The Tyranny of Testing

If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it’

Lord Kelvin – Inventor of temperature (or something like that)

When Henry Ford started time in motion studies back in the 1920s, the purpose was to investigate how people worked on the production line in order to make it more efficient. They ran into problems however, because as soon as people were observed working, they worked differently. Some worked faster, some worked more carefully, some worked slower. Regardless, the results of their investigations were skewed because the very act of observing peoples behaviour changed the behaviour that was being observed. This was termed the Hawthorne effect.

My training works in blocks of three or four weeks. I have a medium week, a couple of hard weeks and the block always finishes with an easy week. Perversely I dread the easy weeks, because at the end of the easy week is a fitness test. Fitness tests are hard. Very hard. They are a simple enough premise; a 30 minute warm up followed by 20 minutes of eyes bulging, vein popping, sweat coursing all out effort. The last 15 minutes hurt, the last five minutes seem to take an hour and the last minute takes an age.  When you climb down off the hamster wheel and out of your pain cave, you are barely able to stand, you are gulping air and soaked with sweat. I spend the week before the test with a heavy heart dreading the tunnel of pain that awaits.

The fitness test is designed to figure out how hard you can go for an hour. That’s a bit of a magic number in cycling (and indeed all endurance sports). Its called your FTP (Functional Threshold Power) and although not perfect it’s a pretty good indicator of ability. Broadly speaking the higher your FTP (in relation to your mass) the better a cyclist you are. So if you can improve your FTP you improve your cycling. Therefore, measure your FTP, work to improve your FTP,  improve your FTP, improve as a cyclist.

When you exercise you body produces lactic acid. The more you exercise the more lactic acid you produce. The harder you exercise the more rapidly you produce lactic acid. Lactic acid is bad. It gums up your muscles and stops them from working efficiently. However, your body can metabolise (get rid of) a lactic acid at a certain rate, provided your body metabolises the lactate it can still work. The amount of effort (ie power) at which the body can metabolise lactate at the same rate as it is being produced, is your lactate threshold, or your FTP. If you work at powers above your FTP you will build up lactate and eventually you will fall over, work at powers below your FTP and you can go on forever (in theory at least). The maximum power you can output for an hour is your FTP. However, going for an hour at maximum is super hard! So you can go for 20mins do a wee sum and get a very good approximation of your FTP.

But the thing with a fitness test, is that it is really, really tough to replicate your best performance. That is usually done outside, on a hill, in competition when you aren’t watching your computer which tells you exactly how hard you are working and lets you know just how much pain you should be in! Part of the problem is of course the vomitron and the lack of external stimulus which I have mentioned earlier. The other part of the problem is that the natural reaction of the body when things start to hurt, is to try and stop them hurting, why put yourself through pain, after all? In competition there is a prize, succeed in an FTP test all you are doing is making your next block of training harder! All the motivation you have is an abstract prize a few months down the line and even then there are no guarantees.

So Kelvin was right, without measurement there is no improvement. But when measurement hurts then there is no guarantee that your measurement is correct and when so much of the results are down to how the subject is feeling it becomes difficult.

My point? Im not sure. I guess I’m just trying to say that I don’t like the FTP test!

From Glasgow,
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