It’s helpful to check in and see exactly where your fitness is throughout the year. Testing doubles as excellent training too, so why not incorporate it regularly?
Having just wrapped up my cyclocross season I figured that it’d be a good time to test myself and see what my power profile is looking like. The screen shot above shows efforts that were done at five and 20 minute durations, (testing VO2Max and Threshold fitness accordingly). A second day of testing can be done to measure maximum one minute power and also your 10 second max effort, (which indicate Anaerobic Capacity and Neuromuscular Power respectively).
The collection of 10 second, 1 minute, 5 minute, and 20 minute data points is known as your Power Profile and can indicate where your unique strengths and weaknesses are.
Understanding what you can do for a single max effort is one thing, but how much fatigue are you able to withstand or how many repeated hard efforts can you serve out? We can also test your fatigue resistance with workouts designed specifically to do just that.
Testing on a regular basis is a great way to measure the effectiveness of your training and the results can help us determine what training might be most appropriate for the next phase. Test often and train well!
-Travis