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Girona Road · 10–15 Oct 2026

Girona Gravel · 16–21 Oct 2026

Coachingsarah & anthony

SECRET TO IMPROVING THRESHOLD - DOSE, FREQUENCY, DURATION

with Secret To Improving Threshold

12:51·12 May 2026

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Most cyclists think they’re doing threshold training — but most are actually riding too easy to drive real FTP gains. In this episode, we break down what...

Most cyclists think they’re doing threshold training — but most are actually riding too easy to drive real FTP gains. In this episode, we break down what true threshold work actually is, why your FTP may have plateaued for years, and how elite coaches structure intensity for maximum adaptation. Drawing on insights from Stephen Seiler, Dan Lorang, and WorldTour training models, we explain the difference between sweet spot and threshold, how much threshold work amateurs actually need, and the biggest mistakes riders make with interval pacing. Plus, we give you three proven threshold sessions you can start using this week to finally move your FTP in the right direction.

If you liked this video you will love our other video "Secret To Zone 2 Training - Dose, Frequency & Duration". Click here to watch it - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qt6tF-GwFEw

One of the tools you will have heard Anthony chat about in this podcast is Training Peaks. Without this platform we can't get into the detail required to pricesly train within zones. If you want to go and check out this incredible training tool go to https://bit.ly/4qWyEKK and use ROADMAN – 20% off an annual TrainingPeaks Premium subscription

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT3 SECTIONS

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01Two riders. They start off with the exact same functional threshold…
02Stack two of them inside that window and the second one gets…
03You're going to run through this three times

Two riders. They start off with the exact same functional threshold…

Two riders. They start off with the exact same functional threshold power. They have the exact same available training hours. Now they come out of an 8week training block with 30 watts separated. Difference is how they structured their threshold work. If your FTP hasn't budged in over a year, training harder isn't going to fix it. You're already working pretty damn hard. The watts aren't moving because riders are getting threshold work wrong. Most amateurs spend years doing what they call threshold sessions and they don't see their FTP move as a result. Let's take a second before we go any further to ground some terms and define what I mean by threshold power. Threshold has a specific definition. Most cyclists are using the word for an intensity that's a little bit below it. Sports scientists they call it threshold 2 or LT2 from here on. You'll also hear called maximum steady state MLSS. Monk cyclists use functional threshold power FTP as the practical proxy. Close enough for what we're doing here. Even if a physiologist would point out to FTP is usually a water or two of true MLSS. We're talking about 95 to 105% of FTP. Heart rate at roughly 88 to 94% of max though that varies depending on the athlete. That's going to put you at a rate of perceived exertion at around seven or eight out of 10. the intensity where you can get a couple of words out if your buddy's riding next to you, but you really aren't motivated by full sentences. I see a lot of riders who think they're actually doing threshold work, but what they're doing is sweet spot. And sweet spot training sits just below threshold. That sits at an intensity of about 88 to 91% of threshold. Works out for most people at around 5 to 10 watts below threshold. A lot of what we know about how endurance athletes should distribute their training intensity comes from Professor Steven Syler. He spent over two decades studying elite endurance sport. Now, I've been lucky enough to have him on the podcast on more than a couple of occasions, and it's always a great conversation. He observed that the pattern that keeps coming up across rowing, crosscountry skiing, running, and cycling is roughly an 80 to 20 distribution. 80% of your training time at intensity we'll call low intensity below lactate threshold one LT1 and around 20% at high intensity or above that LT2 with very little time in the middle. That's called polarized training. The other model which you might hear about which is equally valid is pyramidal training. Mostly low some moderate and a small amount of high. Both work. the point that Professor Steven Syler or other great coaches I'm thinking of that have had on the podcast like Dan Lurang at Bora Hansrove or John Wakefield who's already who's also at Bora Hansrove they all seem to converge on this idea of around 80% low intensity and 20% high intensity and that applies to amateur cyclists the same as it applies to world tour professional cyclists no more than two hard sessions a week massive mistake that I see most amateurs making isn't picking the wrong intensity model. It's logging too many hours in the middle where the session is hard enough to need recovery but not hard enough to drive that adaptation. Let's jump in here and talk about dose for a second. In a single session at trained amateur athletes, it is looking for around 30 to 60 minutes time at threshold wattage. If you're just newer and you're coming upon this video and you haven't done structured training before, structured intervals, start with maybe 10 to 30 minutes and start building from there. across the entire week. Most well-trained amateurs respond best to somewhere between 60 to 90 minutes of total threshold time. A world tour pro might push it slightly harder than that in a specific block, but they're riding 25 to 30 hours a week. And importantly, they have a full capacity for recovering. Their job is a pro athlete. If you're watching this and you're riding the bike anywhere between eight hours and 12 hours a week, the pro number I'm mentioning here, it doesn't really apply to you. So match your dose to your week. The next level we need to talk about which is important is frequency. Frequency is how often we distribute this into our week. For somebody training 8 to 12 hours a week, that translates into one or two threshold sessions per week. Importantly here, more isn't better. You need to leave yourself space for adaptation. Three only if your full-time job is being a cyclist. A threshold session needs about 48 to 72 hours before another hard effort goes into the legs.

