My question is pretty straightforward but I understand the answers will be widely varied. With that said:

How did the Pros train before they had power meters? More specifically, what did training plans look like when coaches were training on HR data only?

I started using HR near the end of last year, and I recently acquired a turbo trainer. did I've been lifting weights since November, lost a bunch of weight, and gained tons of explosiveness and power. The problem is, I can't quantify how much!

If I had a power meter, this would be a simple task, just look at my peak threshold in each zone, 5s 20s 1m 5m 20m hour, and wouldn't that be dandy. I only have a HR however, and I'm doing a ton of HIIT intervals and still lifting,

What is the best way to QUANTIFY my improvement with the data I have available now? How did the pros create a training plan without power data?

Variables I can measure that matter:
-cadence
-perceived wheelspeed on the trainer
-trainer mileage
-trainer time
-trainer resistance
-gear
-performance in plyo/sprint workouts
-most important: heart rate

I'm not a numbers guy. Two ways to measure things are the scales in the bathroom and enter some races.

What are your goals? You said you've lost a bunch of weight and gained tons of explosiveness and power. Why does being able to measure it matter?

my group ride is pretty spirited, I did 1 road race last year (it went very, very poorly lol), and plan on doing a couple crits and maybe a road race this year too. I'm a total numbers guy and want to have something to train towards to keep me motivated. I have a done a ton of research, and I understand all the basics, but without being able to see power numbers, I'm not sure what's the best measure of improvement.

will my HR come down? that seems like an adaptation that would happen much slower than my gain in fitness

ability to hold a higher cadence in a higher gear? sure but that seems rather unscientific relative to power output

max RPM or top "speed" at a given trainer resistance? again very unrepeatable on the road and seemingly irrelevant, although maybe the best approximate answer

I guess I'm curious if the older methodology included some elaborate or even simple algorithm that included these variables, or was training really as imprecise as it would seem? and even so, what would be the best way to measure a benchmarch with my given data points, and what are some initial guidelines for improvement using only the data I have available?

Like they look with power, except efforts are prescribed in terms of heart rate not power.

3x10 at 103% of LTHR not 3x10 at 105% of FTP. 2x10 at 95% of LTHR not 95% of FTP.

Ride as fast as you can up hills for durations of interest. Heart rate will be fairly consistent once it catches up to effort, except on shorter intervals where there isn't enough time for that to happen.

Distance up a steady grade in a given time is essentially proportional to power - nearly 90% of your effort is going into overcoming gravity with speed varying linearly with power, and due to the low speeds involved much of what's left comes from rolling resistance with power to overcome also linear.

If you want to compare yourself to the e-wang chart or change climbs Strava's estimates should be fairly accurate.

Or ride indoors for the durations of interest and derive average power from trainer speed according to its conversion curve. Kurt's fluid trainer curve is very consistent after a 10 minute warm-up.

Heart rate is just a side effect.

After some training your aerobic and anaerobic thresholds won't change appreciably within a season, although heart rate will vary due to cardiac drift, dehydration, and over-reaching. You just get faster at those levels.

You need to look at the work you get done in that time, with work divided by time yielding power.

I've been training with HR for ~20 years. I hear what you're saying. I do hill repeats on the same hills, so either time or how high I get when the interval's over tell me how I'm doing. I also use Strava now, which gives me some data: estimated watts and VAM particularly. However by far the best thing is to have a group ride with the same bunch of folks every week. Of course as summer comes you'll all get faster so there are confounders. However over the years, that's been my best source of "am I getting better" week by week. When summer comes here, there are big rides I've done every year so those really show me if my training plan has given good results this year.

I guess one might say, what are you training for? And are you getting better at doing that thing? That's how training's always been. You want to drop that rider good, right? Or maybe just hang with them? You gotta figure out how to do that. When you can, you've gotten better. One year it was learning to recover from successive accelerations. Turned out I was better at that than some riders. Another year I learned to hill sprint, dropped everyone. All that focus on numbers sometimes gets one separated from the real objectives. As they say, in winter train your weaknesses, in summer your strengths. Figure out your objectives and train to accomplish them. HR isn't even necessary. I ride with some fast guys including an age group national champ who ride and train with no instrumentation at all. It's not necessary, distracts, and adds weight. A lot of getting faster is simply riding smarter.

Your cruising speed at a given HR will increase. And that happens fairly fast. If you think that is different from "fitness" then I'm tempted to ask what you think fitness actually is.

However, don't get too hung up on the numbers. Lots of power-based trainers will boast to you about their FTP but can't race their way out of a paper bag, because success at racing is down to a lot more than the numbers. In fact I'd go so far as to say that the strongest rider loses as often as not. Lots of strong guys can manage fast but one-paced TT type efforts but can't cope with the repeated accelerations that a bike race typically consists of, or lack the brains to spend enough time out of the wind, or waste their strength trying to chase down repeated breaks that aren't going anywhere, or whatever.

