Outdoor workouts - power

Just a quick one. When doing the workouts outdoors, should I be using average power or normalised power for the interval?!

If you’re riding the target power for the interval steadily then AP and NP should be very close, within a few watts, so doesn’t really matter which you use.

If there’s a big discrepancy between the 2 then that means you’re surging and not riding steadily, in which case you should look to address that.

Yeah i get that, but when doing a workout outside being smooth isn’t always possible as there are changes in terrain etc so you’re always going to have to address that.

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I just use the lap function for each interval on my elemnt bolt and use lap avg power to check if I’m hitting my wattage targets. So I have the whole interval power to check if I’m low/high and my normal 3s smoothed power to check my current output.

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That’s what i usually do but when i checked the ride report on the TR website the numbers were lower and then i noticed the target seems to be NP

Best to use average power and start a new lap for each interval

AP for sure between those options.

It may not work as well outside, but “live” power with appropriate smoothing (5-10 sec) seems a better choice to me.

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Bit of both for me. Average power at the start of the interval which basically tells me “Hey! too hard” or “Hey! More than this”.

Then when it settles down, I hold the effort and periodically check 5sec power to see I’m not dropping.

same here, but from experience in windy conditions I prefer to use 10 second average power on my lap and non-lap pages.

I’ve also got a separate page with NP, TSS, IF, etc, but normally only check that when doing long aerobic rides and targeting a certain TSS. That page allows me to confirm TSS is matching my guesstimate, for example last time I did hard ride on that route and not sure if I have to add some more time at end of route.

i use lap average power as others have mentioned.

Use AVG power for anything less than an hour. NP is used to quantify workload over a longer duration, it’s meaningless for short intervals.

So for example, last night I did my VO2 max workout outdoors, so for my 3 min intervals, I had 3 sec power displayed so I could see what as was doing at that moment, and I had lap avg displayed so I could make sure I was hitting the correct power intended for the interval duration.

The difference between AVG and NP power was discussed in a much better fashion on one of the recent podcasts.

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