Originally Posted by
carleton
I missed this.
So, please give me a problem scenario for a sprinter that can be solved by analyzing power that cannot be solved by analyzing speed and cadence data?
Lack of track time. Power is a great thing if you do most of your training on the road.
Seriously though, standing starts. Speed and acceleration lag torque production, sometimes by a very large margin. And you can use a powermeter to analyze torque. In fact, any place where you are training hard accelerations, having torque data is useful for training those jumps. Speed is literally half the equation of what makes a bike move. The other half is torque, and that is what a powermeter measures.
My only knock against powermeters is they are expensive, and unless you are building a training program around that data (and the specific weaknesses that data uncovers), they are practically useless for sprinting. Track sprinters aren't usually in the business of modulating efforts, and performance improvements are directly measured using a clock.
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Cat 2 Track, Cat 3 Road.
"If you’re new enough [to racing] that you would ask such question, then i would hazard a guess that if you just made up a workout that sounded hard to do, and did it, you’d probably get faster." --
the tiniest sprinter