This is my first year with a watts meter after relying on heart rate for the best part of 2 decades. It has been an eye opener for me. If you can afford to buy a watts meter, you do not need to read the rest of this piece, as my advice is to run out and buy one immediately! However, if you are still relying on heart rate I think there are a couple of ways to use your heart rate gadget to improve your cycling performance without a watts meter. One of the keys to cycling performance is maintaining a level effort and that effort is best measured in watts. With sole reliance on heart rate feedback on the bike, when you reach a hill or turn into a head wind, your power usage almost certainly increases immediately and your heart rate does not quickly reflect that. By the time your heart rate tells you to slow down you have already done damage to your legs. In a long race lack of a steady watts level can become a big problem after you have attacked too many hills. Riding with a watts meter you simply ease into a new situation and unless facing a severe hill you maintain a steady watts level. Relying on heart rate requires greater discipline but you can apply the same mind set of easing into the new situation, concentrating on not increasing your effort level and monitoring your heart rate closely until you have settled into your new circumstance. So then there is the question of determining and applying that pace in the first instance. I should mention by way of preamble that as a long time runner I had never really believed that my running zones should not work for cycling. I was wrong; my cycling heart rate zones are very distinct and very much lower than my running zones. Nonetheless, once you figure out what your target heart rate is for a certain cycling effort that appears to be just about as reliable as a watts reading or a heart rate level for a running effort. How then do you determine a cycling pace which is heart rate based rather than watts based? The answer: you need to go regularly to Computrainer where you can compare watts and heart rate. You need to observe what your stasis heart rate is at your Tempo watts, at your ½ IM pace watts and the like. Your coach will tell you that your pace for your next race is a certain percentage of your Tempo watts. Knowing your Tempo stasis heart rate and applying the same percentage will not give you a stasis heart rate which you can use for that race. You cannot take your heart rate at one level such as Tempo and rely on arithmetic. You will need to discover the heart rate for each level of effort on the Computrainer, but once you have done that, and with a little extra discipline rather than extra effort in those head wind / hill situations, you too can arrive at the run with the fresher legs provided by the “level watts advantage”. by Andy Trevoy

Discussion started by Kevin Masters , on 19 October 08:46 PM