Our Team EF Coaching community is adventurous, passionate, driven and, above all, curious. We love hearing what questions you have for us about training, racing, fueling and improving. In this first edition of our Coaching Q&A, we answer your questions about FTP (functional threshold power) with pro team coach Nate Wilson, gut training and carb processing with team nutritionist Will Girling, and more.
Q: "On the professional team (EF Education-NIPPO), do you change the riders’ FTP readings throughout the season and do specific FTP tests? Or do you know each rider’s range and leave their FTPs at one setting so you can measure consistent TSS (training stress scores) race-to-race reviewing back year-on-year?"
EF-Education NIPPO coach, Nate Wilson: My philosophy is to change riders' FTP through the season based on their fitness, and also what altitude they're training or racing at. In this way, I can use TSS as a relative measure of the stress of the training that's normalized to their current ability. I have considered the idea of leaving FTP at one setting in order to keep the TSS consistent, so we know the stress of a race in a consistent way, but at the end of the day we can use power and kilojoules as the more "absolute" values to determine what is needed to win a race in terms of power and workload. In keeping TSS as more of a "relative" value, we then also know how much a race stressed that rider given their current fitness and perhaps how much recovery they need off the back of it.
Q: *What does the team do when you can’t do physical recon rides to recon specific race routes? Do you use a virtual training app of some kind?*
EF Education-NIPPO sport director Charly Wegelius: Typically, if the team can’t do a recon ride of something like, say, a climb, then riders and the team will search out a similar feature nearby. Rather than using something like a virtual training app, we just go out and ride, analyze and use that climb or other feature as a measuring stick.
Q: How do you keep morale high and balanced during challenging periods of racing and training blocks?
EF Education-NIPPO sport director Charly Wegelius: I can't say that we wake up in the morning and book in 15 minutes to motivate people. I think the motivation comes from the environment around you, right? I think you get motivated because you believe you can only do something. Where does that confidence come from? It comes from having done hard things in the past. Maybe not exactly the thing that you're attempting, but it comes from an intrinsic belief that you're a person who can do hard things.
Q: Can the gut be trained to increase its carb-processing rate? What's the highest rate of carb-processing per hour among your riders?
EF Education-NIPPO team nutritionist, Will Girling: So first of all, yes, gut training can be done. This has been shown most clearly by competitive eaters, actually. You know, hot dog eating contests and the like. You can actually train your gut to be able to improve the speed at which you can empty it of food. This, in turn, will enable you to take more food on the bike, so you get more efficient at that. And then you'd be able to break down that food more quickly and use it as a source of energy, more efficiently. To do that, you need to be using a two-to-one ratio carbohydrate glucose-fructose mix, which is in many different products out there now.
In terms of the highest amount per rider, we have Jonas Rutsch on the team who, in a race, recently hit 177 grams per hour over the course of that race. Which is considerably more than the highest processing rate that's been recorded in science. In science, we've seen that, on average, we can reach 120 grams per hour with gut training. Can you oxidize even more than that? There are always outliers, and I’d be interested to do more research with Jonas, seeing if he can do that.