I use HR during early base training. My PM is tracking power and its cool to see over time my HR go down and power go up but for base HR is what I do. I'm sure others use power.

Want your HR to go down? Reduce your power output. Want it to rise? Increase power.
Want power to go down and HR to go up? Ride a long time.
Want to keep HR at a certain bpm? Don't ride a long time. (of course how one defines a long time and physiological responses will vary between individuals)

As duration increases your HR is going to rise as will perceived effort even if your power stays the same. If you want to keep the same HR you will need to reduce power/effort as duration increases.

example: If one rides at say 79% FTP for 4.5 hours the first hour you'll be thinking what's hard about this? Probably even at the end of hour 2 you'll be thinking pffft piece of cake. You roll into hour 3 and while not hard, your ventilatory rates & HR will be increasing even though you're working at the same power. Cross over hour 4 and now it's hard to maintain the same power and your ventilatory rate and HR will mimic a threshold workout and your PRE will probably have increased even though you're at the same power.

Continue long enough and even though you're still riding at the same % of FTP your HR & ventilatory rates are going to mimic a vo2 workout.

Or if you go ride at say 75% max hr for 4.5 hours the first hour and probably the second hour power will be the same. As the duration increases your power will have to decrease to sustain the same hr.

Finally it's just endurance, not aerobic endurance.

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Brian Stover USAT LII
Accelerate3 Coaching
Insta

Great post. If the aim is to increase endurance the the "long ride" should stop when power and heart rate start to diverge apart. Next time the long ride is done that divergence should happen after a longer time if the training is working. Base is built by extending that divergence for as long as you can (or need to) for the type of race you are training for.

doesn't matter

>> Great post. If the aim is to increase endurance the the "long ride" should stop when power and heart rate start to diverge apart.

OK, now I understand what desert dude was trying to say. That makes a lot of sense. Thanks

I agree. I use heart-rate to stay aerobic, which is a state in which your body uses resources. Power is just a measure of the amount work able to be performed in the aerobic state, which should increase with training.

To me, if you use only power, you risk working you anaerobic system instead.

Use both, plus RPE. Once you spend some time riding and testing with a power meter you will start to understand what RPE levels feel like at different efforts. I use all three, with the knowledge that power is a direct measurement of what you're producing on the day, HR and RPE are symptoms of how your body is responding to the effort (plus a number of other factors).

A good case study, for my IM all of my long training rides I was able to hit IM target power and have my HR sit between 125bpm and 130bpm over 4 hours with very little drift. My long runs at race pace were done at around 130 - 135bpm, again with very little drift.

Come race day, I couldn't get my HR down under 145bpm for the first 3 hours of the bike at IM target power, and the entire run was done at 150-155bpm at target race pace. My RPE for the first 2 hours of the bike was way lower than it should've been at target power and the last 45km of the bike felt easier than it should've been, so I held target power at the start of the bike and lifted power by 10w above target in the last 45km. I ended up hitting slightly above target power and run race pace with only minimal run pace drop off (2nd half of marathon was only 4 min slower than the first half), but HR was way higher than I'd trained at. If I'd just followed HR I would've drastically under-performed, if I'd followed only power I would've under performed on the bike. If I would've only followed RPE I would've gone out way too hard on the bike.

The key point I'm making is to understand all three, and learn to use all three as a guide and not one measure as 'gospel' above all others.

What about muscular endurance? :)

Strength + endurance = muscular endurance
Hill intervals increase strength

Sorry, that was a joke aimed at Brian

Rock, good job. What was your aerobic training like in order to get there, on a week by week basis? Did you do that thing where you ride the bike with a given heart rate, until it starts to drift, and then drop the power? And then each ride, see if you can push it further and further before it drops?

Or did you rather simply program longer and longer rides, not really using in-the-moment biofeedback to dial it in?

The endurance piece is really my weak point and what i'm looking to work on this year. I've got good power in the 5 to 30 minute range and i can do numerous above threshold efforts and recover well, but if i, for example, go out to do a ride with 50 minutes in zone 3 "tempo," 20 minutes into it by heart rate will be knocking on the door of threshold, and it is VERY taxing on me the next day . . .

I'm not a triathlete but i figure, triathletes are probably the best people from whom to learn about this particular piece :)

Lots of great advice already. Once thing I would add. If you have only just got your power meter and never used one before take the time to collect some data, learn to zero it properly and use it for a while before you start making far ranging training decisions on a handful of rides.

I have known athletes do some stupid things once they get their first power meter. I know a guy who unboxed a power meter, fitted it to his bike and did a hard 20 minute ride. He then based an entire seasons training on that single ride! He never even zeroed the power meter! He was surprised to learn that most of that season he was not training as hard as he thought.

