If you're over 35 years of age, and your functional threshold power is dropping, if the numbers you used to hit feel further away every single year, here's the uncomfortable truth. It's actually not your age. Well, not entirely. Five specific things are killing your threshold right now, but all five of these are fixable. And number five is one that nobody talks about because it's the most uncomfortable to have a conversation about. We're going to get to that in a minute. What I'm not going to do in this video is I'm not going to tell you to get out and ride more. I'm not going to tell you to go and lose weight. I'm not going to tell you to dip into your pocket and buy some new arrow gadgets. What I am going to do is break down those five specific reasons I see over and over again when I look at training data, especially training data from riders that join our not done yet coaching community. When I look at real riders, when I look at real numbers, guys and girls over 35, people are watching their threshold power slip every year. Slips 2 watts, 3 watts, sometimes 10 watts a year. But the good news, and there is good news here, is this doesn't necessarily need to be a slow slide into irrelevance. Five things all fixable. Most of them you'll be able to fix inside a month. Before I get into these five fixable reasons, let me tell you who this video is for. You train three to five times a week, you own a power meter, you've had a threshold power over, say, 250 watts at some point in your life. And right now, on the right day, you can still get close to that, but something isn't holding. You're not the rider you were at 30 years of age, and you're starting to wonder whether the next decade just looks like more of the same, more of the same slide. Stick with me. I promise this video is going to be worth it. Reason number three is the one that came out of a conversation I had with Olav Bu, the coach at Uno-X, who coaches some of the best triathletes in the world as well, Blummenfelt and Iden. I chatted with him on the podcast. It was a cool chat. And it's the one that matters most to cyclists, and I see them getting it wrong so often without realizing it. And reason number five is the one that separates the amateurs that I see in the community who hold onto their threshold power into their 50s and 60s from the ones who quietly lose like 10 watts a year. Right, let's get going. Reason number one and the one you can fix tomorrow morning, the reason that most over 35 cyclists are working or leaving watts on the table, you're under-fueling, full stop. Not just your hard sessions, you're under-fueling all of it. Do the math with me for a second. If you train five times a week, that's 260 sessions a year, 260 chances to get better by training. If you eat three meals a day, that's 1,092 meals a year, 1,092 chances to get better by eating. Most of you are obsessing over 260 and you're ignoring the 1,092. And here's what I mean. When you were 25, you could show up to a threshold review to max session. Two coffees and maybe a slice of toast when you rolled out of bed in the morning and you'd power through it. Muscle glycogen was full from what you ate yesterday, insulin sensitivity was good. You could redline off almost entirely empty tank and you would still get the training adaptation. Now, if you fast forward and you're age 35 or 40, that just doesn't work the same anymore. Now, if you read through cycling internet forums or Reddit or watch your favorite influencer, the cycling internet is going to tell you that fasted training is this incredible tool for metabolic efficiency. And honestly, I haven't seen it. Maybe for some outlier riders and some blocks there's a place for it. But if you're doing most of your riding under-fueled week after week, what you're actually doing is teaching your body to produce less power, not more power. The framework I'd point you to is a conversation I had with Dr.
That's the zone you're going to delete from your training from now on. And some of you are not going to like this at all. You've been riding in that gray zone for a decade, and you've been calling it training. I get it. I totally do, because I did it, too. What you'll notice in about 3 weeks is that the polarization starts working on both ends. Your hard sessions have more in them because you're properly rested and your easy sessions stop costing you. Reason number three is the reason I wish I'd understood early in my cycling career. Reason number three is you're in sleep debt and you don't know it. At 25 you could get away with 6 hours sleep a night and you could ride hard the next morning. You could recover and you could adapt. That's the key part. You can get through the stuff with sub-optimal adaptation I'm talking about. At age 35, at age 40, 6 hours of sleep it's a catastrophe for adaptation because you don't have the same body. Growth hormone secretion, the thing that actually rebuilds the muscles you tore in the interval session. That happens in deep sleep and deep sleep is the first thing you lose when your total sleep drops below 7 hours. Cortisol stays elevated and adaptation doesn't happen. You wake up, you go ride, you tear more muscle and you don't rebuild it. Do that for 6 weeks and your FTP just starts sliding. Not because you're not training well, it's because you're not recovering well. The fix, and I know this is one that you don't want to hear because it's the least sexy thing you're going to hear me talking about all day. It's a non-negotiable fix. 7 to 8 hours of sleep should be your floor. If you do one thing from this video, please do this. Olaf Boo made this point to me when he was on the podcast. When you look at athletes who keep progressing deeper into their careers and Olaf's looking at the best endurance athletes on the planet. The constant isn't the training, it isn't the equipment, it isn't the aerodynamics, it's the sleep and the basics around it. The people who hold form over years are the ones who treat recovery the same way they treat the session. The ones who don't, no matter how clever the program, they eventually