FTPist Magazine

Most supplements on the market are a waste of your hard-earned cash, but there are five that actually have solid evidence to help you ride faster, longer, or recover better. If your diet is already 90% "real food," adding caffeine, beta-alanine, nitrates, creatine, or sodium bicarbonate can give you that extra 1-2% edge on your […]

You "blow up" because you’ve spent more energy than your body can regenerate in real-time. It’s essentially a math problem: you burned through your limited "emergency" fuel (anaerobic capacity) or emptied your main fuel tank (glycogen) before the finish line. When this happens, your brain sends a distress signal to your muscles to shut down, […]

The Norwegian Method is a training approach that focuses on high volumes of easy riding combined with very specific, controlled threshold intervals. Instead of "smashing" yourself with max-effort sprints, you spend most of your time building a massive aerobic engine and doing intervals just below your limit to keep your fatigue in check. You’ve probably […]

Aerobic decoupling is a simple way to measure if your heart and lungs are strong enough to handle the length of your ride. It happens when your heart rate starts to "drift" upward even though your power output stays exactly the same. Think of it as your body’s efficiency score. When you are fresh and […]

An Ironman training program is a 6 to 9-month journey designed to build your "aerobic engine" so you can swim 2.4 miles, bike 112 miles, and run a marathon in a single day. You don't need to train like a pro to finish; most successful age-groupers find their sweet spot between 10 and 15 hours […]

To calculate your threshold pace, you need to find the highest intensity you can sustain for about 60 minutes. Since riding at your absolute limit for an hour is mentally and physically exhausting, most cyclists use a shorter test—like a 20-minute all-out effort—and then multiply that result by 0.95 to estimate their threshold. Think of […]

Zone 2 training is the "all-day" pace that builds your aerobic engine and makes you a more efficient cyclist. It is the foundation of your fitness, focusing on steady efforts that improve your endurance without leaving you too exhausted to train the next day. Think of Zone 2 as the base of a pyramid. The […]

Average power is simply the total work you did divided by the time you spent riding. Normalized power (NP) is a smarter number that accounts for the surges, hills, and sprints that make a ride feel much harder than the average suggests. Think of average power as the "raw math" and normalized power as the […]

To increase your HRV (Heart Rate Variability), you need to give your nervous system a chance to move from "fight or flight" mode into "rest and digest" mode. You do this by prioritizing high-quality sleep, staying hydrated, and ensuring your training plan includes enough recovery days to balance out your hard efforts. Think of HRV […]