Stack two of them inside that window and the second one gets…

Stack two of them inside that window and the second one gets compromised and isn't going to give you the adaptation that it should. When I think about the conversations we've had with the top coaches on the pod, most favor this idea of block periodization. One specific type of adaptation targeted in each block. a few weeks emphasizing sprint, then we move on to a few weeks emphasizing V2, then a few weeks emphasizing threshold rather than running everything at once in what would be call randomly allocated intensity. For amateurs, this same logic really does apply in a similar way. Don't try to push every system inside a single week. Let's move on and talk about interval length. Threshold training, the classic approach to a threshold prescription, it's 2x 20, it's 3x 15, it's 4x 10. They all give you roughly 30 to 40 minutes of total threshold time, but they don't all train the same thing, and not a lot of people know this. 2 by 20 is the most demanding session mentally. Holding that target wattage through a full 20minute effort, it builds this mental durability you need because your form also starts to come apart because there's no real changes and it's it's kind of a grind if you've ridden it. 4x10 lets you sit at a slightly higher percentage of FTP because each effort is shorter which makes it useful on days when you want that quality but you don't have a full 2x20 mentally or you don't have a full 2x20 capacity in your legs. Recoveries between these intervals can range from anything between 5 minutes to 100% of duration depending on your secondary goal for the session. like is there a durability component you're trying to work on in addition to your primary adaptation which we're looking for here is threshold. If you can't finish the last interval with less than a 10% drop off in power from your first interval then I would suggest you haven't paced these correctly. You're trying to have this linear pacing across all the intervals. Excuse the brief interruption. The Roadman Cycling Podcast has teamed up with BikMo Cycling Insurance for this episode because let's be real, stuff happens. Whether it's a crash, the heartbreak of a stolen bike, or the all too familiar disaster, reversing over your prized arrow wheels, can help you protect your ride. They've got flexible policies you can cancel anytime. A 50% discount on extra bikes in your household. And coverage that extends to your kit, your race entries, and even travel when you're chasing that epic weekend adventure. So whether you're smashing sprints, grinding climbs, or just enjoying a Sunday spin, ride safe. BMO's got your back. Protect your ride before it's too late. Head to bitmo.com and get covered. That's bmmo.com. Flexible policies. Cancel absolutely anytime. Check the terms in your policy docs. Now, here's the exact session. So, I'm going to break these down and give you exact tangible sessions that you can take away and implement into your training. But before I jump into that, we've just started a waiting list for our third cohort for our not done yet coaching community, which we launched at Christmas, and it's just absolutely blown us away the demand for it. I think it's because it combines a lot of factors that previously weren't done together. So, we're going to be building your training plans, everything we talk about in here, but we couple that with the other four pillars of performance, recovery, strength and condition, nutrition, and community. So, if you want to join that waiting list, just go to roadmancycling.com/apply and you can join that waiting list and one of us will pop you an email and get back to you there soon. Okay. Right. Here's the three sessions you can ride this week. The first I'm going to give you, I have to give it to you because it's a classic. It's two by 20 minutes at threshold. So you're going to warm up for 15 minutes. Then you're going to do two intervals of 20 minute each at 95 to 100% of FTP. Five minutes of easy spinning between these 10-minute cool down. Bread and butter session. It's going to give you 40 minutes at threshold in a single ride. The second is overunders. I love this session. This is a formula we see a lot of world tour riders using. Again, if you're stuck for time, you can warm up for 15 minutes. If you have more, you can ride for a couple hours before that if you want. But the important working set is three intervals of nine minutes each. Inside each nine-minute interval, you alternate two minutes at 95% of FTP, one minute at 110% of FTP.

