Originally Posted by
terrymorse
The results: Here is my power vs. heart rate graph comparison. Red is last year, blue is this year.
[snip]
Lower is better. It's clear that my power at a given heart rate is significantly lower than last year.
Did you mean your HR at a given power is lower?
In any event, I'm not sure the ratio of watts/HR is that informative. To the extent that we're talking about aerobic production of power, we know that general metabolic efficiency doesn't change very quickly, so not on the order of five weeks. Likewise, A-V O2 differential doesn't change very quickly over the same time frame. So, over a shortish period of time, power generated aerobically is pretty closely related to cardiac output. Cardiac output is just HR * stroke volume, so watts/HR is mostly a proxy for SV.
Maybe your SV has increased, but probably not because of things you've been doing since Jan 1.