Can 140 Watts Become 200? Building FTP in a Season With the Trainer and the Weight Room

A 45-year-old triathlete tests at 140 watts in November. Can that be 200 by next summer?

It can be, for some athletes. That’s a 43% jump, and whether it’s realistic depends mostly on two things: where the 140 comes from, and how much riding actually happens. What a coach can make predictable is the process: an honest test, a plan written against that number, sessions ridden at exactly the prescribed watts, heavy leg strength work, regular retests, and a clear rule for what to change when the number doesn’t move. Nobody can promise the size of the gain, and the research is clear about that.

Which 140-watt rider is this?

The research splits riders into two very different situations.

A rider who has never really trained the bike has a lot of untapped fitness. In a study by Montero and Lundby of 78 untrained young men riding indoors for six weeks, maximal power rose about 1% for those who rode one hour a week, 5 to 7% at two to three hours, and 24 to 32% at four to five hours.¹ Big early gains are real, and they depend heavily on how much riding gets done. (The men chose their own group, and the study measured maximal power rather than FTP, so treat it as direction, not a forecast.)

A rider who is already trained gains in single digits per block. Two heavy leg sessions a week for 11 to 12 weeks added about 6% to 40-minute power compared with riding alone, in both men and women.² Nine weeks of mostly easy training with about a quarter hard intervals raised power at the lactate threshold about 8% in well-trained endurance athletes.³ No study stacks blocks like these across a season, but our rough estimate for a trained rider’s good season is 10 to 20%, not 43%.

So 200 is a sensible target for the triathlete who came from running or swimming and has never followed a bike plan. It’s unlikely for one who has ridden the same three hours a week for years and sits at 140. Three questions usually sort them out in week one:

1. How long have you been riding at roughly this level?
2. What did your bike weeks look like over the last three months?
3. What was your first sport?

The ruler: test honestly

FTP is the ruler. If the ruler is wrong, every workout written in percentages of it is wrong too.

The 20-minute test is very repeatable, which makes it good for tracking change in the same rider. But in 22 trained men, riders held 95% of their 20-minute power for an average of 42 minutes, not the 60 the test assumes, and the spread was wide (give or take 17 minutes).⁴ Treat the number as a little optimistic, especially for long threshold intervals.

The rest is coaching practice rather than research:

• Test the same way every time: same trainer, same calibration, same warm-up, same time of day, same fan. Pick one protocol and don’t switch mid-season.
• Keep an indoor number. Many riders test lower indoors. Set trainer workouts from the indoor number.
• Don’t let a hot ramp test or a virtual race reset the ruler. An FTP bumped up after one good day makes every session too hard, and ERG mode will enforce it.

Ride mostly easy, and make the hard days hard

In a nine-week trial with runners, cyclists, triathletes and skiers, the plan of mostly easy training plus hard intervals raised power at the lactate threshold by 8.1%. A hard-intervals-only plan raised it 5.6%, and a plan built around threshold work added nothing measurable in these already well-trained athletes.³ The groups also trained different total hours, and hard intervals were new to all of them, so this is a strong hint rather than a settled answer. For a true beginner, almost any consistent, structured riding moves FTP at first; the mix matters more as the rider gets fitter.

Winter trainer culture pushes the other way. A nightly menu of virtual group rides and races makes every session “kinda hard,” which is the middle zone that added nothing for trained athletes. For a club rider, the Saturday ride can be the easy volume, if it’s kept easy.

ERG mode holds a target wattage whatever the cadence. No study compares it with riding in resistance or slope mode, so what follows is practice. It’s a metronome, not a coach:

• It suits steady and threshold-type intervals, because the watts ridden are the watts prescribed.
• It suits sprints and very short efforts badly, because the resistance lags. Ride 30-second efforts in resistance or slope mode.
• Hold a comfortable, steady cadence. If the cadence sags, the resistance climbs and the rider grinds to a stop. If that starts, drop the target by about 5% rather than abandoning the session.
• ERG only delivers the right session if the FTP behind it is right.