stall. You don't need to be a world-class athlete for that to apply to you. If anything, it applies harder to you. You have less training time, less recovery bandwidth, more life to absorb. Sleep is where the adaptation you're paying for in the sessions actually lands. So, how do you know if this is your problem? Well, simple. For the next 2 weeks, track your sleep. Use a sleep tracker if you want. And if your average sleep is below 7 hours, this is your problem. Probably more than anything else on this list combined. Fix the sleep, then come back to the training. Excuse the brief interruption, folks. This episode is brought to you by Big Moe Cyle Insurance. That's right. The folks who make sure your ridiculously expensive hobby doesn't bankrupt you if things go sideways. Let's be real. Your bike is probably worth more than your sofa. Maybe even more than your car if we're totally honest. And if it gets nicked, dented, or accidentally reversed over, it's only money. That phrase is just not going to cut it. So, enter Big Moe. Big Moe protects you and your bike. And yes, your borderline obsessive attachment to it from theft, accidental damage, race day disasters, and even baggage claim shenanigans. Your helmet, GPS, and other gear, they're all covered, too. And if you've got more than one bike, of course you do, you get 50% off each extra bike on the same policy. Covered, replaced, back riding. So, whether you're smashing sprints, you're grinding climbs, or you're just enjoying a Saturday spin with the lads, ride safe. Big Moe's got your back. Protect your ride before it's too late. Head to bigmo.com and get covered. That's bikmo.com. Flexible policies, cancel anytime, check the terms in your policy docs. Reason number four is where most cyclists over 35 quietly quit. You've stopped lifting heavy, if you ever did start lifting heavy in the first place. Here's what's happening physiologically from your mid-30s onwards.
You lose fast-twitch muscle fibers faster than slow-twitch muscle fibers. Sarcopenia hits the explosive fibers first, and it starts earlier than most cyclists realize. If you don't specifically stimulate those fibers with heavy lifting, they atrophy. That means they just like start degrading, down regulating. And your FTP, which is partly a function of your peak power and partly your fatigue resistance, starts bleeding from the peak end. You get the same endurance you always had, you just can't hit the numbers you used to be able to hit. And the cycling internet is going to tell you that as a cyclist you should lift light, high reps for endurance. That's wrong for you. The research on masters athletes over the last decade has been consistent and has been clear. The intervention that maintains power output across the late 30s, 40s, 50s, into your 60s, it's heavy resistance training. Not circuits, not Pilates, heavy lifts, low reps performed twice a week. Think squat, deadlift, or hip hinge variation. Think a press, three to five reps at a weight that's genuinely challenging. Two to three exercises twice a week, that's a minimum effective dose I would suggest. What I'm not going to do is tell you to become a powerlifter. I'm not going to tell you to put on twice your body weight on the bar. What I am going to say is this. If the weight you're lifting in the gym is a weight you could comfortably do 12 reps with, it's not heavy enough to maintain your fast-twitch muscle fibers. It's just cardio. You're like building extra steps. You're not going to bulk, this is what I hear all the time. You're not going to suddenly turn into Arnold Schwarzenegger. At 35-plus years of age, with the amount of riding you're doing on top, the only thing two heavy sessions a week is going to do is defend those fast-twitch muscle fibers that you still have. And that defense is worth 5 to 15 watts of FTP you would otherwise lose every single year, which brings me to the last one. And this is one that nobody over 35 really wants to hear. Reason number five, your warm-up is just too short. You've started neglecting it because you're time crunched. And I know again this sounds boring, but inside our community we really try to execute boring so well. Execute boring world-class precision, and that's what gives these outsize results. It sounds like the kind of thing you'd skip in a video, but please do hear me out because in my experience working with hundreds of master cyclists in the last few years, this is the single most commonly skipped factor in master's power output. When I started tracking it in my own data, the numbers were actually quite stark. At 25, you can jump on the bike, you can do 10 minutes easy spinning, and you can hit your first interval to be honest. Blood flow is working to the muscles. It's all happening quickly. Vascular dilation is fast. The cardio respiratory system comes up to speed in minutes. But at 40, the same 10-minute warm-up puts you in your first interval under prepared, and you do feel it immediately. Interval one looks ragged. Heart rate scrambling to catch up with the power. The effort feels two zones harder than it should. You might hit the number, but you're hitting it by force, not by readiness. And the cost shows up later in the session. You've burnt matches getting into that work zone that should have gone into doing the work later in the session. So, the last couple of intervals, where a lot of the adaptation actually lives, there's less left in there than there should be. The fix is a proper warm-up, not a token one. For a master cyclist about to do a threshold or above session, plan something like 25 to 30 minutes of preparation before the real interval. Easy spinning to get the legs moving, build through the zones, zone two, a couple of short activations at higher intensity 30 seconds to a minute well before the main set. By the time you start your first interval proper, the body is genuinely ready to get going. On paper, it looks like you've warmed up too much. On the power file, I promise you it looks like your first interval of your session is actually suddenly where the interval used to be.