Anthony has had this exact conversation with John Wakefield, Dan Lorang, and Stephen Seiler on the podcast — and they describe the same shortlist every time. When an amateur reports a stuck FTP, the problem is rarely lack of effort. It's almost always one of five structural issues: time-in-zone is wrong, recovery is broken, fuelling can't support the work, periodisation has stalled, or the programme has gone stale.
The most common one is grey-zone drift. Riders think they're doing 'easy' rides at zone 2, but the file shows zone 3. They think they're doing 'hard' rides at threshold, but they're hovering at sweet spot. That mid-intensity creep accumulates fatigue without delivering real adaptation. Seiler's polarised research is unambiguous: trained endurance athletes need to spend most of their volume properly easy and most of their hard work properly hard.
Recovery is the second one. Anthony has said it directly: 'You don't get fitter from training, you get fitter from recovering from training.' A stalled FTP often runs alongside elevated resting HR, fragmented sleep, and a creeping drop in HRV. Add a deload week, eat properly, sleep, and it's not unusual to see the FTP move within two weeks — not because anything trained, but because the body finally got to express what was already there.
The other three blockers cluster together. Under-fuelling — particularly low carb intake on long rides — caps your top-end. No periodisation (training the same way every block) means the body adapts and stops responding. And programme staleness — the same intervals, same routes, same intensities for over a year — is essentially a slow-motion plateau. The Roadman Plateau Diagnostic walks through which of these four profiles is most likely yours.