“Now I can precisely compare output with input by dividing the average (or, preferably, “normalized”) power for a workout by the average heart rate. An increasing value for similar workouts tells me fitness is improving.”
anyone using it in real life? what’s this metric called ? does it appear on sites like garmin center, strava, training peaks, golden cheetah, etc?
thank you!
Training Peaks and it appears as EF (Efficiency Factor) I believe.
Of similar use is decoupling which may be more useful because you are looking at relative changes in hr between rides. If I tracked my EF from spring to summer, well I would think I was getting pretty crappy, but its just the heat.
An increase in average power for a given heartrate tells me fitness is improving. Well, who would have thought that. Good God, what a revelation.
so does an increase in average power
.
so does an increase in average power
What Jack and Scott said.
Friel loves HR. People who love Friel love HR.
Some of the newer stuff just ignores HR completely. Power is your output, so measure power.
If you were training runners, would you measure increases in fitness by how fast they race or how good their HR ratio is?
Lance gauged his performance by his heart rate at a given power output.
Lance gauged his performance by his heart rate at a given power output.
When Ferrari was doing his testing they looked primarily at Power and weight.
That number was what they used to gauge TDF readiness.
Supposedly landis actually outscored him one year.
(this is all from one of the lance books)
Lance gauged his performance by his heart rate at a given power output.
I do too but more as a upper limit. I know if I go over 190 on the bike in an oly im going to be cooked if I hold it for much longer. But until that point i’m looking at wattage by itself. That normally works out pretty well for me.
Bravo Joe, bravo!
If you were training runners, would you measure increases in fitness by how fast they race or how good their HR ratio is?
DO you really think this is an either or proposition? I still cannot understand this mentality that it has to be power/pace or nothing. I guess the really great coaches understand this, but just boggles me that the rest do not get it yet. Perhaps in time it will finally filter down to the less informed…
SO you would just have your runners race everyday to see how they are doing?
No, I would measure performance on repeatable test every 6-8 weeks.
I’m no coach though :).
Sometimes HR goes up when you get more fit, sometimes HR goes down when you get more fit. I don’t see how you could use it to track fitness. That’s where my disconnect is. Could you help me out Monty?
Pretty sure that was VDV, not Landis.
Pretty sure that was VDV, not Landis.
whoa, that would be a stunning, but typical, false memory if so.
if it is VDV, that would be really, really interesting
No, it was Landis. They were testing on one of Ferrari’s favorite climbs.
Maybe we’re talking about two different events
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/07/sports/othersports/07cycling.html?pagewanted=all
After a 10-kilometer time trial, a team doctor took their blood to determine their fitness and potential.
Armstrong, who went on to win the first of his record seven Tour titles that year, did not have the best numbers that day. Vande Velde did.
“We didn’t want to tell Lance because it would have upset him, but no one ever told Christian, either,” Hincapie said in February at the Tour of California. “We kind of didn’t want to upset the hierarchy.”
I take a stab… Unlike a lot of folks, i would not just use HR as any metric for fitness, I have never advocated that, but in context with power or pace it begins to make sense. You can even graph results, and low and behold, people that are improving have similar graphs, just as those that are not. If i can run a 10 mile run at 6 minute pace in training at 160HR, and a month later i do the same exact time at 154HR, or i run 5;54 pace at the 160 HR, then that tells me something. Now as a one off it is not earth shattering, but over time you have a lot of these data points, and when put together, they can show progress in your training or not. IF i only race once every few months, that is a long time to go without feedback. Even your 6 to 8 week test is a long time to go before taking stock in training progress…
Someone mentioned it earlier and i hate to bring lance into the mix here, but he is a guy that really gets this and it is a great example of what i’m trying to get across. I assume his coach does too, but i don’t know his coach, and it could be very likely that lance forced this on him and not the other way around. Lance may be one of the smartest athletes we have ever seen, and possibly very few coaches smart enough to offer him any advice that he has not already figured out through 100;000’s of thousand of miles, running, cycling, and swimming with a HRM.
He used both power and HR and pace to race this last race, which for him was super important as he had never done a 1/2 ironman, and had been decades since he did a big time road triathlon. Listening to interviews with him afterwards, it appears he use HR as the primary metric to his pacing. He can do this because he knows what his HR can and cannot do over that period of time. Power and pace were just there, and now he will balance all 3 to make a plan for his training and next race. His comment on power seemed to be that it was well below what he normally could hold, but because of heat and other factors, it held it where his HR said it should be. Same to be said for his pace, hold the HR and it will be what it will be. Hard to argue with his approach as it did net him a superbly paced race, and was one of a very small group that did not blow up or overheat that day. In his world of bike racing, he had no real power number to base off of, but he does have many samples of HR over a 4 hour distance in hot weather. That is a very hard number for him, one he knew he could trust. No with all that info he can go back and tweek the power and paces through specific training, but always in context of what his HR is doing. Pace and power do not happen in a bubble. You can use PE, but once again, why not use it all…
Thanks that makes sense.
My N=1 experience throws me for a loop. I might run a 5k at 185 bpm. Then a 2 months later I’ll run another 5k at a faster pace at 192 bpm.
Maybe I’m looking at this wrong. Maybe it shouldn’t be used for max efforts, but be used for pacing and sub threshold efforts. I agree that it makes sense that if you can cruise at 7 min miles at 150 bpm then later you can do the same thing at 140 bpm then it makes sense that you’re gaining fitness.
I dun know, what do you think?
“Now I can precisely compare output with input by dividing the average (or, preferably, “normalized”) power for a workout by the average heart rate. An increasing value for similar workouts tells me fitness is improving.”
anyone using it in real life? what’s this metric called ? does it appear on sites like garmin center, strava, training peaks, golden cheetah, etc?
thank you!
I do something similar.
I have a ton of workout data with Power and HR
I have too much time on my hand sitting in airplanes
I come from a programming background and am a data geek.
So I started picking apart my ride files and mapping my HR to power. Pretty soon I derived some y=mx+b equations to turn HR into power and vice versa.
I sometimes compare my calculated power vs actual power and they are usually pretty damn close. (They do not when I am not doing 30 second intervals at 120% of FTP)
I see that my fitness is improving when the slope of the HR/vs Power line is decreasing (m) or when my NPcalculated from HR is less than actual NP.
If I see this happen a few times, I recompute a new “m” and “b”.
In theory, as fitness improves, m decreases.
I do this out of interest of knowing how my body reacts, but I only train by power and pace.
DO you really think this is an either or proposition? I still cannot understand this mentality that it has to be power/pace or nothing.
Pace for any individual is pretty close to watts/kg times a constant so power/pace is going to be pretty close to a constant. So maybe that will help you to understand.