You're going to run through this three times

You're going to run through this three times. 5 minutes of easy spinning between the intervals, and then cool down as you see fit. 10 minutes, 15 minutes, whatever. The format forces your body to clear lactate while you're under load, which is why it feels harder than the average power suggests after the session. Third session, and again, I love this one. This is 4x 10 minute progressive. So, you get your warm-up done, 15 minutes. Then, we're going to have four intervals of 10 minutes. Starting the first one at 95% of FTP and adding like 1 or 2% to each interval. So, the last one lands exactly on that 99 to 101% of FTP. 3 minutes easy between these intervals, 10 minutes cool down after. If you tune into the cycling media, you'll hear a lot about carbon bikes. But the truth is, not all carbon is created equal. And that's really what Parley is about. Basically, instead of mass- prodducing frames as quickly as possible, they're taking sheets of high-end carbon and laying them up by hand piece by piece with really precise control over how everything is orientated. It's a slower, more labor intensive process, and that's exactly the point. Most brands don't do it this way because it takes way too much time. It takes too much skill and it's just more expensive. But Parley have always leaned into that. Parley frames are made in small batches by experienced builders in the US and Portugal with a big focus on how the bike actually feels to ride, not just how it looks on paper. Yes, these bikes do sit at more of a premium price point, but once you understand how much work goes into each frame, it starts to make a lot of sense. So, when you ride a parley, you're not just getting a carbon bike. You're getting something that's been built by a level of precision and attention to detail that most brands don't aim for anymore. If you're curious, you can check them out at parley ple.com and see the full range there. I've been riding my party bike for the last couple of months and I'm blown away by the ride and the experience and even people's reaction to it. It's a true work of art. When I look at our entire coaching community, and we're starting to get some good numbers in there at the moment, mistake I see almost every week, a rider sets out to do threshold work. They warm up properly, then they're motivated, so they hit their first interval at above 100% of FTP. By minute 12, they've already dropped to 90% of FTP. By minute 18, they're 85% of FTP. They get off the bike and they tag this as a threshold session. They call this a threshold session. They tell themselves this is a threshold session. But did they really just do a threshold session? If we look at the data, what it actually has drifted into is what we identified at the start, a sweet spot session. They've fallen into that 88 to 91% of threshold. They've executed a sweet spot session and they've called it a threshold session. The fix is to start the first minute or two of each interval slower. Start out at around 95% of FTP and let that system settle in. Then build as the effort goes on. Think about negative splitting it. So you're building to that 100% of FTP as you work through the interval. When it's executed this way, the wattage holds much steadier, much more linear across all intervals, and it can accumulate the threshold time that you set out to do. That one change is the biggest reason that I've seen riders starting to progress with their threshold training. They've been maybe been held back for years and they finally have this little unlock and they see their FTP move. If you want this slotted into your full training plan, well, that's what we build inside the Not Done Yet community and I left the link for that down in the description below. But you don't need a plan to get this started. You don't need to sign up for our community to do this. All you need to do is to take 30 to 60 minutes per session, one or two sessions a week, intervals of between 10 and 20 minutes, and apply this methodology. Most riders will see something meaningful happen to their threshold inside one month. Road man, thanks for tuning in. If you enjoy this type of content, please let us know in the comments.

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Anthony Walsh — Cycling Coach & Podcast Host

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Reviewed by Anthony Walsh · Last reviewed 2026-05-12

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The world's largest cycling performance podcast. Translating conversations with Greg LeMond, Professor Seiler, Dan Lorang, and 1,400+ episodes of world-class expertise into content that makes you faster.

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