No trainer during holidays: train with just HR monitor?

Hello !

I’ve been following the base plan for a month now, and making great progress. I’m away for 3 weeks and couldn’t grab my bike and home trainer to continue .

There is however a still bike where I’m going and I’ll have my heart monitor.

Are there any TR workouts I can do for treshhold or VO2 max using just HR monitoring and maybe using HR Zoning ? It’s not ideal but I want to keep improving. I do have a physical sense of where my ftp is, so i could just pedal for 45 mn at 80% max HR but it doesn’t seem ideal

Yep, I’ve done this before and it seemed to be pretty spot on when I had access to a power meter again- I found myself hitting the correct zones without really thinking about it. Also saw a decent improvement during that block, so it can’t have been too bad…and I think there’s some advantages to being able to train by feel as well.

One thing to note is that HR isn’t great for shorter or more variable intervals because it takes a little while to respond. I was doing SSBHV at the time, so HR was pretty suitable for most of my workouts- however, if you’re doing shorter v02 intervals or above, RPE is probably your best best.

It’s probably worth looking over some fairly recent HR data to establish some rough ‘ranges’ and get an idea of how these might vary by day. :slight_smile: