Hello and welcome to your next video. This video let's move the chair out of the way is all about Watts per kilogram. You might've heard that there's a lot of these online cycling programs, things like Zwift, where you go online, you take your trainer, you hook it up to the computer and you start riding along and your ability,

or you go into categories based on your Watts per kilogram. And you might go, Todd, what the heck is Watts per kilogram? Watt's up with that? You see what I did there? Watt's up. Yeah. Anyways, it's a very interesting number to know when you take your, your Watts or your power divided by your weight and kilogram, that gives you your power to weight ratio.

And that number is key in determining how well you're going to be as a cyclist. I'm going to teach you more about it in the PowerPoint. Let's go. So, first of all, what is power to weight ratio anyways?  It is the best measure of the ability for cyclists. It's going to be the number of this going to show you how well,

but you're going to do. It's a good predictor. It is the amount power you produce divided by your weight in kilograms. Now there's a book out there by Tyler Hamilton, and I read it and it was called the Secret Race. And I actually had a great chance to interview Tyler and even ride with him a couple of times. And he's just a cool guy.

And he, he was with the tour for many years. He was with Lance Armstrong and there's a whole part of him becoming one of the whistleblowers. And it's just a whole mess. But regardless of that, when they were training together, there was this always this magic number that they kept talking about that you had to have in order to win the tour de France.

And that was all based on your power to weight ratio. What is that number? And the number was, if you could get to 6.7 Watts per kilogram, then there'd be a very good chance that you could win the Tour de France. So these cyclists would always be trying to get their Power to Weight to be 6.7. And once they reached that number,

they go, okay, I think we can win. Let's go. Now the power in the power to weight ratio, that power right here that is going to be your functional threshold power. And you're like, what the heck is that Todd? Well, we kind of already talked about that when we were discussing how to calculate your training zones. So do you remember that bike test?

We talked about a while ago in previous videos. Well, that 30 minute bike test or a 20 minute bike test, whatever amount you want to use for your threshold test, the power that you can average during that test is going to be the power that you put in up here.  And that becomes your FTP or your functional threshold power.

And it's also known as the hour power. Now, when I'm talking about this, if you don't have power on your bike, you might go Todd, what the heck? I don't have Power on my bike. It doesn't matter. But it might because a lot of the trainers, these days have power and the spin bikes we are using have power.

So there's a lot of ways out there to have power without having a power meter, its becoming easier for people to have power than it used to be, but really your  FTP is your hour power or that's the maximum power that you could produce if you just went all out for an hour. No,

really, no one really does that. That's what we do the test about 30 or 20 minutes. But once you get that number that becomes the power. You plug it in right here. Now this ratio of the power to weight ratio is more important than just Watts. Now here's an example for you. Because you might be talking about Watts with your buddy.

You might say, Hey, look, my FTP is 300, mine is 350, or 250, 150 or 180 or whatever your number is? You might be curious. They will, Oh, you must be a better cyclist than I am, but that's not quite true. In this example, I'm going to show you why power is important,

but it's not, it's not like the most important metric to look at. Let's have a look. We're going to look at two riders rider. Number one has an FTP. So functional threshold, power of 250 Watts. Rider two we'll look at that has the exact same FTP of 250 Watts. So this could be you and your buddy and you're going,

you know what? We just took a test. We have the exact same FTP. So should we be the exact same rider? Well, no, because rider number one weighs 60 kilograms. Rider number two weighs 90 kilograms. And when you take that formula.... Power divided by your Weight to give you Power to Weight ratio, let's see what happens. Rider

number one, take 250 divided by 60 has a Power : Weight ratio of 4.2 Rider number 2  has a Power to Weight ratio, 250 divided by 90 of 2.8. So when you look at that, you can see Rider number one, because the ratio of this number is higher is going to be, is it going to be a faster cyclist or has the potential to be a faster cyclist than rider number Two.

And so just To reemphasize rider number 1 will be faster. You maybe thinking, well Todd, that's all fine and dandy, but how do I increase my power to weight ratio or my Watts to kilogram ratio? Like if I want to win that tour, I need to be in the 6's. How do I do that? Well, that's going to take a lot of riding,

but in order to increase your Watts per kilogram, here are three things you can do. The first one is you can increase more power, right? So it'd be Power divided by your Weight. If you increase this unit here, that's going to increase that ratio, right? So the first one you can do is increase your power to get strong. Number two,

you could keep your power exactly the same, exactly the same, but just reduce this number. So lose weight that increases your Watts to Kg ratio or number three, you can do a combination of the two. You can increase your power and lose your weight. And that's going to dramatically increase your power to weight ratio. As we get into more of these online classes or online programs where you take your bike,

hook it up to a trainer, and you start to look at those ratios of what your power to weight is. That number is going to become more and more important. Now for me, when I'm training for an Ironman I'm training athletes for Ironman, I want to see that number get higher and higher and higher and higher so that when we come to race day,

especially our key race, we want that power to weight ratio to be as high as possible. That's going to show you that we're going to be in a best cycling shape possible to have a really good race. Does that make sense? So this video was all about power to weight ratio. What or, Watt does it all mean? I know I did it again.

I just can't help myself. I just think I'm so, so funny. Anyhow, I hope you enjoyed this video and I will see you in the next video. Bye-bye :)