply put level one is your first chance of losing a little bit of weight yeah so that one is just cut out the crap okay so there's some things in life that we know aren't really doing us any good booze heavily processed food we know that hey they're going to give us more spikes they're going to put on weight they're empty calories etc etc if we consistently cut those out of our diet we're likely to lose a little bit of weight and when we're saying power to eight we're probably talking for most people one kilo two kilos is still going to make quite a sizable difference yeah that kind of next level up from that is then looking at the quality of the food okay so you've cut the crap Bic out what's the stuff that's on our plates on a bit on a meal by meal basis sort of thing for example white rice to brown rice more vegetables more fruit some good protein so just looking at good quality we're not talking about portion sizes or anything like that it's just let's think about good quality food okay level three this is when I start thinking that actually it's beyond my scope and you're starting to get into the portion sizes yeah having less food on rest days more food on higher intensity days less carbs all that sort of stuff that's getting a bit heavy yeah that's that level three level four we're talking about really pairing things down you know that's the Tour de France working one-on-one how many calories are you burning on a ride and matching that with how many calories somebody's eating that's that real higher level but I think a lot of people if we look at level one and two they can do those quite easily for a period of time lose a little bit of weight combined with an increase in power and they're going to climb faster foreign we got a laptop in front of us now so a lot of those points we were talking about earlier you can now illustrate for us on the training Peaks um dashboard here so first of all that power profile as well so what does that what does that look like in real life until my clients Ben he's a typical client of mine kind of mid-40s bit of cycle across in the winter but his big goal coming up he's going to be looking at getting around the Alps for a week with some mates so um in terms of previous feature on training Peaks was a power curve and you're looking at their the main metrics we talked about before so if we're looking at you know their PB for five seconds one minute five minute 20 minute and 60 minutes yeah it will rank those almost in a classification so it's got some sort of comparison with well what is untrained all the way up to what is world class yeah um and then recently training piece added a stack up feature which will then show that really a bit more personal so more against similar people similar age similar categories and a bit more day by day so like maybe more of like a motivational tool then so that you can kind of you can see your progress basically you can see it out on the road but actually you can also see yourself improving against yeah and I think of course the big things we talked about before is consistency and to get consistency it needs to be achievable and you need to be motivated yeah so partly it's finding out well actually if I was in the top 20 in my 20 minute power you know it's probably most important metrics and I can get that up to the top you know 15 in my age group well obviously that's a really good a and it's finding these little aims and goals and a personal one like that could be perfect you know almost a stepping stone before someone like Ben got to the Alps yeah and you can do it on based on Purely power right and then also power to weight exactly yeah which is the key one yeah you know someone like Ben he's a bigger guy um so therefore having um just running on power isn't you know he's going to be at the top end but power to weight is is the more applicable okay cool and then also I can see on the screen now so Performance Management and so this I guess is illustrating that point of consistency over time yeah so it's it's we talked about how it's we're monitoring sessions using TSS yeah which kind of is giving each workout a score yeah so you can compare like with like um this one's taking it one step further so it's looking at again the key thing is consistency and this is with your Fitness it's looking at your your training load averaged over 42 days so it's really looking at that consistency that like I'm keen on okay so this one here then is the fatigue fatigue which is the pink one yeah and then your form which is the yellow one so you can see that there was an overload of cycling this week so I think that was a festive 500 week yeah I pushed up the TSS we got a couple of outliers here really hard rides yeah so he's so he's more tired more tired and therefore he's got less form because he's fatigued so does this show progression then of your Fitness or is it just monitoring the training that you're doing in terms of its monitoring training if we get this right there should in theory if we've done all our jobs right there should be an increase in uh in power however we're monitoring that if you know in this case let's look at FTP if we get this right there's a good chance that FTP will also be higher as well and if we're looking at power to weight if we've monitored that and it's been consistent drop obviously that power to weight was going to go through the roof so this is is your tool either coach or Rider just to make sure you're training optimally and then actually you then sort of cross-reference it from time to time looking at like your power curve yeah and then so that you either be monitoring this one this is kind of the overview yeah and you can see the woods from the trees you know day by day it has someone been sick have they as the weather bad you know we just had an icy patches is it icy are they being sick what's work going on that's the kind of day by day and you can be caught up or how we're going to fit these sessions in this week to achieve your goal whereas this one is kind of let's step back a little bit and are we on track and that's the key about monitoring and keeping monitoring your your metrics and you know we're flooded with metrics these days but it's getting the key ones monitoring them over time to get that consistent whether that's a drop in weight or an increase in power or Fitness [Music] lots to digest there isn't there for me the big take homes are that there are no quick wins when it comes to improving power to weight ratio should be a medium to long term objective and has Ollie kept reiterating consistency is absolutely key both on the improving power side and also the weight loss side as well and then for the majority of bike riders focusing in your training on those intensities that are lower than FTP to build your engine as opposed to fine-tuning your turbo and then keeping a track building up those durations and volumes over time to get a nice steady progression and then I think having things that motivate you in your training and potentially as we touched on with the coaching have someone to hold you to account as well so that you can reach those longer term targets now that's a huge thanks to ollie for his time and giving us his straight up no-nonsense advice as well if you're interested in what we've been talking about over on trading Peaks go take a look we've got some gcn training plans on there then put together by Mark beaumont's coach and so that it's not a one-on-one coaching but you can follow along and get all the benefits of training Peaks so do go and have a look if you're interested otherwise last thing to say as always if you've enjoyed this video please do give it a big thumbs up

Channel: Global Cycling Network

Views: 208,502

Keywords: power to weight, w/kg, power, cycling power, watts, cycling watts, ftp, functional threshold power, training, trainingpeaks, training peaks, cycling training, bike training, fitness, health, improve ftp, improve power, increase power, boost power, how to, data, coaching, GCN, Global Cycling Network, Sports, Cycling, Bike, Bikes, Bicycle (Product Category), Road Bike, Cyclist, Road Bicycle, GCN Cycling, velo, sec-feature, sca15, gc21s, ិ, ꗧ, r1, c1, ꗶ, Ղ, n1, e3, ሙ, ସ, ଙ, ホ, ᠫ, パ, 𐒎, 𑃓, ዩ, ළ, Ꮽ, Բ, Լ, Ծ, ፕ15, サ, ኾ, 4974

Id: uQ7It1uznas

Length: 21min 8sec (1268 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 17 2023