The argument about FTP gets loudest below the World Tour. Coaches working a few rungs down debate testing protocols, training models, and percentage-of-FTP targets with religious intensity. Move up a level and the noise drops. The people who actually programme the pros do not agree on everything — but on FTP, they agree on more than most amateurs realise.
This article distils what World Tour coaches actually say about developing functional threshold power. It is narrower than the broader 25 Top Coaches consensus on FTP, which includes club, national, and World Tour voices. Here, the focus is the World Tour tier specifically: Dan Lorang, John Wakefield, Tim Kerrison, the staff inside Red Bull–Bora-Hansgrohe and the coaches at that level who have appeared on the Roadman Cycling Podcast.
The framing that emerges is more practical than philosophical. These coaches are not arguing about the model. They are aligned on the model. They are arguing about how to apply it inside a 12-month season for the rider in front of them.
Position one — FTP is a lagging indicator, not a target
The first thing World Tour coaches do not do is treat FTP as a goal. It is a number that rises when the system underneath rises. The system is aerobic capacity, durability, fuelling competence, strength, recovery — and the work that drives FTP is upstream of FTP itself.
Dan Lorang has stated this directly on the podcast. The Bora-Hansgrohe athletes he coaches do not chase FTP tests. They build base, programme intensity blocks, recover well, fuel correctly, and the FTP number tracks the underlying improvement. Inverting the relationship — chasing the FTP number directly — produces short-term spikes followed by plateaus and over-training.
For amateurs, the practical version of this position is to plan blocks around aerobic development and threshold quality, not around the date of the next FTP test. The test confirms what the training built. It does not build it.
Position two — consistency across years outweighs any single block
The second consensus position is the one amateurs find hardest to act on, because the timeframe is uncomfortable.
World Tour FTP development is a multi-year process. Riders who arrive at the World Tour with high FTP figures got there through years of progressive volume, structured intensity, and the accumulated effect of recovery and fuelling done correctly across hundreds of training weeks. There is no 12-week block that produces a meaningful World Tour-level FTP from a deficient aerobic base.
The framing Lorang and others apply is the 36-month horizon. What you do this winter sets the platform for next summer. What you do across the next three winters sets the ceiling for who you can become as an athlete. Once that timescale lands, the temptation to chase quick gains drops because they are not actually pointing at the target.
For working amateurs, the corollary is that consistency over years outperforms intensity over weeks. The athlete who trains 48 weeks a year for three years outperforms the athlete who trains brilliantly for six months and then breaks down. Joe Friel has made this case in print for decades, and his position is closely aligned with the World Tour view.
Position three — threshold work earns its place but only at one to two sessions per week
There is unusual agreement across World Tour coaches on the upper bound of high-intensity work for amateurs. One to two genuinely hard sessions per week, executed with quality, surrounded by easy aerobic work and at least one full rest day.
Three or more hard sessions a week, in the experience of the coaches in the Roadman archive, is where most self-coached athletes plateau. The hard sessions become moderate, the easy sessions become moderate, and the entire week sits in the grey zone — too much fatigue to fully adapt, too little stimulus to drive specific change.
John Wakefield has been particularly clear on this point. The development riders he sees entering the World Tour are often surprised by how few hard sessions are scheduled, and how much the volume of disciplined easy riding increases. The hard work is not a secret. The discipline to protect easy days so the hard ones can land is.
This is the same conclusion Prof. Stephen Seiler's research arrives at from the lab side. The two views — World Tour coaching practice and elite endurance research — converge on the same number.
Position four — field-based testing on familiar terrain beats lab numbers
The disagreement about testing protocols often surprises amateurs who expect the World Tour to be more standardised. The reality is that the protocol matters less than the consistency.
Some teams use 20-minute tests with the standard 95% multiplier. Some use ramp protocols. Some use lab-based lactate testing periodically alongside field tests. Dan Bigham, former UCI Hour Record holder and Head of Engineering at Red Bull–Bora-Hansgrohe, has spoken publicly about the limits of lab-derived FTP numbers when the goal is real-world race performance — particularly for time-trial-style efforts on real roads in real weather.
