Seattle Forrest

For what it's worth, having a power meter doesn't make you push yourself harder. It can be the opposite, having one helped me get up hills faster by not blowing up too early, until I unlearned that habit. 350w doesn't feel hard at first, it's not until the match is already half burned.

joelcool

I have a PM and do not race - I commute and ride for fun on weekends. My computer displays HR speed, time, miles covered, feet climbed, calories burned and some other stuff I can't remember right now.

I still make it to work and home each day, even with all that data. The PM / HR data is kind of interesting to me, but since I don't have a coach and I am not training to race, it's just that, data.

Most of the time I spend on the bike is enjoying the ride, I really don't get obsessed with the computer's outputs, but it is fun to take a look and see how I'm doing - particularly on a windy day or when I'm feeling weak, the numbers indicate that I'm doing OK or that I could step things up a bit.

Bicycling has so many choices now, particularly with technology. I think it's all cool, but at the end of the day I enjoy going out for a bike ride - I get used to all the data and looking back on my rides, but it's not about that for me - it's about riding my dang bike.

rubiksoval

Nothing tells you what you can do. Especially heart rate. Let's say I'm tapped out at 195 bpm. Can I go harder? Well, sure. I can stand up and sprint, albeit for a pretty brief amount of time. Same with a power meter. You can "always" go harder if properly motivated. There's not a device that's going to tell you that.

rubiksoval

Indeed. A powermeter is very useful for both pushing harder and easing off.

Because of the lag in heart rate (even more so when fit), you can push much harder than needed/wanted for brief amounts of time and that may not be reflected in heart rate at all.

It's really pretty easy to maintain gearing and just power up every little roller without a big effect on heart rate, but continually doing that without appropriate recovery may hamper you down the road.

Conversely, it's really easy to ease up and coast at the top of every roller and descent or when eating or drinking or whatnot and waste a lot of time coasting/soft-pedaling that could otherwise be spent getting some training effect. It takes a very concerted effort with routes that have no stoplights and minimal intersections for me to maintain less than 10% coasting/soft-pedaling/z1 on my rides. Without paying attention, I used to easily rack up 20-30% of ride time doing that. In a 2 hour ride, that can be almost 40 minutes of minimal training effect. Ain't nobody got time for that...(at least I don't).

Racing Dan

That is not what i said. I said a PM only tells you what you do, right now. You still need to supply the context yourself. Did you eat, drink, sleep, ride 100 mi yesterday, have the sniffles, is it 95 degrees, ect? All have a strong impact on what you can and cannot do on a given day. Thus the claim a power meter is "much more accurate" than a HM is a half truth. Much more accurate at what? Contrary a HM does give some insights into how your activities impact your body, where the PM does not. Again, there is room for both. Im not claiming one is Better than the other. They are different tools.

rubiksoval

Much more accurate at telling output. HR is reactive, and it's reactive to a myriad of factors that you may or may not have control of. And it's not even reactive in the same way from day to day! So using it as a basis for training is fraught with being hindered by said factors. Not that it can't be done, but you're likely to waste a lot of time figuring the ins and outs of hr in relation to those factors and doing a bit of guessing as to what you're actually doing and/or capable of in regards to your training and performance.

Your examples are a precise reason why I don't train by hr. If I need to do 300 watts for an hour, I'll do that whether it's 40 degrees and my heart rate is 155, or it's 80 degrees and my heart rate is 170. If I did 100 miles yesterday, my hr is going to be 10-15 bpm lower across the board. Going by heart rate in either of those situations is not going to tell me anything about my actual fitness.

There's room for both and a whole host of other things. The question is whether or not it's in any way useful or providing meaningful input. In my experience (and my first 6 years of riding and racing were done exclusively with a hrm), no, it's not.

RChung

There are lots of ways to enjoy cycling. Some people get that enjoyment riding with a power meter. Others prefer to ride without one. A few like being killjoys. Cycling is a big tent and everyone has a place.

ljsense

[QUOTE=ymee;20833765I was thinking of purchasing the Assioma dual power meter pedals as a means of studying my power while riding and balancing my output during hill climbs etc. when riding with friends. Do you guys think looking at this data is useful...[/QUOTE]

If you're asking about left vs right balancing, I think you'll find it useful the first few times you ride. You'll either see one leg is stronger than the other, or, more likely, they're the same.

