Anybody look at Watt per HR?

I am still learning about the PM and what it can do for me and I thought it would be interesting to pay attention to how many average or normalized watts I produce in a workout as a function of what my average HR is.

Over the last few months I have seen that my 2 x 20 workous have steadily improved (more watts for lower heart rates), which is what I would expect, but I haven’t heard anyone else talk about this particular ratio, so I may just be pissing away time looking at meaningless statistics.

Any thoughts?

I think it is fairly common. For example, GoldenCheetah has a chart for plotting Heartrate vs Power which is pretty cool and tries to do a linear fit. There is also a metric called Aerobic Decoupling that you might want to look up. Has to do with how your heartrate vs. power changes over the course of a ride (some claim it shows if you are getting dehydrated for example). There seems to be quite a bit of debate as to whether there is any value to these metrics, but it is not uncommon to look a them. I personally don’t give it more than a passing curious glance and certainly don’t base my training off those metrics.

In all honesty…I don’t even bother with HR anymore. I’ve never found anything usefull in comparing them to eachother.

jaretj

If you have a lactic threshold test on the bike using a blood lactate analyser, standard protocol is to generate a curve of blood Lactate vs Heart rate, and power vs HR so yes, it gets done all the time. From these curve you can determine an athletes lactic threshold heart rate, which is important for true lactic threshold training. Generally the power/HR curve is linear until the athlete reaches LT, at which point it will deviate (kind of a cheater way to run a test without a blood lactate analyser).

A 20’ FTP test just gives you a power number that you can hold for 20’. Depending on how fit you are, it may be a good estimate of your LT, it may not be. Less fit/beginner athletes may not even be able to hold true LT intensity for more than a few min, while an elite should be able to hold it for almost an hour.

some of the pitfalls of looking at that are discussed here:

http://www.slowtwitch.com/Interview/A_chat_with_Uli_Schoberer_2729.html
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some of the pitfalls of looking at that are discussed here:

http://www.slowtwitch.com/Interview/A_chat_with_Uli_Schoberer_2729.html

That’s pretty interesting, so his point was that it’s not an end all be all statistic, but it does have some value. I read it to mean a higher ratio of watts per HR is good, but you have to pay attention to the higher end as well (make sure you are getting the watts and the HR into the high target regions).

Interesting.

I don’t have a power meter. I use heart rate only because at this time it’s what my budget allows.

I trained on Trainer Road all winter and learned my heart rate at the power levels TR gave me. For example 90% of FT for me is 140HR. 100% is just a hair over 150.

This past weekend I did my first Olympic Tri so wanted to pace the bike at 90% so settled into 140 on the HR. I had goal times in all 3 disciplines going into the race and came out of the race 2 seconds under my goal swim, 2 seconds under my goal run, 11 seconds over my goal bike. Therefore I can conclude either my pacing was pretty acceptable on the bike or I simply am more fit across all 3 disciplines that I give myself credit. It was definitely race level effort across all 3 disciplines.

So for me at this time HR works. Next weekend I’ll use it again for HIM and see how things go. I’ll target low 130’s there creeping up to 135 at the end of the bike leg.

Be careful, I have used HR to pace HIM in the past, HR has a pretty bad lag. You could really crush the hills and coast the down side and not change your HR too much. Though you would be putting out much more effort this way.

For me, it manifested itself as cramps near mile 10 (hamstring) on run, in three different HIMs. Now that I am pacing better, no cramps.

What worked for me, before I had the PM was to nail a combo of instant HR, Average HR, cadence and RPE. Instant Power is much simpler, when budget allows it $300 gets you a wired PM!

Thanks for the advice.

I keep track of my watts vs HR for a couple of reasons.

Foremost is when I get on a bike without a powermeter, I have a good approximation of my watts based on my HR. It helps when traveling, having to use a rented bike or spin bike or when I use my cross bike with no power.

I like to think of it as a backup in case my powermeter would fail. Shit happens, batteries die…my PE is crap, so HR is my backup to my powermeter.

While I rely exclusively on my power, it is an indication if something is slighly off. During a half IM I know when I have fully recovered from the swim when my HR to watts get to normal.

Nothing wrong with looking at both, understanding if there is a correlation but only guiding your efforts with one. But don’t be surprised if they are way off during a workout. If so, stick to the watts is what I do.

but I haven’t heard anyone else talk about this particular ratio, so I may just be pissing away time looking at meaningless statistics.
Back when PMs were first being introduced many people looked at the relationship between HR and power. If you go back about a decade and look through articles, discussion lists, forums, and even the software that was available at the time, you’ll see a great deal of discussion about it. The reason why those conversations and discussions and debates are not very common nowadays is because over the years additional experience and analysis has shown that if you have power and perceived exertion then at best HR is redundant. Those measures you see like “decoupling” are vestigial remainders of that earlier era.

i wouldn’t say vestigial, though i only look at them after the ride.

i’m way too anal about things that looking at my HR will probably cause it to go up, so i don’t even have it displayed.

for exercising at a power level i assume to be my FTP:

if i’m tired, my HR may barely touch LTHR toward the end of a 25min interval. Though i’ll also know this b/c the first 10 minutes hurt like hell even though i can push through it

if i got weak (say from not training for a few days or sick), my HR will shoot up above LTHR about ten minutes in

and for my best intervals, the last 15-25 minutes (depending on length of the bout of exertion at FTP) will be right at LTHR.

