Ramp under and overs

Last week was not much of a training week. I had a weekend with my friends in Gent, Belgium which was not really good for the legs, nor for the liver ;)
 
Anyway, I did manage to do an other training last week which was kind of a ramp training. The idea is to mimic a climb which usually gets tougher at the end. You usually start at (if you pace well) a bit slower than you can actually ride. During the climb you will be able to ride a bit harder / its starts to become a bit harder. Its what you often experience with people who ride by at the start of the climb, but who pay the price halfway or towards the end of the climb and which you pass and leave behind ;)

The ramp training basically is a step based training in which every 4 minutes the watts are increased. At the end of the ramp (in my case at approx. 115% FTP) you go under your FTP. After that over, then under, then over and then under again. It is designed for sweetspot, but I have made it a bit harder :high end sweetspot / lower FTP training, which is quite hard. You can adjust the steps so you are doing a bit less on the whole, but try to keep it in the sweetspot range. The ranges (expressed as % FTP were):
 

There seems to be no warmup, but basically the 50% of FTP until approximately 70% is a good warmup, so don't worry. In the build up to the 116% it starts to get 'nasty' around step with 102%. The last 12 minutes in the buildup are quite hard. Its basically 12 minutes at approx. 110% of FTP. After dropping it to approx 100% of FTP is remains hard. First recovery you feel at the 88% of FTP (under) again......this is how it looks like in a graph:
 

W.r.t my heart rate (red line) there seem to be some erranous points. The dotted line remarks my 'Kurt' FTP.

The whole effort in my case was:

1h, IF 0.93,AP 256, NP 270, TSS 87,AV HR 145

Just for fun I wanted to see the relation between heart rate and wattage of the ramp part (which is basically a steady state ramp up). I deleted the erranous heart rate points and it looks like this (wattage on X, HR on Y axis).

 

As you can see HR trends upward (first red line until dotted line) with wattage, and at around 250 watts (dotted line) there seems to be some sort of acceleration in the trend with wattage. So from that point on my HR trends faster than before. Now, I once did a lactate test and the point of 4 mmol /l was around 250 watts. But my heart rate at that time was 150. Now it is approx 133 around that point. Maybe that marks the point of  HR / wattage gets a different trend. But it cannot represent my lactate treshold since my heart rate is almost 20 lower than then (I am doing more watts at lower HR now). Maybe it is my aerobic treshold (which is usually 20-40 strokes lower than Anaerobic Treshold), but I suspect it has more to do with dehydration.

Within a few weeks I will be doing a ramp test as an alternative FTP estimate. Stay tuned for that one.