I bought dual pedal power meters, saw that my L/R output was always within 1 percent, then sold them. If you haven't had a leg injury, chances are your legs have about equal strength.

ymee

That's exactly why I am looking for one. i tend to not pace myself well and blow out at the first part of a long climb. Would like to use the power meter as a gauge to place myself at a level I know I can sustain the entire climb.

BluFalconActual

canklecat

Valid point.

Wouldn't work for me. If I saw those numbers in real time I'd push harder. Unless there's an app that yells at me or jams a frame pump through the spokes when I exceed a preset threshold.

Same reason I don't take out the road bike for casual rides, like today. Unless I skip the clipless shoes and wear soft soled shoes that hurt my feet when the Look pedals jab me, I'll turn every outing on the road bike into a workout. So I ride the hybrid for those days when I'm trying to put in more miles at a casual pace.

Seattle Forrest

Honestly from all of what you've said, it sounds like these would serve you well. If you still have doubt, is recommend checking the return policy, and maybe renting a pair for a week too.

We all have some intuitive ideas about how to ride a bike. It seems like charging at the hill to build momentum going into it is a good idea, and it's advice a lot of people give. It also seems like mashing is going to put out more power than spinning but my biggest numbers always come at a high cadence. Being able to see how it all comes together, I'm real time with no appreciate delay, everything just becomes clearer.

Training isn't too demanding, you can train just fine without a PM. It helps with that too, but training is the tip of the iceberg.

Seattle Forrest

​​​​​​All Garmins have this. Doesn't have to be power either, you can have them yell at you when your HR or pace or watts are too high, or too low. I used to set an alarm for when I went into HR zone 4 or 5 back in the day. I could always choose to ignore it and sometimes did, but it was a good reminder, told me I'm planning to ride tomorrow and let's not over do it today.

Again, this works so much better with power than with pulse rate. It takes almost a minute for my HR to reflect what's going on. A power meter has 1 second delay, it shows you what going on now, not an average of the last 45 seconds.

I'm not trying to sell you a PM, I just like taking about bikes and technology. And I don't think PMs are understood all that well by a lot of cyclists so I'm also trying to clear up misconceptions and add some context.
​

chicagogal

Just wondering... Now that you make a concerted effort to stay out of z1 as much as possible, what percentage in z1 are you seeing? I did a hard 2.5hr effort the other day of mostly steady riding, but pushing the pace a bit (no sprints or accelerations) and was not surprised to find that nonetheless 28% of it was at z1. That still means that 72% was above z1, with 25% at z4 or above and a solid chuck in z3.

I have pretty much accepted that even when I am trying to go hard, something like 30% will still be z1.

... not to hijack the thread. As you can see, I like my PM. I find it difficult to ride without it. I don't race, but I train and I like numbers.

colnago62

BonkonFleet

Great posts.

rubiksoval

I'm typically around 8-10% for steadier or tempo/sweetspot rides. Harder intervals may be closer to 12-15% with the additional needed recovery. Yesterday I did some bigger efforts and my ride was 11% Z1 for 2 hours and change. Group rides I don't even worry about it as they're always higher.

But I don't have any red lights and few stop signs on my routes. I very rarely have to come to a complete stop, so that makes some difference, too. The biggest thing for me was how much time I used to "ease up" even though it felt like I was going harder. Now I get as much "work" done as I did before when I was doing 50% or more total hours.

jadocs

Rubiksoval and Seattle Forrest are spot on.

colnago62

chicagogal

I have a coach, and love having handed over the responsibility of analyzing the numbers. It is a major time saver for me, and takes away from some of the stress of training. Like if I plan a workout and fail to hit the numbers, I no longer have to try to figure out whether it was an error in planning or an error in execution. However, I don't think that everyone needs a coach to work with power numbers. I have many years of experience with my data and know how my body responds to training. I would probably be a terrible coach for someone else, because I have the tendency to assume that everyone is just like me. But if an individual athlete takes the time to understand their own numbers, then the PM is very useful, even without a coach.

burnthesheep

It's all about specificity. You want to challenge the right energy system in the body sufficiently hard and sufficiently long to induce adaptations.

