shovelhd

A club rider went through a battery door and a crankarm replacement, and all is good now. Woks great with the 500.

globecanvas

Yes.

No. Your 500 will deal with it exactly as if it were a powertap.

One nice feature of the Stages is that it also transmits over bluetooth, so you can record power on your phone (using apps from Wahoo, Strava, etc) if you don't have a head unit that day for whatever reason.

Ygduf

for what it's worth, I've been actively trying to **** my rides on my 510 by pressing save and powering down immediately. It hasn't lost one yet. They may have actually fixed the issue!

abhirama

My HRM strap's battery died (it's surprising how long it lasted!) and I'm considering ditching HR. Ever since I started using a PM, the HR number on the screen is more for amusement than anything else. Is there any good reason to continue having HR if you have power? I know more data is always good but was wondering if there's a better reason to continue having HR.

shovelhd

Fatigue and pacing.

slynkie

as shovel said. Specifically for me, I end up use it when it's been a while (too long) since I've done an FTP test or any long interval. If my HR is too low then I know I'm going too easy. HR's affected by other factors, of course, but it's still a useful guideline.

Wylde06

I need to lower my FTP at this point. With my leg/hip being screwed up right now, and since I havent been able to do any sort of meaningful workouts in the last 3 months, I know it has dropped. And I can tell by my recent rides..tss and .if dont really match up to the effort of the ride. The thing is, I wont be testing (can't do longer "intervals" without it starting to hurt) anytime soon..so im not sure how far to bring it down..

slynkie

I had a similar case recently, with minimal riding in May, then nearly zero riding in June + July. With leg/hip issues, my suggestion is to err on the low side, to avoid going too deep too soon. As you're building back up and are able to ride harder, you'll start to notice IFs are too high, and you can start nudging your FTP back up. As soon as you're able to do a real threshold test or any more accurate estimate, go for it - you'll probably find you'd been underestimating yourself at that point, but you've mitigated the risk of further injury, and your PMC will self-correct more and more as time goes on.

shovelhd

I assume this is the end of your season, so overtraining is more of a concern than training under threshold. I would drop it 10w and evaluate it over several rides. Get your rest and heal up. You will want to test before you start structured training for next season.

furiousferret

I had to lower mine back in March about 20 watts due to nerve numbness / dead leg. I don't know how much power based training you do but if the values are set right you can guess your FTP just off RPE of intervals. If I were you I'd just go off my best 20 minute effort in the last few weeks, assuming your best 20 minute probably isn't all out.

slynkie

in case some data might help others, here's my PMC from May 1st. I didn't have a good spring, either, so by May 1st I'd dropped my FTP to 260w. Note this was a very rough estimate just based on experience, and it may have had no basis in reality. It would be a few months before I could garner the motivation to do any longer intervals.

The subsequent adjustments to 250w, 240w, 245w, were also untested. In retrospect, I probably never dipped down to 240w, but since an injury was involved I felt better erring on the "safe" side, as I mentioned in my other post. I had a decent August, and then after a rest week I finally felt motivated to do a CP20 test, from which I estimated my current FTP of 265w.

Bottom line is I'd suggest dropping somewhere between shovel's 10w suggestion, and 10% of whatever your pre-injury FTP was.

Good luck!

abhirama

thanks guys.
Fatigue, I understand. But for pacing purposes, isn't power sufficient? But yeah, I'll continue using the HR.

echappist

For ITT, i prefer to look at HR and 3 second rolling avg. The HR tells me that i'm not going overly hard, and is really like having a rolling 30-60 second average. Then past the halfway point it cease to matter that much

The other thing is to look at HR throughout a hard effort (say your FTP test). I have a few too many files where HR is pretty steady up to the 15th minute mark, only to rise sharply near the end as i dial up the effort. That tells me i didn't really pace things as well as i could have.

also, while many lambaste Friel for his aerobic decoupling stuff, i actually find it an useful post-hoc tool.

