Hi all, I was wondering if anyone here has started taking beta blockers, and happy to share the effect it had on your FTP i.e. before to after - and how workouts feel?
Thanks in advance 
I had a brief experience with beta blockers due to arrhythmia. It made it impossible to get my heart rate up, I felt tired all the time, and I had fainting episodes due to low blood pressure (my BP was normal before starting beta blockers). My understanding is that it can take time to settle on the choice of medication and dosage, and I wasn’t on the pills long enough to work through that process. They had a profound effect on athletic performance for me. If I had been on them longer I would have needed several follow up consultations to get it right.
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I’m on an ACE inhibitor for mild hypertension, not a beta blocker, and unfortunately I started it prior to joining Zwift, so this may not be quite what you are looking for and may not be applicable in your case. Also, I am currently a mid- to high-D racer, so again may not have helpful info for you.
Since part of joining Zwift was to see if I could encourage my body to not need the ACE inhibitor in the future, I had been in low- to mid-D shape initially (FTP around 150), but was able to boost my FTP as high as 217, low-C level; haven’t tested recently but a few months ago it was around 200. So I was able to do most workouts that pushed me pretty hard … but if they require me to do a sustained effort near FTP, that part is very difficult for me to do. Short, very hard efforts are not a problem (I’m actually a decent sprinter) and long, low-level efforts aren’t an issue either, just the part that makes sense when you think about it.
The key piece of this for you is probably that I don’t have a baseline to compare to. If I’d done threshold work at 150 and not on meds, would that have been as hard, or is it just the meds that make that work a problem for me? I can’t say. But I can say that except for very specific times when I’m kind of tired at the start of the ride and the ride is fairly easy, I don’t have the side effects that Paul mentioned. (I do get drowsy when I’m doing something comfortable and not moving a lot; Zone 1 riding when I’m tired can get close to that.) I just struggle with effort that asks my heart to work at a pace it isn’t able to access right now. My heart rate caps at about 150 for most workouts; if I do a roughly one-hour race, stay with the pack, and sprint at the end, I might just poke it above 160 briefly; the highest 1’ HR I have on Zwift is 163. I’m 55.
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i was prescribed a very small dose of propranolol for an off label use and i don’t think it affected my threshold, but it killed my sprint and vo2 max efforts took a lot longer to recover from. efforts at and below threshold felt fine. recovery from day to day was also slower and i needed a lot more easy days than without them
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I have a friend with arrhythmia who is on those, in his case his HR is low. He just doesn’t have much energy at all to do anything.
Zwift he just wouldn’t be able to handle. 
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I had to use beta blockers for a almost a year due to arrhytmia.
Lowered my rest heart rate with about 5 (from 40 to 35BPM), maximum heart rate was reduced from 180 to 145BPM. But besides that I was feeling OK.
This reduced my FTP from around 300W to around 270W.
Luckily I have had an ablation (2 years ago). Rest heart rate went to 60BPM. Max heart rate again at 175BPM.
And FTP is back to 300W.
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