Here's the thing nobody tells you about FTP. Two riders can walk into the same group ride with an identical 270 watts. Same number. Same category on Zwift. Same bragging rights at the coffee stop. And they will have absolutely nothing in common as cyclists.
One of them can sprint at 1,350 watts for five seconds, punch over short climbs at 480 watts for a minute, but falls apart in any sustained effort over twenty minutes. The other can hold 258 watts for two hours without their heart rate drifting a single beat per minute, but couldn't win a sprint against a headwind. Their FTP says they're the same. Their power curves say they're from different planets.
That difference — the shape of what you can produce across the entire spectrum from five seconds to five hours — is your rider phenotype. It's the fingerprint of your cycling engine. And if you're not training with it in mind, you're almost certainly leaving performance on the table.
What Is a Rider Phenotype?
The concept isn't complicated. Your phenotype is the pattern of strengths and weaknesses across your power-duration curve. It describes what kind of cyclist your body has built you to be, given your genetics, your training history, and your age.
Sports science and coaching tradition give us four classical types. They're imperfect — more on that shortly — but they're a useful starting language.
The sprinter is neuromuscularly dominant. Massive peak power, typically 1,200 watts or more in trained male riders, with the ability to sustain well above threshold for 10-30 seconds. Their curve towers at the left end and drops steeply as duration increases. Think Mark Cavendish or Sam Bennett — riders whose entire careers are built around the last 200 metres. In the amateur world, a sprinter phenotype usually shows as someone whose 5-second and 15-second power ranks two or three categories higher than their 20-minute power.
The rouleur is the all-rounder. Strong everywhere, dominant nowhere. Their power curve is remarkably flat — decent sprint, solid threshold, acceptable climbing. Fabian Cancellara was the archetype. In amateur terms, the rouleur tends to show up near the same Coggan category at every duration. They rarely win on any single effort but they're always competitive.
The climber is aerobic with a high power-to-weight ratio, typically producing their best category-relative numbers at 5-20 minutes. Low body mass, often lower absolute sprint power, but watts per kilogram that stay high deep into efforts. Tadej Pogacar and Egan Bernal fit here, though Pogacar's range is so extraordinary he almost breaks the model. The amateur climber usually sits in the 60-68 kg range with a disproportionately strong 5-minute and 20-minute output relative to everything else.
The time trialist is the diesel. Sustained power is their weapon. They may not produce spectacular numbers at any single duration, but they hold a remarkably high percentage of their maximum for a remarkably long time. Their curve doesn't drop off — it just stays flat, kilometre after kilometre. Tony Martin and Rohan Dennis defined this at the professional level. In amateur terms, the time trialist's 60-minute power sits unusually close to their 20-minute power, sometimes within 5-8 per cent.
Those are the textbook categories. And they're useful as a starting point. But let me be really clear about this: they're a framework, not a diagnosis.
How to Read Your Own Power Curve
I covered the mechanics of reading and interpreting the power-duration curve in detail in the power-duration curve post, so I'm not going to repeat all of that here. Go read that if you haven't — it walks through how to build the curve, what each segment means physiologically, and how to identify specific limiters.
What I want to focus on here is the phenotype question: not where the curve dips, but what the overall shape tells you about who you are as a rider.
The simplest method uses four numbers. Pull your best efforts at 5 seconds, 1 minute, 5 minutes, and 20 minutes. You can get these from Intervals.icu, WKO5, TrainingPeaks, or even from structured testing if you've done max efforts at each duration recently. Then compare them to the Coggan power profile chart for your weight.
Here's what you're looking for. Not the absolute category at each duration — that tells you your overall level. You want the relative position across durations. The gaps between them.
A rider who sits at Cat 2 for 5 seconds, Cat 3 for 1 minute, Cat 4 for 5 minutes, and Cat 4 for 20 minutes is neuromuscularly dominant. Their engine is built for short, violent efforts. Their aerobic system is the weak link.
