Quick question - a trainer road work out says I spend 20% Act Rec, 30% End, 16% Tempo, 25% Sweet Spot and 4% threshold and 0.7% VO2 by power.
By HR it says 1.4% AR, 10% End, 31% Tempo, 2% sweetspot, 36.6 threshold and 18.6% VO2
so how do you reconcile the 2 or what do you follow?
No way to know unless you spoke to the creator of the workout and knew what he was thinking.
But, there isn’t any magic to it, so you could just pick one. Heart rate and power aren’t tightly coupled so it makes sense they would differ.
I suggest power of course =)
My experience is that using HR is like throwing darts blindfolded. You might hit the board some of the time and even hit your target now and then. My heart rate various by at much as 10% at a given level of power in training. In racing, its’ so decoupled, that it’s entirely useless for pacing in my experience. I use it more for basic data it provides and to track other factors like hydration and overall stress on my cardio and energy systems. Oddly, it’s a little more accurate when running for me.
It’s also useful to detect overtraining. A step shift in heart rate or a HR that refuses to increase when RPE and power increases, can indicate a problem.