Originally Posted by
ctak
Hard to say how the next 3-months will go as Zwift is still very much an experiment for me, but last winter (weekly avg vol of 15 hrs with less than 10% of this work above HR zone 3) my ftp went up by ~30w using this approach.. no doubt in part due to familiarization with the test itself. On the other hand, I also dropped 8-lbs of fat so power-to-weight was the more notable "achievement". Either way, I mostly treat the 20min as a bi-monthly low tss workout to improve my cadence and ability to sustain threshold efforts without blowing up
(Pssst! That's SEMI-monthly, or bi-WEEKLY)
/pedant
I don't know if my FTP has not gone up, or if I'm just measuring badly - the problem with the Ramp test, IMO, is that there are steps, and when I've just done a minute at 340W, the idea of a minute at 360 seems impossible, so I probably drop out before I'm really spent. I do know my last two FTP tests were within 1W of each other. However, one was done before doing Zwift Academy, and I found the workouts were only doable if I reduced my listed FTP from 256 to 249, AND reduced FTP Bias for the later sets in each workout. A month or so later, I'm re-doing the same workouts, at a listed FTP of 257 and without reducing the FTP bias, and I'm finding them no harder to complete. Perhaps I should do the 20 minute test?