Testing your cycling performance is the only way to accurately measure changes in your fitness and form but what tests should you perform and what do you do with the results? We explain the value of performance testing, how to interpret your test data and which tests you should do.
· Measures of fitness and form
Why test your performance?
Dropping your mate on the Sunday club run, or feeling fresh after a hard ride, might make you feel good (and a bit smug) but neither are true indicators of your cycling fitness, and that’s because they are subjective measures of performance. You could have had a good night’s sleep, which has given you a boost, and the rider you gleefully left in your wake could have had two weeks off the bike, leaving them de-trained and de-motivated. Simply riding faster compared to someone else is not a true indicator of your fitness, or strength.
There are three main reasons to test your cycling performance: to evaluate your current level of performance, to test how effective your training has been and to highlight any weaknesses which, let’s face it, we all have. The information that you get from the tests can be used to create training plans and to help you to make maximal gains in the time you have available to train, which in turn should make you a better rider.
“Testing during the off season is a great way to track your progress but also to assess how a certain phase of training is working. You might find one test result goes down but another one goes up as that is the area you have been working on,” says Olympic and world champion track cyclist Joanna Rowsell-Shand.
And whilst regular fitness and performance testing is an essential part of training for a professional cyclist it’s also beneficial for amateurs too. According to exercise physiologist Andy King, of Leeds Beckett University, “To objectively and accurately measure changes in your fitness and to track progress you need to perform a test against a set of parameters. Testing is like getting an MOT on your car – it’s a way to ask, ‘is what I’m doing working?’. It’s an objective measure of the adaptation process.”
How to measure changes in your cycling fitness?
One of the best measures of cycling fitness is sustainable power – the power a rider can generate through the cranks of a bike over a sustained period of say, six seconds, three minutes, twenty minutes, or even an hour. This is measured in units of power called watts and if you’re measuring yourself against past performance, using watts is a useful tool. In simple terms, as you get stronger and fitter you should produce more watts.
However, when when it comes to assessing long-term changes, or pitting yourself against other riders (which we all love to do), how much power you produce in relation to your bodyweight is more relevant. This is measured in watts per kilogram of body weight (W/Kg).
As a rule, bigger cyclists produce more power than smaller cyclists which can be an advantage, especially on the flat – time triallists, like Cancellara and 90s legend Miguel Induráin, were comparatively big cyclists. However, once the gradient starts to go up (anything over 4%) being heavier, or having more mass, can actually be your worst enemy and here’s why. A bigger, heavier cyclist with more mass requires more force to turn the cranks and drivetrain and to accelerate their mass (and the bike) than a smaller one.
For example, a 70kg rider who holds 260w for 20 minutes has a power-to-weight ratio of 3.74 watts per kilo but for an 80kg rider to produce 3.74 watts per kilo they must hold 299w - an extra 39 watts. That said, upping your power on the bike is not as straightforward as just dropping a few pounds – losing weight runs the risk of losing muscle mass and therefore power too.
The 20-minute FTP test
For amateur cyclists and those testing at home, the 20-minute functional threshold power (FTP) test, or threshold test, is one of the most common ways to test your fitness. But what is it measuring and why do we do it?
Since the 1980s scientists have known that during exercise, the point at which lactate starts to build up in your blood (your lactate threshold, or LT), is a good indicator of your endurance ability.
Ideally, to test your LT, you’d ride a 60-minute time trial but trying to do this on the road, whilst negotiating traffic lights, potholes and vehicles, is very hard to do. And to ride in the hurt locker for an hour at a sustained power indoors requires a level of motivation that most of us simply don’t have. The 20-minute test was designed as a more practical approach by the pioneering exercise physiologist Dr. Andrew Coggan, co-author of Training and Racing with a Power Meter.
“Short tests are popular because we know - from scientific literature - that they correlate with performance in other forms of riding, such as endurance. They are also a more practical way of testing performance. The caveat, which is the case for any measurement of anything, is that it only measures what it measures. So, a 20-minute test only truly measures 20-minute performance. Anything else is an extrapolation,” says King.
Off season testing – when to test
Regularly testing your fitness during the off-season is a little like going to the doctors for a routine check-up – it’s a way of seeing how things are ticking over and if your training is having the desired effect. If your programme or plan is new, testing is a good way of checking what you’re doing so that you, or your coach, can make tweaks and adjustments to the load and intensity.
Other times when testing is particularly useful are when you’re coming out of a period of recovery or reduced load, when you’re training with a specific aim, such as a race, and when your training focus is going to shift, say from endurance to intensity.
“It’s incredibly useful to know if you have improved, or not [over time]. If the answer is yes, then you can have confidence in the training you have done. If the answer is no, then it's clear you need to change your programme,” says former world road race champion Lizzie Diegnan. But she adds, “some areas of fitness can be compromised by improving others, so it’s worth focussing on what you want to improve”.
A more casual approach, albeit one that never lies, is to use winter races as a way of testing your fitness. The varied pace of races means that it’s hard to test constants like sustainable power - attempting FTP test in a race is not a wise move - but your ability to make it to the line in one piece (or maybe not) will give you a good and relevant gauge of your fitness.
Alongside knowing when to test your fitness it’s worth knowing when not to test. For some - pros and amateurs alike - the physiological and psychological impacts of testing can cause stress; if you get nervous and anxious ahead of a performance you’ll understand. For that reason, it’s worth seeing a test as a training session and building into programme rather than adding it to programme.
"And if you’re looking to compare your results with before, build the ‘test’ into a session and make sure the scenario is as similar as possible. For example, don’t do one 20-minute test fresh, after a good breakfast and after a few days rest and do it it hungover after a hard club ride the next,” says King.