The position that emerges across coaches is pragmatic. Pick a protocol you can repeat. Use the same roads, the same time of day, the same warm-up, the same equipment. The trend across multiple tests over months is the signal worth tracking. Single-test absolute numbers, especially in different conditions, are noise.
For amateurs the practical translation is simple. Pick one test and stop changing it. Build your zones from the most recent reliable result using the FTP zone calculator, then stop testing for at least six weeks while you actually train.
Position five — strength and fuelling are prerequisites
A position that has hardened across the World Tour over the last decade is that strength training and structured fuelling are not optional add-ons. They are the floor of the programme.
Two strength sessions per week, programmed alongside the bike plan and adjusted across the season — heavier in winter, maintenance in season — is now standard practice across most World Tour teams. The mechanism is cycling economy. A rider who improves the metabolic cost of producing a given power output produces more sustainable wattage at the same aerobic effort. Economy gains compound with aerobic gains, and FTP improvements show up faster than they would from the bike work alone.
The fuelling consensus is similarly tight. Hard sessions and races are fuelled at 60–90g of carbohydrate per hour, with longer sessions warranting the upper end of that range using multiple transportable carbohydrates (glucose plus fructose, roughly 2:1). This protocol comes from Asker Jeukendrup's research and is universally applied at World Tour level. The full breakdown of how it translates for amateurs sits in What Sports Scientists Say About Cycling Nutrition.
What this means at the coaching level is that an amateur asking "how do I raise my FTP" without addressing strength and fuelling is asking the wrong question. Those two inputs change what the training stimulus can deliver. Without them, the ceiling is lower than it needs to be.
Position six — easy-day discipline is the largest amateur lever
The position World Tour coaches converge on most often when asked about amateurs specifically is the one that contradicts amateur instinct most directly.
The largest single FTP improvement available to most self-coached cyclists is not more intervals. It is fixing easy-day discipline.
The mechanism is the one Seiler has documented and the World Tour coaches see in practice. Riders who drift into the grey zone on their easy days arrive at hard sessions under-recovered. The hard sessions then under-deliver because the rider cannot hit the targets that drive adaptation. The fix — capping easy rides under LT1 — restores the recovery that lets the hard sessions actually be hard. FTP rises without changing the intensity sessions at all.
This is the move that produces the largest measurable gains in the Not Done Yet coaching programme for self-coached athletes who arrive after a plateau. They do not need more intensity. They need the discipline to protect the easy days so the existing intensity can land. The principle is World Tour. The application scales down to ten hours a week.
How to apply this in your next training block
A practical translation, in five steps you can take in your next eight weeks:
- Stop chasing the number. Plan the block around aerobic development and disciplined intensity, not around an FTP retest date. The retest happens at the end as a confirmation, not as the goal.
- Cap the hard sessions at two per week. Pick them in advance, plan specific targets for each, and surround them with genuinely easy riding and one full rest day.
- Pick one test protocol. Use the same protocol on the same terrain for every retest. Build zones from the most recent reliable result and stop retesting for six weeks.
- Audit strength and fuelling. Two strength sessions a week, 60–90g of carbohydrate per hour on the hard rides. If either is missing, your FTP work is operating below its ceiling.
- Audit easy-day discipline. For four weeks, cap easy rides under LT1 — talk test or heart-rate cap — and keep everything else identical. Watch what happens at the next test.
If this is the work where the gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it consistently is biggest, that is what coaching closes. The Roadman coaching programme is built around exactly these principles — daily review, weekly adjustment, and the accountability to apply pro structure at amateur volume.
Where to go next
If you want the broader synthesis across all coaching tiers, What 25 Top Coaches Agree On About Improving FTP is the wider article. If you want the science on intensity distribution, What Stephen Seiler Says About Polarised Training covers the framework underneath the consensus. And if you want the granular view from one coach who programmes at the very top of the sport, What Dan Lorang Says About Endurance Training is the place to start.
The summary, if you only take one thing: World Tour coaches do not have a different FTP playbook from the one available to you. They have the same playbook executed with discipline and patience for years. The work is to apply that discipline at your volume, not to find a different shortcut.