What kind of engine are you?
Your FTP is one dot. The shape of your power curve says far more — and two riders with the same number can be opposite riders
2026-06-24 · 4 min read · Brevet · AI-assisted
Drafted with AI assistance and reviewed by a human. The science is sourced and real; the article isn't medical advice.
The short version: FTP is a single point on a curve, and a curve has a shape. Two riders can share an FTP to the watt and still be opposite engines — one explosive and fading, one quietly relentless. Read the whole power-duration curve and your type is obvious. Read only the one number and you've thrown the personality away.
Same number, different rider
Two riders in your club test at the exact same FTP. On paper, twins.
On the road, nothing alike. One sits in all day, then lights up the final 200 metres and takes the kick every time. The other can't sprint to save their life — but points it up a twenty-minute climb and rides the whole group off their wheel. Same number. Completely different gifts, completely different races won.
So what was that single number actually telling you about them? Almost nothing that matters.
Your power lives on a curve, not a point
Here's the thing the one-number habit hides. Your real fitness is the most power you can hold for every duration — a hard five seconds, a brutal minute, a five-minute climb, twenty minutes, an hour. Plot all of those and you don't get a dot. You get a curve, and the curve has a shape.
A steep curve that starts sky-high and drops fast is a sprinter or a puncheur — enormous power for seconds and minutes, less interested in the long grind. A flatter curve that gives up little as the clock runs is a diesel or a time-triallist — no firework at the top, but it just will not quit.
Look where the two lines meet: dead on the twenty-minute mark, the same FTP. Everywhere else they're nothing alike. The number where they cross is the one most apps build your whole plan around — and it's the one spot on the entire chart where these two riders are indistinguishable.
Why the shape changes the work
This isn't trivia for the data shelf. A sprinter and a diesel sitting on the same FTP need genuinely different training. Hand them the identical plan and you blunt the one's gift while never touching the other's ceiling. Your strengths tell us what to protect; the dips in your curve tell us where the cheap wins are hiding. You can't see either from a single point.
How we read it — and where we shut up
We don't type you off one test. We build your curve from your whole history of hard efforts — every genuine max you've put down across every duration — and read the shape that emerges, then let it steer the coaching toward your engine instead of a generic template.
The honest catch is in the gaps. A curve is only as truthful as the efforts under it. If you've never actually emptied yourself in a sprint, the short end isn't your sprint — it's a blank we won't fill with a flattering guess. If you never go truly long, the right end is thin. We'd rather tell you "this part of your curve isn't earned yet, go put down a real effort" than invent a phenotype out of missing data.
And your type isn't a life sentence. It's where your engine sits today. The shape bends with training — that's the whole point of knowing it. Read the curve, find the gift and the gap, and you stop training like an average of everyone and start training like the rider you actually are.
You're not a number on a test. You're a shape on a curve — and the shape is where the rider lives.
A note on what this is
Brevet is a training and coaching tool, not a medical device. Your power-duration curve and rider type are performance descriptions built from your own efforts, never health assessments. The platform recommends; you decide every session. Our methods, and the limits of typing from incomplete data, are written up in plain language on the Science page.