I don’t see decoupling as being in the same league as the ratio between HR and power. Decoupling seems to me to be deeply flawed in that it is very sensitive to the exact start and finish points you select. But the ratio between HR and power is absolutely fundamental for me, in that my threshold HR is sufficiently close to my max HR that I have essentially zero scope to get it higher, so the only way I can possibly improve my FTP is by improving my Watts/bpm. Thus this is the only metric that is worth me looking at in assessing the effectiveness of my training regime - if it isn’t going up, then my training isn’t working, and no way is my FTP going up. Since I realised this late last year and focused entirely on doing training that improves Watts/bpm I’ve added 10% to my 10 mile TT power, getting my time down below 20 minutes. And it isn’t as if my performance was on an upwards trajectory before this, I had made essentially zero improvement over the previous 12 months, so there was simply a big change in my performance when I decided to ignore what the majority of people were telling me (that I should ignore HR) and stuck to my convictions and focused entirely on Watts/bpm.

What kinds of training target watts/bpm? Even if I agreed with your assertion that watts/bpm was a key metric, I’m not clear on how I would change my training plan. Or are you just saying that you experimented with various stimuli and kept the ones that increased watts/bpm, whether you saw FTP gains at that point or not? Don’t take this the wrong way, I believe that you did something that helped your performance and just want to understand it better. An example of a workout that you now do that you wouldn’t have done before might be very helpful in understanding your change.

There are limits to how much info I’m willing to give away for free, I like to leave people with some work/thinking to do themselves, but what I am willing to say is that I had read differing views on what types of workout would increase W/bpm, so I tried them all, and only one of them worked (for me). So even if I did tell you what I started doing lots of, it might be that a different type of workout would increase W/bpm for other people, as I find it hard to believe that the people who advocate the stuff that didn’t work for me have it so wrong that they are advocating something that doesn’t have that effect for anyone.

It does depend how fit you already are, though - there are types of training that will increase W/bpm when you are not all that fit, but they stop working before you have fully reached your potential.

There are limits to how much info I’m willing to give away for free, I like to leave people with some work/thinking to do themselves, but what I am willing to say is that I had read differing views on what types of workout would increase W/bpm, so I tried them all, and only one of them worked (for me). So even if I did tell you what I started doing lots of, it might be that a different type of workout would increase W/bpm for other people, as I find it hard to believe that the people who advocate the stuff that didn’t work for me have it so wrong that they are advocating something that doesn’t have that effect for anyone.

It does depend how fit you already are, though - there are types of training that will increase W/bpm when you are not all that fit, but they stop working before you have fully reached your potential.

you are obviously being purposely obtuse, which is fine, but since i can’t stay asleep, let’s do it for kicks. For starters, it’d be nice to know the lengths of your regimen; was this regimen over a period of a few months or over 1-2 years? Also, you’ve said nothing about which side of the equation changed more. Did you Assuming you are taking a w/bpm over a period of time and not just from a particular day. Personally, most of the time i feel much better when my HR for FTP workouts level out to 1-2 bpm above LTHR than if it were 3-4bpm below, as the latter is more often a result of fatigue than any true improvement in fitness.

To do what you did, you have to either increase the numerator or the denominator. From your saying that your LTHR is not much lower than MHR (how do you even determine this?) and assuming that it hasn’t changed much, I take it that you are probably on the more aerobically fit side of things and very likely are capable of operating at ~90% VO2max for an extended period of time. Furthermore, it means that you can probably also tolerate operating at a high blood lactate concentration.

I’ll take a stab and say that you probably eschewed from anything lower than FTP as those do more to increase enzyme activity at a muscular level than an issue of increasing O2 carrying capacity, which would lead me to think that you probably did a lot of L5 and tabata style of work so that you can squeeze out a higher raw O2 carrying capacity to increase aerobic head space.

Key benefits of L5 include a larger stroke volume, increased capilarization, and increased plasma volume. The first allows you to increase the rate of O2 delivery to the muscles at the same stroke rate (bpm). The second allows for a wider coverage (though my head is too mushy to think about effect on bpm at the moment). And the third would actually increase bpm if all the others are held constant as there’s more to circulate through the body, but is still favorable as it would mean that at the same hematocrit level, you are pushing more RBC through your body. So i say you probably went on a reverse periodization or something similar.

However, all this assumes that you did not reach the raw O2 carrying capacity dictated by your genetic potential (or genetic potential reachable given the available amount of training time). If you had, the only way to get a lower bpm is to drop weight, and the above will need to be thrown out of the window as it’s difficult to lose weight when doing a lot of L5 work.

For starters, it’d be nice to know the lengths of your regimen
This info was in my post - started late last year and continued to now. The gains were mostly achieved over approx 6 months. There may be scope for further improvement, but my regime is now compromised too much by taking part in TTs, and I’ll be happy enough just to hold on to my current performance throughout the season and then possibly gain more with another solid training block in the next off season.

Also, you’ve said nothing about which side of the equation changed more.
My HR hasn’t changed - as I said, it has essentially no scope to increase relative to max. I am TTing at the same HR as last year, this has been true over 10, 25 and 50 miles. The increase in power has purely been due to an increase in W/bpm, i.e. more power for the same HR.