A rider who sits at Cat 5 for 5 seconds, Cat 4 for 1 minute, Cat 3 for 5 minutes, and Cat 2 for 20 minutes is the opposite. Their endurance engine is strong. Their top-end snap is the limiter.
A rider who sits at Cat 3 across the board is a rouleur, whether they like it or not.
The ratios between durations matter too. If your 5-second power is more than 5 times your 20-minute power, you lean heavily toward sprinter. If it's less than 3.5 times, you lean toward the diesel end. Most amateur riders fall between 3.5 and 5, which puts them in hybrid territory.
Another useful ratio: 5-minute power as a percentage of 20-minute power. Below 105 per cent suggests your anaerobic contribution is minimal — you're running almost entirely on the aerobic engine even during short climbs. Above 115 per cent suggests a meaningful anaerobic reserve that lets you produce efforts well above your sustainable power for several minutes.
These aren't arbitrary thresholds. Andrew Coggan built the original power profiling tables around exactly this kind of comparison, and coaches like Tim Cusick at WKO have refined them further with data from tens of thousands of riders. The shape isn't opinion. It's arithmetic.
The Hybrid Problem
Here's where it gets really interesting. If you look at the professional peloton, you see relatively pure phenotypes. Cavendish was a sprinter. Cancellara was a rouleur. Indurain was a time trialist. The decades of specific, high-volume training at the genetic ceiling push riders into clearly defined categories.
At the amateur level, almost nobody is pure anything.
Most club riders I've coached over the years are hybrids. They've got a dominant tendency — maybe they lean toward sprinter, or maybe they're better at sustained work — but they don't fit neatly into one box. And the mistake I see constantly is riders forcing themselves into a category based on what they want to be rather than what their data says they are.
The former rugby player who weighs 90 kilograms and wants to be a climber. The 58-kilogram natural climber who keeps entering flat criteriums because that's what the club does. The diesel who spends January doing sprint intervals because someone on a forum told them to work on weaknesses.
Your phenotype is not aspirational. It's descriptive. It tells you what your body does well right now, and it should inform how you train and which events you choose. You can shift it. You can develop it. But you can't ignore it and expect good results.
There's also a subtler version of this problem. Some riders look at their data, see that they're reasonably balanced, and decide they don't have a phenotype at all. They think hybrid means generic. It doesn't. It means your dominant tendency is less extreme, which actually gives you more flexibility in how you train and race — but it still exists. Look harder at the data. Run the ratios. Almost everyone skews in one direction, even if the skew is modest.
The practical approach for hybrids is to identify your dominant tendency — the durations where your curve sits highest relative to the rest — and build your training and racing around it. You're a sprinter-rouleur hybrid? Good. Train the sprint, maintain the endurance, and stop worrying about whether you'll ever climb with the pure climbers. You won't. And that's fine.
Phenotype and the Masters Cyclist
This is where phenotype stops being an academic exercise and becomes practically important for the riders I work with most — cyclists over 35 who are serious about performance but realistic about time and recovery.
Here's what the research tells us, and what I've seen play out in hundreds of athletes. Your phenotype shifts with age. It's not random. It follows a predictable pattern.
Neuromuscular power — the 5-second to 30-second range — declines fastest. This is driven by a reduction in type II muscle fibre recruitment, a loss of muscle fibre cross-sectional area, and changes in the nervous system's ability to fire maximally. Rittweger's work on ageing and muscle composition, along with the broader literature on sarcopenia, puts the rate of decline in peak sprint power at roughly 1-2 per cent per year after 40. That adds up.
Anaerobic capacity — the 1-minute to 3-minute range — follows next, though the decline is somewhat slower. VO2max drops too, typically at around 5-10 per cent per decade after 30, though this is highly trainable and the decline can be slowed significantly with consistent high-intensity work.
What declines slowest? Sustained aerobic power. Threshold. Endurance. The diesel qualities. Riders who maintain their training volume and include regular high-intensity work can preserve a remarkable percentage of their FTP well into their fifties and even sixties. The research from the Masters Athlete Project and from individual case studies — guys like Robert Marchand, who set cycling records in his 100s — consistently shows that the aerobic engine is the most durable engine.