Hope that makes sense!

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He who understands the WHY, will understand the HOW.

Thanks for the compliment on the post



I'll say that there is nothing wrong with going 30 minutes or an hour or 2 past that point. It's just going to get harder and harder as time goes on. You won't be less fit bc of it, and increasing fitness is the goal.

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Brian Stover USAT LII
Accelerate3 Coaching
Insta

Just how long do you think he's going to last working his anaerobic energy system?

3 minutes? 6 minutes? Unless he's slaying himself up every hill or in a group ride this isn't really a risk.

Anaerobic metabolism isn't something that people can do for long periods of time.

A 5k for a world class runner is something like 85% aerobic metabolism or this would be similar to an 8 mile all out TT for most triathletes. Now around a :45-1:15 effort could be mainly anaerobic metabolism.

Also power is a direct measurement of what you are doing, after all in order to turn the cranks you have to produce power. Heart rate is the response to turning the cranks.

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Brian Stover USAT LII
Accelerate3 Coaching
Insta

Haha the next coach that uses muscular endurance and is serious about it should be flogged in public...two Friday's in a row.

I blame Joel Friel....still.



To Mark 57 = there is no such thing as muscular endurance. It's just endurance. If you go ride 6h you're not going to say hey I've got decent muscular endurance you're just going to say my endurance seems pretty good. It's endurance.

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Brian Stover USAT LII
Accelerate3 Coaching
Insta

This is a fair assessment.

Although not fully anaerobic, I think a couple of bpm can make a difference in what training zone your are trying to work, and what zone you are actually working.

Without the access to clinical testing of the percentage of fat and sugar sources you are using in different heart rate zones, it's all just guesswork. So maybe in that instance, and without that information, I agree that power can be the better training tool.

I personally use both and get V02 max tests annually to adjust my zones.

It's funny, when I posted up here what I did for training I got criticized on here by some. I came from a bike racing background so that shaped a lot of my bike training philosophy. It sounds simple, but really I just trained specific to the demands of the event. So on the bike I did mid week rides of 90 min, with blocks of 45 min - 1hr straight at half IM power. For my long ride, I was doing rides of 3.5 to 4 hours every weekend, and closer to the event I did a total of 4 x 5hr rides. My long rides had large chunks of time at IM power target, and often the whole ride would be at IM power target. So I did a lot of riding at power similar to what I would be racing at, and I did a few rides each week with blocks of time at power slightly higher than what I would be racing at. Training was all based off a power target, but adjusted on the fly depending on what HR and/or RPE was doing. E.g. earlier on during long rides I would do blocks of 1 hour at IM power, which was what I could sustain before getting some reasonable HR and RPE drift. As I got fitter, I could do longer and longer blocks at target power without getting the drift. So basically a very simple progressive overload approach.

One thing to watch though, is that by focusing on longer aerobic type intervals, my 5 min and 1 min power really dropped off. So if you're bike racing predominantly, I would make a focus of 20 min power and below. I was told years ago by a very experienced bike racer that in bike racing your FTP determines what grade/category/level you race at, and your 5 min/1min power determines if you'll win. I know it's a very simple way of looking at things, but I think that it's actually very accurate for the majority of bike races us amateurs do.

There's nothing wrong with doing any athletic activity for sure. But if the aim of the session is to increase the physiological response to high volume low cardiovascular stress training then cardiac drift is a good end point to call it quits. Go further than that isn't bad but it illicits a different response.

As for the semantic argument about muscular endurance vs endurance you're correct. I guess I like the term because it reminds us that we have to work on strength as well as endurance.

My 2 cents is if you use power, use it all the time.
HR is more of a marker than a true instantaneous measure of work being done. More like seeing how much gas you use instead of the power you produce.

If you don't have a power meter, HR is the next best option.

If you have a power meter to train AND race with (having it on a smart trainer only is good, but if you can't race with power it becomes a precarious metric to achieve in a race).

It's good to track your HR to see if you are becoming more efficient with power training.
You should be able to achieve higher power zones with proper training and lower HR indicating better fitness with more power.

For running... they are still trying to really nail down a way to use power. I'd stick with HR until many outlets come up with the same conclusion how to use it. Right now the only procedures are derived from the people that make the power meters.

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Ryan
http://www.SetThePaceTriathlon.com
http://www.TriathlonTrainingDaddy.com
I got plans - https://www.trainingpeaks.com/...dotcom#trainingplans

I have coming around to believing that the best way to pace these long steady efforts (and any low-intensity training really) is to use HR. Yes, power is "objective," but my understanding is that the metabolic processes your body uses to generate that power are not objective and can be different every single day based on a variety of factors, including heat and fatigue. So, if the amount of power you can generate with the all day aerobic process changes each day, but the heart rate that is correlated with the metabolic changes is consistent, heart rate should definitely be the way to go.