As far as progress is concerned, believe it or not there was a time before HR monitors. Eddy Merckx didn't have one and he managed pretty well. They trained on the basis of time on the bike, and gear selection, and they measured their progress with a stopwatch - timing themselves over a prescribed course. Merckx himself spent many many hours being paced by his coach on a motorbike - three hours at 25 mph, that sort of thing. Their most important measures of progress, of course, were race results.

With a HR monitor it's pretty straightforward to create a training plan. Test for your LTHR then create HR zones based on either Friel's or Coggan's system. Then train to thise zones as you would to power zones. Friel's training bible explains how to adapt his plans for HR training and hiw to assign TSS to HR-based sessions. HR has limitations at the top end because of lag, and (to a lesser extent) on long sessions because of cardiac drift, but these can be compensated for with experience.

yeah I use Strava too, but the estimates I find are all over the place, especially when I switch bikes or if it's windy. add to that my HR monitor is standalone so it doesn't upload the data to my rides, which means Strava really is just guessing.

Interesting . . . I hadn't thought about it this way, but I guess it's what I've been doing all winter. Time to put these things to the road!

Yeah I think I definitely need to do a formal LTHR test, the zones on my monitor are clearly off. 220 - age is the default on my monitor, so it works out to 189 max for me (I'm 31). I regularly and easily see the upper 180s when doing intervals all the time, and I have even registered over 210 going all out trying to chase down a pack. So clearly 189 is not my max, and I think it's throwing off my zones, especially for steady state threshold efforts. They don't feel hard enough even though my HR is supposedly at 80% or whatever.

Should I do my LTHR test on the trainer or on the road? Or both and average them?

Should I do my LTHR test on the trainer or on the road? Or both and average them?

VAM. Find a hill, watch your ascent speed over time. Will be great if you want to climb hills, not as great if you have other goals. But if your goal is just to be able to measure improvement, VAM is a pretty good proxy for power.

Easier on the trainer because you can eliminate variables like terrain, traffic etc.

220 minus age is bunk, as you have discovered. I'm 61 years old and can still see 180 bpm occasionally.

If you switch bikes, you need to switch them in Stava, too. Strava calculates power by speed, assuming no wind, and by rate of ascent. It doesn't use your HR data at all. So if your watts are all over the place on non-windy days, they probably are. What device are you using to record and upload your rides? Offhand I can't think of one that doesn't have a HR recording function. If yours doesn't get one that does and an ANT+ compatible transmitter. They're almost all ANT+ compatible.

Speed and cadence are on a small cannondale iq114 wired unit mounted on the stem, HR is a sportline watch with chest strap, I mounted the watch on the bars so I can see it next to the cyclocomputer, Strava is running on my iphone tucked in a jersey pocket and I upload at the end of my rides, but I obviously can't sync the HR data. My cyclocomputer and Strava are well calibrated to eachother, and they were only off by about a mile when I did a century last summer, so for shorter rides I consider them accurate for my purposes.

I have both bikes setup in Strava, and I make sure I choose the correct one, but my average power readings seem to be all over the place, especially when it's cold or windy. Specifically, when I ride my winterized MTB on the road, the power readings seem to be much larger on average, even though I cover much more ground much more quickly on my road bike, and my road bike workouts are usually much more structured around time/distance or intervals while on the MTB in the winter I just try to get some miles here and there when not on the trainer indoors.

I think the Strava algorithm overcompensates for bike weight and aerodynamics. With that said, maybe you're right and my efforts aren't consistent. Strava obviously doesn't give me anything for rides on the trainer, as I have to manually enter the miles and time, and it doesn't account for resistance or intervals or anything like that.

VAM might be ok, but my area is really flat, and I have to drive 45 mins to find hills with a decent grade and with any length. There is one good hill a couple miles from my house, but it's only about 80 vertical feet, although it has a decent grade at the steepest section. Hill repeats anyone?!

I'm a big guy, 6' 208lbs right now, although I want to be down to 195 or so by the start of road season. I absolutely SUCK at climbing as you can imagine, as my sustained power to weight ratio is currently rather low compared to some more serious racers and cyclists that I know. With that said, I can set off a watt bomb and push a large gear, so my accelerations are very strong when I jump and my sprint has improved significantly. I can get up over 35 in a solo effort (10-15 seconds or so) on flat terrain, and even more with a lead out. I can also spin up to over 150 rpm on the trainer and have seen wheelspeeds over 40. How this will translate to the road come spring I don't know, but I did get in a ride with one of my buddies last weekend and dropped him like a rock.

My goal is to race a couple local cat 5 crits this summer, and it is a fast flat 4 corner square course on pretty good clean city streets. The cat 5 is 35 mins + laps I think. I'm thinking my bike handling skills, ability to handle the repeated accelerations, and overall finishing sprint will be more important than my climbing skills or one hour threshold.

I do hill repeats twice a week. I've been using a small and punchy hill, a block long, for 20 to 30 minutes at a time. I'm coming back from an injury that had me off the bike for three months, and this is having a very big impact on me. It's time to switch to a bigger hill.



It's also a good way to get used to repeated accelerations.