The practical consequence is this: a rider who was a punchy sprinter at 30 will, without specific intervention, drift toward a rouleur or even a diesel profile by 45. Their sprint will fade faster than their threshold. Their power curve will flatten, losing the peaks at the short end.
You can see this in your own data if you've been training with power for long enough. Pull up your power bests from five years ago and compare them to today. I'd bet money that the 5-second and 30-second numbers have dropped more, in percentage terms, than your 20-minute or 60-minute numbers. That's the age-related phenotype drift in action. It's not a sign you're failing. It's a biological reality that every masters cyclist shares.
And here's where most masters cyclists make the mistake. They fight the drift. They see their sprint fading and they throw sprint sessions at it every week, trying to hold onto numbers they produced a decade ago. They're pouring training time into the part of their engine that biology is taking away, while neglecting the part that biology is preserving.
Let me be really clear about this: I'm not saying you should abandon all neuromuscular work. You absolutely shouldn't. Some sprint work, some short explosive efforts, some standing starts — these maintain neural recruitment patterns and help slow the decline. A few sets of resistance band or light dumbbell work for the legs twice a week supports that too.
But the bulk of your training time as a masters cyclist should lean into what you're becoming, not what you were. If your phenotype is drifting toward diesel, train the diesel. Make it the strongest, most efficient diesel it can be. That's where the performance gains live.
Training to Type vs Addressing Weakness
This is the question I get asked more than almost any other. Should I train my strengths or fix my weaknesses?
The honest answer is both. But the ratio matters enormously, and it changes depending on where you are in your development.
If you're in your first two or three years of structured training with power, train everything. You've got so much low-hanging fruit across the entire power curve that it doesn't matter much where you focus — everything responds. This is the phase where riders see gains at every duration simultaneously because the body is adapting to a training stimulus it has never received before.
After that initial phase, the law of diminishing returns kicks in. Your strongest durations — the ones that define your phenotype — start to plateau earlier because they're already closer to your genetic ceiling. Your weakest durations still have room to move. And that's when the strategic question becomes real.
My recommendation for masters cyclists past the beginner phase is an 80/20 split. Eighty per cent of your specific, targeted training work should reinforce your dominant phenotype. Twenty per cent should address your biggest limiter.
Here's why it's not 50/50. Three reasons.
First, training your strength is motivating. You're good at it. The sessions feel productive. You see the numbers on the screen and you feel like a cyclist. Spending half your training time on work you're bad at grinds you down psychologically, and for a masters cyclist who's fitting training around a full life, motivation isn't a luxury — it's the engine that keeps you showing up.
Second, your strength is what makes you competitive. A rouleur who stops training their sustained power to focus on sprinting doesn't become a good sprinter — they become a mediocre rouleur who can sprint slightly less badly. You've traded what made you dangerous for a marginal improvement in something that still won't be your weapon.
Third, the limiter work doesn't need to be a huge volume to produce results. Limiters respond faster to training precisely because they're undertrained. Two sessions per week of targeted limiter work — maybe 20-30 minutes of specific intervals within a longer ride — is enough to shift the needle measurably over an 8-12 week block. You don't need to dedicate half your training calendar to it.
What does this look like in practice? Take a masters rider whose phenotype leans time trialist. Strong at 20-60 minutes, weak at 5 seconds and 1 minute. Their training week might look like three endurance rides with tempo or sweet spot blocks (reinforcing the strength), one VO2max interval session (maintaining the upper aerobic engine), and one session that includes 4-6 short, maximal 10-15 second efforts after a warm-up (targeting the neuromuscular limiter). That's roughly an 80/20 split in terms of specific intensity distribution, and it keeps the main thing the main thing while giving the weakness a regular stimulus.
If you want help figuring out where your numbers put you and what to do about it, that is exactly what we do inside the Skool community.
