I’m training indoors now (-25 wind chill) and using a base program on TR. The smart trainer provides the recommended settings but I was wondering about how to stay on a plan without a power meter on my mtn bike. Can you use the HR monitor with any consistency to stay on target?
Welcome to the TrainerRoad forum.
For training without power, TR recommends using RPE over heart rate.
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I used TR’s Virtual Power for quite a few years before getting my Assioma pedals and went off HR and RPE once I was able to get back on the road in the spring (I take your -25 windchill and raise you -55 windchill here today 
). I still tend to use HR quite a bit out on the road, especially for steady efforts where HR is much more useful than the shorter stuff. It’s definitely useful having both HR and power available inside and out, but you can still more than make due without power outside and learn to be in tune with what different power ranges feel like from your time spent indoors.
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I’ve been doing some workouts outdoors, off-road on a single speed fat bike so about as far removed from a carbon road bike as you can be, using RPE. It helps if you have done similar efforts indoors so you know what they should feel like but it’s reasonably accurate.
I’d still tend to do the shorter intervals indoors where you can be much more precise - going thirty seconds under or over on a fifteen minute interval is neither here nor there but also remember just how far you could have travelled in fifteen minutes on a bike!
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Learn to ride to feel and use a HR monitor, both of those can take you a long way.
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Ha! Im in SW Montana and i know in central Mt. they are at those kind of temps. Thanks for the response
Cool, Billings rider here, and there are a few other “local” MT riders in TR and on the forum. Ivy from TR is actually among us, and probably closer to you 
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Anaconda
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I’m actually North of the border in Saskatchewan–the Polar Vortex knows no borders!
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People trained successfully with just RPE for a long time. Since you’ve been training with power indoors you know how each zone should feel. You’ll be fine. Real-time heart rate info won’t do you much good until you have at least of few weeks of data as a baseline. It will be different outdoors from in.
Only thing I would recommend is to replace complex intervals (think over-unders) with simple, steady efforts. Consistency is king. You’ll still get 99% of the benefit if you’re in the right zone, which is actually pretty easy to do.
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