As I said you can train to not need a warm up. I even said how to do so.
Your reading skills fail you in this thread like they have in most other threads you post in. Re-read my first post in this thread. If you can't figure it out ask a 1st grader to read it and comprehend it for you. You also appear to lack the understanding of how important it can be to absolutely nail the start of a mountain bike race, especially if there's lots of single track. It ain't no road race where you can easily get to the front buy just riding up the outside... I think one of your mystery drinking spigots out in the back woods must have been hooked up to the pesticide tank and into the water mains...An old Guy said:
Nail the start of a race. Great idea. Sort of beginner mentality.
Professional time trials - even the long ones are short easy days for the pros. They go out and ride for a couple hours after the time trial.
I have two comments on this. One is that the TT stages are very light workout days for TdF cyclists. They are at most about 110 TSS points for a cyclist that averages 150+ TSS points per day. This means that doing a substantial warm up won't significantly hurt their performance in the TT by tiring them out too much. Also note that just because they are spinning on the trainer doesn't mean they are working hard. (I actually don't know how many TSS points their typical warm is.)
1. TSS is a poor indicator, unfortunately. Most TdF riders sit in on long stages. Lots of seat time, very little effort. Compare that to going full-boogie at FTP for X amount of time. It's much easier to recover from three hours at an IF of .6-.7 than one hour with an IF over 1.0.
You don't know what you're talking about. TSS specifically takes this into account by using a fourth order moving average. Full FTP for an hour is NOT a hard workout for a highly trained athlete. Heck, it's not even a hard workout for me, and my CTL is only 90ish whereas theirs are in the 150 range. The really hard workouts tend to involve going into the red way above FTP for too long or too many times in a day (something also accounted for pretty well by TSS).
"A greater limitation to the entire concept, though, is that the basic premise – i.e., that you can adequately describe the training load and the stress it imposes on an individual based on just one number (TSS), completely ignoring how that “score†is achieved and other factors (e.g., diet, rest) – is, on its face, ridiculous. In particular, it must be recognized that just because, e.g., two different training programs produce the same weekly TSS total, doesn’t mean that an individual will respond in exactly the same way."
FTP (and TSS) is a correct measure for a 1 hour race. It is perhaps not a correct measure for a 5 hour race. While it is true that most of the riders sit in for several hours a day at the TdF, their power output for the entire ride is on the order of what most of us (you not me) can do for an hour or so. Those guys are working hard. Just look at them at the end of the race. (Much the same can be said the the RAMM riders. 15mph average. I can hold that for most of the day without feeling pain.
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Just saw this now. You're basically asking the $64000 question. There are all sorts of things that go into improving your FTP and it seems to depend somewhat on the person. However, more CTL is generally viewed as better up to the point where your body hits its limit and can't recover anymore (and this cutoff is different for different people). So for most people 100 would be better than 90, for example (and 110 better than that). Personally I've never had the time to go over about 95 and I've always thought more training would help me more.