Choosing Events That Suit Your Engine
Here's a conversation I've had dozens of times. A rider in their late forties tells me they keep getting dropped in the final 200 metres of club crits. They feel strong all race, hold position, follow the attacks, and then get annihilated in the sprint. They want to know how to fix their sprint.
My first question is always the same. Why are you doing crits?
This isn't dismissive. It's strategic. A criterium is a sprinter's event. The entire race is structured around a mass finish where 5-second to 15-second power decides everything. If your phenotype says diesel, you're entering an event where your strength — sustained power — is irrelevant for the last thirty seconds that decide the result.
Your phenotype should guide your event selection at least as much as it guides your training. And for masters cyclists, this matters even more because you're competing against younger riders who still have the neuromuscular snap that age is taking from you.
Here's a rough guide. Sprinter phenotype — criteriums, short road races with bunch finishes, track events. Rouleur phenotype — stage races, hilly road races where the bunch splits but doesn't shatter, fondos. Climber phenotype — hill climbs, mountainous sportives, short steep time trials. Time trialist phenotype — time trials (obviously), long flat sportives, ultra-distance events, gravel races where pace consistency beats explosive power.
The good news for masters cyclists is that the events which suit the phenotype age preserves — time trials, long sportives, gravel — are also the events where age categories create properly competitive racing. A 50-year-old time trialist racing other 50-year-olds on a flat 40 km course is a fair fight. That same rider lining up in an open crit against 25-year-old sprinters is not.
There's a psychological benefit here too. When you race to your phenotype, you race from confidence. You know your engine suits the demands. You're not compensating for a mismatch — you're expressing what you've trained. That confidence shows up in pacing decisions, in tactical choices, and in the willingness to commit to efforts that you know your body can sustain.
And let's talk about gravel for a moment, because it's become the ideal discipline for the masters phenotype that age builds. Gravel races are long. They reward consistency. They punish riders who go out too hard. Sprint power is nearly irrelevant because the finish is almost never a bunch sprint — it's usually a solo effort over the final kilometres where the steadiest rider wins. If you're a masters diesel wondering where your engine fits, gravel is the answer the sport has been waiting to give you.
I've watched riders completely change their racing experience simply by switching from events that exposed their weakness to events that rewarded their strength. No change in fitness. No change in training. Just a better match between the engine and the race.
Practical Next Steps
If you've made it this far, here's what I'd suggest doing this week.
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Pull your power bests at four durations. Open Intervals.icu, WKO, or TrainingPeaks and write down your best 5-second, 1-minute, 5-minute, and 20-minute power from the last 90 days. Calculate them as watts per kilogram. Compare to the Coggan power profile chart for your weight category. Note where you sit at each duration and, more importantly, how much the category shifts between short and long efforts. That shift is your phenotype.
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Identify your dominant tendency. You don't need to fit a clean label. Just answer this: am I better at short explosive efforts or sustained ones? Your data will tell you. If your 5-second and 1-minute categories are higher, you lean toward sprinter or puncher. If your 5-minute and 20-minute categories are higher, you lean toward diesel. If they're all about the same, you're a rouleur.
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Name your biggest limiter. This is the duration where your curve drops the most relative to the rest. If you're Cat 3 everywhere but Cat 5 at 1 minute, that's an anaerobic limiter. If you're Cat 2 at 5 seconds but Cat 4 at 20 minutes, that's an aerobic limiter. Write it down. That limiter is where your next block of 20 per cent work should go.
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Audit your event calendar. Look at the events you've entered or plan to enter this season. Do they reward your phenotype or expose your weakness? If they consistently expose the weakness, you have a choice: train specifically for that demand, or find events that suit what you already do well. For most masters cyclists, the second option produces better results and better experiences.
Your phenotype is not a verdict. It's a compass. It tells you where your training will produce the most return, which events will let you race from strength, and how to spend the limited hours you have on work that actually moves the needle. The riders who figure this out stop chasing someone else's version of fast and start building their own. That's where it gets good.