Half monty without HRM

Looking for advice regarding performing the Half Monty ramp test without a heart rate monitor.
Do I not bother at all with the constrained section of the test? Will I still get an estimate of my FTP if I stop after the ramp section?

Note: I have done the full frontal but looking for a shorter mid-plan check of my FTP.
Thanks.

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Hi @Ricardo! The constrained effort won’t amount to anything without a heart rate monitor. We need that effort to calculate your FTP.

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Thanks @Cody.Moore
So to be clear, i can’t do the ramp test element of the Half Monty and get an estimated FTP?
So for those of us without a HRM, our only option is Full Frontal?

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Hi @Ricardo - you can do the Ramp portion of Half Monty without a heart rate monitor and you’ll get a MAP value, but you will not get an accurate FTP estimation without a heart rate monitor, though you will get an estimated FTP based on your MAP that is more accurate than other Ramp test FTP estimates since we take into account your age, gender and weight into our estimates. But to reiterate - using a heart rate monitor will give you the most accurate FTP calculations from Half Monty.

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Thanks @Coach.Neal.H
That makes sense.
This estimated FTP is fine as i just want to use it as a mid-plan check. I faithfully suffer a Full Frontal test every 12 weeks or so.

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Hi everybody,
Hijacking this related topic instead of starting a new one.
I’m in the middle of a training schedule, and Saturday morning I had a Half Monty Ramp test on schedule.
Unfortunately, my Wahoo Tickr had Bluetooth connection problems during the test, so during the ramp test I had no heart rate registered.
Connection came through just before the contrained effort, but there was no suggested heart rate zone registered so I used the heart rate zone I remembered from a previous Half Monty.
The test results showed a quite spectacular increase of FTP (from 209 to 295 W in 8 weeks).
Yesterday I did a ‘Nine Hammers’-session which used my new values, and I had to reduce the intensity to 80% to be able to do this session.
Is my current FTP in SYSTM too high, or did I just have a bad day yesterday? :slight_smile:

FTP increasing by >40% in a short period of time points to an error in the test. A bad day shouldn’t result in needing a 20% reduction. I would not trust the second test.

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I agree with @Mecons. Your HM results depend on accurate HRM readings. Your best option is to rest a couple days and do a new HM or FF.