Mike's Bike Blog

When I first got my power meter last July I did the rider profile testing which includes a 5 minute test. Basically you go all out as hard as you can for 5 minutes. Since that initial test I never went back and retested. I mainly test in the 20 & 30 minute ranges to get my FTP.

I haven't thought much of it until a thread on the Wattage google group came up regarding VO2Max and a formula was presented to get an approximation based off of the 5 minute power result. People started throwing out their numbers and how accurate or inaccurate their computations came out to versus a lab conducted vo2max test with drawing blood.

I pulled up my power profile up on trainingpeaks.com to find my 5 min power at 353 watts. This seemed low, just like my 1 minute power. I looked at the ride that this number came from and it was a hill route I did with Jeff, Joe and Scott. It wasn't an overly hard ride and not one that I went out of my way to ride hard on.

Beforehand if I had to guess what I'd do on my retest I was thinking 390 to 400 watts. Well after retesting my final was 358, not the big jump I was expecting so what went wrong or what was different with this test?

After analyzing the effort I did too much at once. For this test instead of doing 5 minutes I did 6 minutes. I did this because some of the workouts use the number from the 6 min critical power effort. I figured I'd do 6 minutes and have both numbers. The surprising thing was my 6 min and 5 min power numbers were identical, my 6 minute number held steady at 358. That seemed very odd, I was expecting some drop off. On the really steep sections of Ladera Norte I was running out of gears and had to stand on these sections compared to spinning at a higher cadence. This is due in part to changing out the compact cranks for standards a couple months ago. Plus I had on my 11x23 cassette, not the ideal choice for the 20+% grade sections.

I thought one more test was in order to see what would happen if I just did a flat out 5 minute test and with a 12x26 cassette. Well that test happened last week. I lined up at my start point and let it all hang out on Ladera Norte. The taller gear felt a lot more manageable and it allowed me to hold a cadence of 72 rpm which was faster than last time which was only 67 rpm. At the end of the 5 minutes I was ready to poop a lung. I didn't have anything in the tank to make it up the last tenth of a mile climb to the top of Ladera Norte. So I turned around and went back via 360.

On this last test I came out with a number of 380 watts for the 5 minutes. Plugging that into the formula:

VO2 max= 1.8*((P5min*6.12/Kg)+3.5)+3.5

My VO2 Max comes out to 62. What does that number mean? Well according to this site  I would be at the low end for a male bicyclist. I'm on the high end for hockey players, I guess I  made a good choice in my sports growing up.

Jesper over at Training4Cyclists.com has posted  How to Increase your VO2 Max in 14 days  I will have to give this plan a go. Jesper has a good post on why training at VO2 Max that's worth reading. Not only is a high VO2 Max the prize for cyclist but also building up your body for a faster recovery after such efforts. Not only is my VO2 Max a limiter but I don't think my body has gotten accustomed to recovering quickly from such efforts. Anybody want to join in on the fun and join me in doing the 14 day VO2  Max test? I'll probably start next Tuesday. If you don't have a power meter you can do it the old fashioned way and ride up a hill for 5 minutes and record how far you get for your base 5 minute test.