Lift heavy

Adding heavy leg strength work to normal endurance training improves cycling performance in trained cyclists.⁵² In trials by Rønnestad’s research group, two sessions a week for 11 to 12 weeks raised 40-minute power about 6% more than riding alone, power at the lactate threshold rose 4 to 8%, and power in a 5-minute all-out effort at the end of a 3-hour ride rose about 7%.² That last test is the closest the research gets to a triathlon bike leg; nothing here measures the run that follows. Most of this evidence comes from one research group, which is worth knowing.

Heavy means heavy. The programs that worked used several leg exercises at a 4 to 10 rep maximum: a load you can lift only 4 to 10 times. Programs that failed were short, low-volume, a single exercise, or explosive rather than heavy.⁵² Light sets of 10 are exactly the kind of program that didn’t work.

The researchers recommend:⁵

• two sessions a week, 2 to 3 sets, 2 to 3 minutes rest
• learning the movements with light loads first; for a 45-year-old new to the weight room, this is the step that keeps them healthy
• lifting the “up” part of each rep as fast as possible
• a 12-week block in the off-season, with riding kept easy for the first 2 to 3 weeks while the legs adapt
• about one session a week in season to keep the strength

That’s the authors’ recommendation, consistent with their trials, not a tested optimum. A four-exercise example: squat or leg press, split squat, step-up and single-leg press.

Lifting didn’t add body mass in trials of 8 to 16 weeks, and it didn’t hold back VO2max.⁵ It seems to help through better economy and fatigue resistance late in long rides.

Age isn’t a reason to skip it. The one study comparing masters athletes (average age about 51) with young endurance athletes found the older group started weaker and less efficient on the bike, and gained more from three weeks of strength work. That study used a single exercise (knee extensions) and measured efficiency, not performance, so it supports “there’s room to gain” and nothing more specific.⁶

Lifting and riding don’t cancel each other out. A 2022 meta-analysis of 37 studies found combined training doesn’t reduce gains in strength or muscle. It blunted explosive power only when lifting and endurance work were done within about 20 minutes of each other, not when separated by three hours or more, and age (under or over 40) made no difference.⁷ Keeping lifts and hard rides three hours apart is a conservative rule, not a proven way to protect FTP.

Fit it into a triathlete’s week

The dose figure that mattered most in the untrained study, four to five hours of riding a week, is half the week for an age-grouper with 8 to 10 hours across three sports.¹ Two heavy leg sessions take another hour and a half or more. So the rule is trade, don’t stack: for a bike-focused off-season block, run volume stays easy and run quality drops to one session or none, while swimming stays as it is.

Placement rules from coaching practice:

• Pair one lift with the interval day where you can: ride first, lift at least three hours later.
• No heavy legs the day before a quality run or the long run, especially in the first three weeks while soreness is new.
• No long ride the day after heavy legs.
• Swim days are natural recovery days.
• Plan a lighter week every three or four weeks.

The season

The structure follows the evidence above. The specific weeks are coaching practice.

1. Week 0. Test, ask the three questions, and count the hours the athlete can really give each week across all three sports.
2. Off-season, about 12 weeks. Two heavy leg sessions a week; riding mostly easy, then one interval session a week once the legs adapt.⁵³
3. Retest every 6 to 8 weeks and update FTP, so every workout rescales.
4. Build, about 12 weeks. Strength drops to one session a week; one or two hard interval sessions a week, ridden in ERG, on a base of easy riding.⁵³
5. Race season. One strength session a week, intervals closer to race demands, some threshold work in the race position, and a lighter strength week before key races.

When the number doesn’t move

Check the dose before you change the plan. In the untrained study, men who hadn’t improved at lower doses all improved when they added two one-hour sessions a week for another six weeks.¹ That was a small group of young men, but the lesson travels: a rider who “doesn’t respond” may simply not be getting enough training.

1. Compare completed with assigned, for the bike and the strength sessions separately.
2. If the sessions happened, add riding time, and for a triathlete that may mean moving an hour from another sport rather than adding one.
3. Add hard work only once the easy volume is there.³
4. Check the ruler. A stalled number after an over-optimistic test can be the test, not the training.