Will an FTP test on trainer, using a power meter, be adequate to get your outdoor FTP?
The reason I ask is b/c I don’t live anywhere near a flat piece of land that I can go all out for 20 mins.
Thanks!
Yes, it will be adequate It might not be 100% accurate, but it will get the job done
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go hard, get a good idea, adjust as needed when you’re outside if needed.
They’re just numbers in the end.
Sure. One tip is to use a big fan. The biggest problem with indoor is that you don’t get the cooling effect from 20-30MPH self-created (or natural) wind you do outdoors.
Not really even close for me. I don’t have the mental fortitude to pull it off. With no feeling of speed etc it’s just pain on the trainer and I end up being quite a few watts lower. I quit trying. In fact I pretty much quit testing also. Even though training peaks sent me a new FTP email last week
Depending on what kind of setup you have, it’s almost always easier to produce watts out on the road. I train a lot on the trainer, and for me, it’s around a 15W difference indoors. So if I’m riding 250W inside, that same effort level outside would be around 265W (even with huge fans, etc). To sort of account for this, when I’m riding Tempo/Threshold/V02 wattage zones, I ride on the lower end indoors, and the upper end outdoors. So if you find it harder to produce watts indoors, and you do the FTP test, you can probably set your zones for riding outdoors just a little higher.
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One challenge for my outdoors is that I don’t have a good, flat, out and back 20 minute section anywhere. I’d probably be forced to use normalized power and just try to still hammer the downhills until I spin out. So indoors is much more controlled. I do have a rolling course that I’ll probably start using as an alternate. The test will at least be repeatable.