In the vehicle emissions business, ( unless you are Volkswagen ) everyone measuring the pollutants from their products uses the same protocol according to EEC or SAE.
The engine and drive systems are preconditioned, temperature soaked and tested to the same procedure, so that the result compares with other manufacturers’ products.
Its called a ‘Global standard’.
In the industry, a ‘round robin calibration vehicle’ is shipped around to the test labs as a direct comparator.
Testing a human being’s power output on an ergometer requires the same due diligence, i.e. each cyclist follows the same warm-up; rest period and test which follows the same ‘drive trace’ or output stages.
Allen and Coggan ( Trainingpeaks ) devised the protocol for either a full 60 minute FTP, or a CT20 ( Critical Test 20 minutes ).
First, decide which protocol we use.
What Allen and Coggan did, in effect, was to commercialise the work done by N.A.S.A.; David Gordon Wilson and Francis Whitt in the 1960s.
Of course, N.A.S.A. didn’t call it Functional Threshold Power. More like ’60 minute power test’ which speaks for itself rather than something cryptic in a new made up language which racing cyclists have to learn to be ‘in the know’.
They attempted to keep the entire protocol secretive, selling it for hard dollars to cyclists who wanted to compare themselves against elite cyclists who were being tutored by Allen and Coggan.
We could of course, make up our own Protocol and call it something different that only we know.