You could spend money. A Garmin or other ANT+ compatible head unit, a strap/transmitter, and a Garmin or compatible speed/cadence sensor. Maybe someday you'll get power, so maybe a unit with that capability too.

Chris Carmichael's zone system may be more attractive because it's based on the best of two all-out eight minute efforts which require less experience to pace well and is easier to accommodate logistically.

You can also use a polarized system, where efforts are either below your aerobic threshold (AeT, VT1) or above you anaerobic threshold (Ant, VT2, lactate threshold).

Your aerobic threshold is where breathing becomes rhythmic, conversation doesn't flow, lactate accumulation begins. It's the highest sustainable pace on a 3-5 hour ride with an even split.

Your anaerobic threshold is your LTHR.

You ride below your aerobic threshold on easy sessions (4/5), and past your anaerobic threshold for the 1 in 5 hard sessions (ex: 7-10 minute intervals as hard as possible). You don't need to know how far past your lactate threshold you're going.

I like a polarized approach (or close to it, with a Friel Z4 ride replacing an easy day), finding that works at least as well as more Z3/Z4 for efforts through 20-30 minutes but better for longer rides.

With mass-start racing you'd also want shorter neuromuscular efforts.

Agree with all of that. Tempo rides are useful if one is time constrained, but I find that riding around VT1 most of the time and above VT2 some of the time, with relatively little time in the middle, works best for me. I'm old, of course...

Same flat problem where I live. 6-8 feet elevation per mile for 30 mile rides and only 20-25 ft per mile if I ride 50+ miles. So twice or three times a month I put my bike in the truck, drive 30-40 minutes and ride from there so I can do real hill repeats or long sustained climbs.

That is correct. Over/under intervals are an excellent way to simulate the conditions you'll meet in crits, with periods of maximum intensity followed by the need to recover at speed. And you need to know how to ride at close quarters and make use of the draft. Some group rides, with a group that know what they're doing, would be a good idea.

I did about 10 "A" rides last year where we do a rolling paceline of about 20, with another 20 or so riders hanging on. We usually get the bunch up to speed for Strava segments, with lead out sprints over 30mph. The group ride is basically the casual screw off ride for a bunch of local racers, and if I asked around I bet I could get some good mentoring. I'm pretty comfortable in close quarters, but I know the race will be more hectic.

A couple events I plan on doing for the pre-season are as follows: April 24th there is a race skills clinic being put on by our local club, with in-race mentoring, cornering and sprint practice, and bumping/wheel touch drills. May 1 there is a practice race which is a 6 mile circuit with a small climb and primes on lap sprints, so good crit practice too.

Currently I'm lifting, upper lower body split 4 days a week, dieting and cycling a fat burner trying to lose about 10 lbs, and doing intervals on the recumbent, treadmill, and turbo trainer to keep the cardio up but give me variety. I'm doing some sort of workout 5-6 days a week with only 1 or two rest days, and I'm even usually doing a short spin just to turn the legs over on rest days. On the trainer I'm using the GCN training videos which range from 15-60 minutes, with a mix of hills, intervals, "spin classes," and general tempo rides.

I should add that I did a hilly cat 5 race last year, however I hardly count that, as I was so far off the back by mile 3 that I was completely alone. By mile 7 I was caught - and passed - by the women and the juniors . . . not a good day lol.

I'm hoping to be Cat 1 by the end of the season, but reached this level training mostly with heart rate and cycling-specific functional exercises. I also coach a lot of people with heart rate only, but now that "smart" trainers are becoming more affordable, a lot of them have also started training with power.

In terms of HR effectiveness, as long as your heart rate hits your intended target, you're guaranteed to have a positive training effect. You can use past races to determine your maximum heart rate which will give you more accurate HR training zones. Timing the rate and depth of your heart rate immediately after a work interval can represent your body's ability to clear lactic acid, and it can tell you when it's time to stop a workout. HRV is also just as accurate as using TSS to measure your recovery status and likelihood of illness or overtraining.

If done with correct technique, single leg squats and step ups can help you develop power for sprints and repeated anaerobic efforts. I often use this to track anaerobic progress. Back when I was a Cat 5, I was lucky that weightvest.com sponsored me and sent a 150 pound weighted vest over so that I could load my single leg squats safely.

I forgot to mention that if you live close to a sports training facility or a college campus with an exercise physiology lab, you can also schedule a lab-measured VO2max and lactic threshold test. This will tell you exactly what heart rate corresponds with your thresholds. This is how the Pro's used to (and probably still) track their progress.

If you have a turbo trainer and a speed/cadence sensor, you can do power-based training using Trainerroad.com. You pay $10/mo and they have an incredible database of workouts and programs that use your bike's speed sensor to come up with virtual power. You just have to tell the software what turbo trainer you're using and they have a power curve that correlates rotational speed with instantaneous power. I have a stages power meter and a KurtKinetic Roadmachine. I have compared power with my power meter versus the 'virtual power' and they match very well such that I use virtual power for indoor training.

This is probably your best approach whether you do or do not have a power meter provided you don't mind indoor training.