Power Output vs Age

[Leftymax]

I am trying to figure out if I am getting, or can get stonger, just maintainging what I have , or loosing power becouse of my age.

I am 47, started road cycling two years ago (MTBin for 4 years previous), and trying to keep track with the iBike as to where I stand in regards to power output, and can I get stronger or is it to late in my life.

I know this might be to general of a question, but at what point in your life will you power output start to decline in cycling in regards to age ?


Thanks
Tom

[iodaniell]

I am trying to figure out if I am getting, or can get stonger, just maintainging what I have , or loosing power becouse of my age.

I am 47, started road cycling two years ago (MTBin for 4 years previous), and trying to keep track with the iBike as to where I stand in regards to power output, and can I get stronger or is it to late in my life.

I know this might be to general of a question, but at what point in your life will you power output start to decline in cycling in regards to age ?


Thanks
Tom

Check these pages by Stephen Seiler PhD:

http://home.hia.no/~stephens/hrtage.htm
http://home.hia.no/~stephens/musage.htm
http://home.hia.no/~stephens/maxpower.htm

They are accessible from here:

http://home.hia.no/~stephens/exphys.htm

...which is part of the The MAPP (Masters Athlete Physiology and Performance):

http://home.hia.no/~stephens/

[rruff]

I know this might be to general of a question, but at what point in your life will you power output start to decline in cycling in regards to age ?

*If* you had been training hard for a decade or so, you might be noticing a decline in some performance parameters. But since you haven't been riding that long, you probably have room for performance improvement. At any rate the downward curve is rather shallow at age 47 for most athletes.

[sl@enposte.net]

A few years ago I did a rough analysis of the Test of Metal results. A local mass start mountain bike race. With 800 (limited too) entries... and a multi-year result base to work with, sorted minimally by age (10 year age increments...)

The difference between the pro riders finish at typically 2:45 and masters 50 was about 30 minutes (3:10-3:12). Overall there appeared to be about a 1-2% overall drop in finish times per year of age for the elite podium riders. There was a similar but perhaps slightly larger difference at the mean finish (about 4:10).

The bottom line is, IFF you can train yourself back up, you will be competitive against all but the best of even the younger riders. But they will be able to get to the same level probably with less training time.

This appears to carry through up to 60-65 group. But there is less empirical evidence.

[5am]

I know this might be to general of a question, but at what point in your life will you power output start to decline in cycling in regards to age ?

Thanks
Tom

Like everything else in life that's age-related, it's not far from the truth to argue that at some point past the age of 30, all systems start to head south.
Over on the google wattage forum, power differences related to age have been a sometime topic. See for example, this discussion.

In the table, from the wattage forum (from a post by Jim Turner), the 2nd column indicates the "residual" performance level, the 3rd, the drop per year, in %. In other words at age 55 you can expect to be at 86% of your top level, ie 14% down.

At age 56 you will be down by 14% +0.73% = 14.7% and so on
40 0.9679 0.64
45 0.9333 0.69
50 0.8980 0.71
55 0.8616 0.73
60 0.8236 0.76
65 0.7834 0.80
70 0.7403 0.86
75 0.6935 0.94
80 0.6419 1.03

Turner also says: "Tne rule of thumb which is easy to remember and reasonably accurate is one percent decline in cycling power for each year over forty years old. For example, there are many pros in their late thirties and the power of a male 80 year is about 60% of his peak. There are studied differences in the decline based on event duration (anaerobic vs. VO2max vs. endurance), on gender and on amount of training but one percent gives you some idea of what to expect as the curtain begins to fall and the light grows dim...


One possible approach is to use the published age-graded factors that are used for running events. Since your event duration is one minutes, I copy below
some age-graded factors for men and women for running 400 meters which takes about one minute.

Factor
Age Men Women
-------------------
30 1.0000 1.0000
35 0.9693 0.9645
40 0.9384 0.9288
45 0.9071 0.8927
50 0.8751 0.8559
55 0.8420 0.8180
60 0.8073 0.7785
65 0.7704 0.7368
70 0.7306 0.6922
75 0.6871 0.6439

You could then take the measured power and divide it by the age factor to get an "age corrected" power. For example, if a 50 year old man held 450 watts
for one minute, his age-corrected power would be 514 watts = 450/.8751.

The full published tables give factors for each single year but you could just interpolate the values above if you want to use single year corrections."

Hope this helps.

[Leftymax]

Thanks a bunch for the replies, I'll just keep on pushing to see if I can keep increasing my output from where I was last


Tom