There is a such a thing as a dreaded "eternal z3 rider" who rides kinda hard all the time. Not hard enough to be steady state. Too hard to be Z2 (and thus reaches exhaustion too soon to get enough Z2 work).

You don't get fast eternally trying to ride the entire ride at the same pace. You get faster by doing the work to force the body to adapt. I would say a good VO2 ride would have pretty much only Z1 and Z6/Z7 power. Same for SS workouts. Etc....

Here is why it's tough to say you train with HR.......the lag in HR change over time in a trained person.

If I tried to hit a target HR on that first interval I'd have destroyed myself for the workout. It never even gets out of the 160's the first rep. But, note the drift over the reps. You can see a sloped line on the 2 1/2 min and the 1 min intervals going up over time. This is why you train with power even if you ride by RPE.

https://www.strava.com/activities/2206466606

RChung

I have a story sorta like this. When my wife and I learned that she was pregnant with our first daughter, I knew our lives would change in lots of ways. One (minor) way was that my hours on the bike would be cut back quite a bit. I had had a coach a couple of years before that but was dissatisfied with the connection and results. I started using a power meter. Much more than using HR or a coach, one of the first things that became clear was how much of my time on the bike was either too low intensity or too high intensity; sometimes, in regards to pacing, I was too high intensity at the start so got spent and straggled in. In the months before she was born, I cut my training time almost in half, but saw no change in my overall performance because I was being more efficient about how I was spending my bike time. I took a big hit in training in the first year of her life when I did almost no riding but thereafter was able to get back close to my performance on a bit more than half as much volume as I had been doing before I got the PM. People often ask how much they'll improve if they get a PM. In my case, I didn't improve at all -- I held about the same on roughly two-thirds the volume.

My kid is now a sophomore in college, so this was 20 years ago, before power meters were widely used and there were essentially zero coaches who knew what to do with power data anyway. There were no books, and few resources. So I think it's easier now than it was then to learn what to do -- and even easier if you find a coach who actually knows how to coach with power.

The other way that I use a PM, of course, is to get faster on the same amount of power -- or, as I'm now past my prime, to stay at the same speed with ever-decreasing amounts of power. I don't know of any way to use HR to do that.

jadocs

I improved a heck of a lot using a PM and output as a metric and I do not have a coach.

MinnMan

Like the OP, I am a non-racer who thinks about getting a power meter and like the OP, it's my time on a trainer that gets me thinking about it. in the basement, even with Zwift, there's not too much else to focus on and I pay a lot of attention to my power. I start thinking about getting a power meter for my road bike, but then the cost gives me pause....

And then I think about how much I cared about my cadence when I first got a cadence sensor, and then I stopped paying attention. And then I was really interested in my HR after I got a HRM, but after a while, I paid less attention - I know how to pace myself to keep from going into the red without checking my HR obsessively. I figure it would be the same with a power meter - at first it would be really interesting and I'd probably learn a lot, but then it would matter to me less and I'd stop paying attention.

And so I won't buy a power meter this spring and I'll forget all about it. Next winter, when I'm on the trainer, I'll think about it and do a little internet window shopping, and yet again, won't actually buy one.

chicagogal

If the goal is not to improve the numbers, i.e. train, then I don't recommend getting one. However, once you learn what you can do for 30min, 20min, 5min, 1min, etc. you can try to go a little longer or a little harder. If you do the work to make the power numbers go up, you will be faster... but if that isn't what you want, then there is absolutely no reason to get a PM. So many folks in this thread suggest using a PM for pacing (to slow down). I really don't think it is worth spending $1000 for a tool to go slower. A PM is a training tool - a tool to help you go faster. If a group or a race is attacking a climb and you look down and see power numbers outside your comfort zone, your only choice is to ignore your numbers and embrace the hurt or get dropped.... Then when you are on your own you can train to build your fitness to the point where those numbers don't hurt so much.