Old 10-22-21, 08:08 AM
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aclinjury
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Originally Posted by RChung
I care about whether they read in chicken-power because in order to test their accuracy, I measure the difference in reported power when adding a known mass, or climbing a known height, at different known speeds. It's a lot easier to do that in watts than in chicken-power.

Pacing can actually be important (but it's more about the distribution of work than raw power). One of the earliest things I learned from using power is that my previous pacing using RPE was way off. Having accurate power data (not just consistent) helped me to learn when to trust my RPE and when not to, so I learned how to "re-calibrate" RPE. That's especially important near threshold, so having accuracy near threshold was important to me.



I mostly agree, which is why I say that one of the least demanding uses for power data is training. That's why I keep saying that you can train pretty effectively with just a wristwatch and a regular training route, and why I think a single-sided power meter is fine for many riders. However, I think the real value of power data comes from doing things you can't do with a wristwatch, like drag reduction (but there are others, depending on what kind of weekend warrioring you do).

As an anecdote, I've never done 18 hrs/week of riding. The most I've ever done for an extended period was maybe 12 hrs/wk, and I was at my fittest. Then I changed jobs, and got married, and soon after we were expecting a child, so my riding time got cut a lot. That's when I bought a power meter. I was using the power meter not to get faster, but to learn how to cut out "inefficiency" in training time. I was able to stay very close to my former speeds and times on half as much riding -- but I couldn't keep it up for hours and hours as I had before. So I never actually got faster with power -- I stayed almost the same on half the riding. Now, of course, I'm much slower, and the kid is going to graduate from college next spring. So I'm old, fat, and slow; but if I do all these crazy things, there are times when I'm just old and fat.
Right. In my experience, one of the major "advantage" of being able to train long hours per week is that:
1. your routine doesn't have to be "efficient" because you will gain fitness based on sheer volume. Of course, as a race or event approaches, you need to cut down the zone1/2 hours and start to focus on specificity (the greater the volume you had put in, the shorter amount of time you need to spend on specificity before entering peak fitness).
2. with a great volume base, you're considered well trained, then the rule "FTP = 95% of 20min max effort" applies. If not well trained, then this rule doesn't apply. And it seems from personal experience that it requires about 18-20 hrs/wk to be considered "well trained". Anything less then this, then you could still train to get a good threshold but you won't be able to do many above-threshold forays and still have something left at the finishline.

But I will say this. There are many research on exercise physiology already. All the training and response are pretty well researched (yes, you still need to understand your body because of specific individual response, but this can only be known after some experience, and maybe a good coach). However, the one area that is still not well document is diet. There isn't much research that say "if you eat this diet, you can expect to get this training response". If there is something I wish to know better, it's this aspect of training performance.
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