Ride Harder

Find your FTP without doing a test

Drop in a few of your hardest rides from the last 90 days. This works out your threshold power, your threshold heart rate and your training zones, using some of the methods I use with my coaching clients. Nothing is uploaded. It all runs on your own computer.

Drop your ride files here

Pick your four to six hardest rides from the last 90 days. Hard group rides, hilly rides, time trials, anything where you emptied yourself. You do not need every ride, just the ones that hurt.

.FIT · .TCX · .GPX · .GZ · or a whole Strava export .ZIP

Leave either box empty if you do not have that number. You will get the zones for whichever you fill in.

The efforts behind the number

These are the best efforts found anywhere in the files you gave me, and the date each one came from. Critical power is a second, independent estimate of your threshold, worked out from the shape of your whole power curve between three and twenty minutes rather than from one single effort. When it lands close to your FTP, the number is trustworthy. When it sits well above, it usually means that 20 minute effort was not flat out.

Coggan zones

Your power zones

Coggan zones

Your heart rate zones

Read this before you train to heart rate. Heart rate lags, and it lags badly. It takes two to three minutes to catch up with what your legs are actually doing. On anything short and hard your power is finished before your heart rate has arrived, so you can ride a full VO2 max effort and never once see a zone 5 number on your head unit. That is not you failing the effort, it is the metric arriving late.

So use these zones for the steady work, the endurance and tempo riding where heart rate has time to settle and tells you something real. For anything under about five minutes, ignore heart rate and go on power or on feel. And there is deliberately no anaerobic or sprint zone here, because heart rate cannot measure efforts that short.
Treat these as guidelines, not gospel. They get you close, which is far better than where most riders start. Zones are a starting point for training, not a score. Every platform carves them up slightly differently, so if your head unit disagrees by a few watts, do not lose sleep over it. Recheck the number every eight to twelve weeks, or after any block that has clearly moved you on.

Your numbers above are yours to keep either way. If you want them as a PDF, put your email in and it opens straight away. You are also joining my email list, which is a monthly newsletter plus the odd note about my coaching and training plans. Unsubscribe in one click whenever you want.

Your ride files and the numbers above stay on your computer. Your email address is the only thing that gets sent. Coach James

Ride Harder · rideharder.co.uk · Your ride files are read in your browser and never leave your computer.