All this assumes of course that you have accurate heart rate zones or at least ones that are "close enough." It's a toss-up whether 220 - age will be accurate for you and it can be way off. For me, the formula is off by a good 15 beats.

Obviously i'm not an exercise physiologist so i don't know everything here, but the above is what i've read, and i have ancillary anecdotal support: I have a muscle oxygen sensor that i bought because i thought it might be cool; it's not a game changer by any means but it's useful for pacing warmups and a few other things. Anyway, it has a marker that is clinically demonstrated to correlate with maximal lactate steady state, with at least as good correlation as an hour of power (i.e. FTP). And, the power i generate at MLSS can be different every single day.

If MLSS power changes each day, why wouldn't low-end aerobic power, or recovery power? I expect that it would, and if you think about it, why shouldn't it? The power zones you get from a test are just a snapshot in time. Useful for judging progress and capability at the time, not something to turn off your brain and blindly follow.

FWIW, i pace rides as follows: (i) HR for any easy rides (recovery, long endurance), while using the power meter to collect data for later and make sure i'm smooth (i.e., make sure i'm not spiking the power all over the place); (ii) HR, Power and RPE for long intervals (threshold and just above), while using the power meter to set a target starting point (which i then mediate by reference to HR as I go through the workout), to again make sure power is consistent and i'm not going out too hard and tailing off at the end (for example), and to collect data for next time (i.e., average power in the intervals is a starting point target for next time, plus a small amount if HR didn't reach the high end of the target by the end of hte last interval); (iii) Power for short intervals that are not super short, with RPE as a check to see whether i'm in a condition whether it's worth it to continue; and (iv) RPE for VERY short intervals (30s on down), since im usually working too hard to look at the Garmin until the interval is over.

This is exactly what I'm concerned about. If people throw out the idea of "aerobic endurance" then does that mean there is no physiological reason to train at lower HR zones?

I'm operating under several assumptions:

• In ideal circumstances, power zones and HR zones will align very closely.
• If power and HR zones have been aligning closely but suddenly I have HR zone 4 while riding in power zone 2 then I am probably overtraining.
• There is a physiological change that happens while riding/running in HR zone 2 that is critical for endurance.
• The same change will diminish in HR zone 1 or 3 and will likely disappear in HR zones higher than 3.
• The critical factor in making this endurance change is HR zone 2 and has little to do with power level.

I really hope that the bullet points in red are wrong so that I don't have to keep doing long slow distance runs in HR zone 2. It is a lot more fun to run right at or below LTHR!

A run and a bike are different. The pounding of "threshold" or even "SS" running is a lot different than the non-impact cycling. You simply will injure yourself with too much intensity too frequently when running. On the bike, you can eat SS/threshold stuff on a pretty regular consistency.

About the RPE/HR for this stuff:
Doing long SS intervals in the upper range I feel like people would tend to either wuss out or "think" they're doing the wrong thing once the HR finally creeps up. When in reality, it's taken so long to get there and will take so long to go further..........you should keep going. Like 2x20, 1x40, 1x60min kind of SS stuff.

As for Z2 riding, you'll probably tend to go out too hard early and finish too soft if you go by RPE and HR only. Using a meter you can "meter out" that effort with probably a final tough hour or 30 minutes getting home. I also don't take "Z2" riding to mean zero excursions into other zones. The point is just to limit prolonged or repeated jaunts into the other zones.

Don't forget the handy TrainingPeaks and same chart used by others with the checkboxes beside the zones and what each one does. It shows you what you're doing to the body and how effective it is (number of checkmarks) by zone.

https://www.trainingpeaks.com/...wer-training-levels/

https://fascatcoaching.com/tips/training-zones/

I generally agree with this, there's definitely an aspect to running (eccentric load or something) that makes it so that an equivalent number of hours is harder. but for me, that's always related to the volume i could tolerate, not the intensity.

I also find that i personally need to be pretty judicious with the tempo and sweetspot on the bike as well otherwise i will burn out. The whole, you can do it and then do it again the next day has never really worked for me, although maybe it will with a few more months of training.

Mostly i do days that are either hard or easy, and if a day is going to be "moderate" (e.g., tempo) you keep on doing it until it's really not that moderate at all anymore and is instead "hard." This for me has been much more sustainable and led to better results, so far.

I also agree with using power to adjust your effort even if you're "pacing" overall by HR. You use the power to slowly and smoothly work up to your HR target on long rides and then for the most part keep it there, and you use it on intervals or steady state sessions ot make sure you're not falling off the pace at the end.