FTP rises from repeated, structured time near and above threshold — sweet spot, threshold and VO2max intervals — built on a base of genuinely easy riding. Most riders who stall are not doing too few intervals. They are riding their easy days too hard to recover for the hard ones.
The three intensities that move FTP
- Sweet spot (roughly 88–94% of FTP). Hard enough to force adaptation, gentle enough to repeat two or three times a week. The workhorse. Blocks of 8–20 minutes.
- Threshold (roughly 95–105%). Directly trains the line you are trying to move. Costly to recover from — once or twice a week at most. Blocks of 8–20 minutes.
- VO2max (roughly 106–120%). Raises the ceiling that FTP sits under. Short and sharp: 3–5 minutes, or repeated 30–40 second efforts. Once a week is usually enough.
None of these is magic on its own. What raises FTP is the accumulation: the same sessions, repeated across weeks, at an intensity you can come back from.
The reason most riders plateau
It is rarely a missing interval session. It is the easy rides that are not easy. Zone 2 that creeps to Zone 3 because the group went up the road, because the climb was there, because it felt good.
That middle intensity is expensive — it costs real fatigue — and it buys very little adaptation. Ride it habitually and you arrive at every hard session slightly too tired to hit the numbers that would actually have moved your FTP. The session gets completed. It just does not do what it was for.
The uncomfortable fix: make your easy rides genuinely, boringly easy. Most riders find this harder than the intervals.
How to sequence it across weeks
A workable pattern is two to three hard sessions a week, everything else easy, then a lighter week roughly every fourth. The light week is not a reward for good behaviour — it is when the adaptation you have been forcing actually gets built.
Progress the work before you progress the intensity: add a repeat, or a minute per repeat, before you add watts. And change one thing at a time, so that when the number moves you know what moved it.
How long before you see it
Give any consistent block six to eight weeks before you judge it. Newer riders often see a lot in the first months, simply because there is a lot of untrained ground to cover. Riders with years of structure move in smaller increments, and that is not failure — it is what a mature aerobic system looks like.
Be careful what you attribute: a bigger number after a rest week may be freshness rather than fitness. The trend across several tests is the honest measure.
Your numbers, explained the moment you ask.
The part no training plan on paper can do is notice that today is not the day. A fixed plan written six weeks ago does not know that you slept badly, that work went sideways, or that Sunday's ride cost you more than it should have. So it hands you threshold intervals anyway, you complete them at 92% of the target, and the session that was supposed to raise your FTP quietly becomes another medium-hard day.
Peakfy reads what your rides and your recovery actually say and adjusts today's session to today, then tells you why it moved. When you disagree, you can say so — the conversation has no counters and no credits to top up, so arguing with your coach costs you nothing.
Questions riders ask
Keep reading
- What is FTP in cycling, and how do you test it?
- Recovery and readiness in cycling: reading the morning signals