As for fatigue, while i'm sure you probably already know this, for others who are wondering, this often manifest as a suppression of HR and a slow response of HR with respect to effort. You'll know when your legs feel really heavy and are pushing mid to high Z3 power at top of Z2 for HR. Sure, you may have gotten stronger, but this is also an indication that you should dial things back a bit.

shovelhd

Nice job Chappy. I don't do too many TT's but the same principles apply to a solo effort in a road race.

echappist

thanks shovel. Good point about RR pacing.

found the following from a ride earlier this year (a purely s*** & giggles ride to set PR). The first one is much better paced than the second, though the second one was at higher power. The first interval ended up being 10W above FTP, so i was relatively more certain of how much i could push and not fear blowing up for going too hard. Even though it was a negative split, the overall HR profile shows that it's relatively better paced.

I knew i could probably go faster the second time, but i had no idea how much faster. In retrospect, i should have targeted power of the first interval for the first 10 minutes of the second and push harder afterwards. Instead, I have a tendency to fear blowing up as i've done that quite often even when i had a pacing tool, so i can only convince myself to go all out for the last 5 minutes. This makes for horrible pacing as HR rose by 9 bpm from the 15th minute to the 20th, whereas HR was constant from the 15th minute to the 20th minute of the first interval.

jsutkeepspining

I don't use my hrm regularly (i always forget it at home). I think it's interesting, but i don't see a need for it in the moment. I am relatively good with rpe and telling how my body is doing. I rarely have days where i'm like "wow i feel so great i'm so fast!" **** i'm doing 200 watts and i thought it was 300. I also don't have too many "i have to be doing 200 watts right now" looks down and see 400. This is just my opinion on it, I am not saying you should or shouldn't use it, but for me, I don't use it regularly.

shovelhd

I agree that if your RPE is finely tuned that HR is relegated to a support metric rather than one you use actively. The issue I have had is varying fitness and performance based on numerous external factors like injury, medical issues, etc. HR can reinforce your RPE. It can be a good indicator. Not one to train by, but as a secondary indicator.

furiousferret

For me I know when I hit xxx bpm I know I'm about to blow up. That's really the only thing I use HR for.

Ygduf

take it off your screen then. You'll immediately be stronger.

Hermes

I pretty much stopped measuring HR when I started measuring power in 2009. I saw a lot of variability in HR with heat, indoor v outdoor, rest, hydration and etc and HR proved somewhat useless for pacing high intensity efforts due to it being a lagging variable. And not much value to a trackie doing 500 meters or other max efforts.

My coach this season loved HR. He saw all kinds of things in it but mostly used it to set rest intervals between efforts and as a measurement of fatigue both based upon the rate of recovery after efforts.

It takes me a long time to warmup and if I go use too much effort, I will feel the fatigue in my legs. If I warm up more slowly and match HR to power production, my session (racing or training) goes much better. Typically, my second effort in an interval session is the best one but it is almost never the first one. I suspect this is due to age but also genetic makeup. Some athletes just seem to be able to go harder from the moment they start a session and I have never been one of those guys.

Enter Cycling Analytics... I used to use TP WKO and GC (for OSX operating system). Cycling analytics is cloud based so I wanted to try it on my MAC. IMO, it is the best software on the market today and has many interesting features one of which is called physical working capacity (PWC), which refers to the amount of power that is produced at a specific heart rate. PWC130, PWC150 and PWC170 are the the power produced when the heart rate is raised to 130BPM, 150BPM and 170BPM. Ideally, these numbers are worked out by doing a specific test, but it’s also possible to work some things out by looking at power and heart rate from a normal ride.

CA creates a chart of HR v Power so one can see the power at PWC 130, 150 and 170 and the shape of the curve.

So, I have started recording HR again on longer endurance rides that feature some efforts. Like most pieces of data, it is interesting and may when used with other data confirm improvement in aerobic conditioning and offer a insight if there is additional headroom for increasing FTP or was their spare HR capacity during a race that was not utilized or the converse that racing shows more capability that is not being addressed in training.

furiousferret

Agreed x1000

Dunbar

My soft HR strap stopped working (again) and I'm trying to decide if I want to replace it (again!)

Wylde06

I thought my soft hr strap stopped working ~2 weeks ago..have you tried putting the battery in upside down for a few minutes? Worked for me after putting a new battery in and that not working,

Dunbar

The battery is only a few months old. It still works intermittently but it's not reliable anymore. The soft straps just don't last very long IME. If I replace it I'll probably get the hard plastic ones that pretty much last forever.

tetonrider

sounds interesting.