Originally Posted by
Jughed
85-88 most of the time. When riding harder, the cadence goes up to 95-100.
While doing VO2 intervals last night I noticed that 93-96 was resulting in less power than 85-88 at the same heart rate. About 10-12 watts less.
That's because the higher cadence is putting more load on your cardio system. The trade-off is lower muscle loading at the higher cadence. I usually do VO2 max intervals at around 100 rpm, but for longer FTP intervals I drop to around 85 rpm as my HR tends to spike up after a few minutes - even at the lower power output. I also tend to reduce my cadence slightly during long intervals as my HR starts to creep up. So I might start a 20 min FTP interval at 90 rpm and gradually reduce to 80 rpm to keep my HR more stable.