For a bit of fun I decided on Sunday evening to compare the zones devised by Doctor Andrew Coggan based on Watts with the FaCT zones. The reason for this was some people felt the zones I've found using the LBP test were too low.
For this experiment I needed a willing subject who had already done the LBP test. A name that sprung to mind was Marky Mark as I know he likes a challenge and is interested in learning more about his body.
For people not familiar with Andrew Coggan he is the co-author of the book "Training and Racing with a Power Meter". This is the programme I followed for 7 years and nearly everyone else who has a powermeter does as well.
The zones I was interested in finding were the ones for Active Recovery, Endurance & Tempo and would require Mark to ride as hard as he could for 1 hour to find his Functional Threshold Power (FTP). Now in the real world I know most powermeter users don't ride for an hour as the test is pure torture especially when done on a turbo tariner.
What is FTP? It is the power a person can maintain for 1 hour and correlates to their power @ Lactate Threshold. Wattage Zones are based on this FTP figure using percentages.
With Mark I had 3 choices to find his FTP :-
1. Ride for an hour
2. Ride 20mins then multiply by 0.95 (used by many people to asssess FTP)
3. Ride for 40mins
Option 1 - I decided against asking Mark to do 1hr as it's very stressful.
Option 2 - decided against this method as this can overinflate the 1 hour power.
Option 3 - as a compromise I offered this option to Mark as I feit it would be very close to his 1hr FTP than the 20mins test.
Here's images of Mark's power & HR :-
[img]http://i161.photobucket.com/albums/t209/sbc205/Image1-4.jpg[/img]
[img]http://i161.photobucket.com/albums/t209/sbc205/Image2-5.jpg[/img]
Results from test:-
45mins - 197 watts avg/173 HR avg
Will post more later on comparison.