A couple of weekends ago I was one of about 40 coaches and athletes to attend a 2 day workshop presented by Hunter Allen (Right), one of the co-founders of Training Peaks software platform.
Bob Tobin the owner of http://www.cyclelepowermeters.com/ had organised the event and it was interesting to see the mixture of people exploring the use of these devices for their own training or for the development of their athletes.
Going into the seminar I will freely admit I was already a fan of using power as a training tool. I have been using an Ergomo system for the last year and had read through Hunter and Andy Coggan's book Training and Racing with a power meter.
Whilst I love a good training book, I sometimes find it tough going taking in all that information and applying that to the real world situations without ready examples and the ability to ask questions. I thought listening to Hunter and chatting to the other coaches would provide some greater insights into really getting the most out of this fantastic tool.
So the main benefit from the workshop for me was taking the time to really delve into the relationships between the variables in the data. When you first get a power meter one of the first things to get used to is the reams of data these things produce, so it can become a bit of task to understand what its all telling us.
I meet lots of runners and other athletes who wear heart rate monitors, often when I ask them about what they really get out of them it turns out to be little more than a glorified stop watch. Heart rate zones are more often than not just guess work and therfore its just not adding anything to improving the performance of the athlete, in fact it often has the opposite effect.
So here is the rub, a power meter or any type of fitness monitor needs the user to spend a little time getting to undertstand what it all means and or you get a coach to do it for you. In my experience of working in business as an executive coach and with athletes our biggest challenge is working out where to place our focus oftime and energy. Where are we are going to get the the biggest bang for our performance buck.
For athletes this almost certainly means spending their valuable time working out rather than analysing data. For most beginners just getting out and working out regularly will make huge performance improvements. For those athletes with aspirations of greater things i.e. Ironman events, age group qualification etc. getting appropriate feedback from your performance tools is a real time saver.
For me before using a power meter it was a bit like working in the dark, firstly I used my intuition so I could gauge my fitness by feeling my way around, ok but sometimes I did not listen to the way I felt. Then I got a heart rate monitor, whch was a bit like being given a candle, much easier to see when the conditions were right, but lots of other things affected it so it wasn't always the most reliable. Finally I got a power meter and the light has come on! Yep, you have to consider the conversion cost and feed the meter of regular analysis but its the difference between night and day!
Having a simple guideline wattage number and coupling that up with your heartrate allows you to ride within parameters that will dramatically improve the odds of having a great race.
Now with the development of the Performance Management Chart in Training Peaks and WKO software we are able to monitor the effects of variables like, TSS (Training Stress Score) and TSB (Training Stress Balance) again improving the odds of getting right on our big race day.
So if you are considering coming out of the dark and buying a power meter or other fitness monitor get some help in getting the most out of it, if that means buying a book, asking a club mate or working with a coach it will be worth the investment of your time.
May the Power be with you comrade :-)
