I know this is an OCD thing somewhat…but just wanna see what you all are doing if you are trying to hit a power target.
I know I know it doesn’t mater. nothing ever matters lol.
just literally wanna see what you are actually doing if you wanna hit a certain power target.
I’m training to power outdoors and ~half of my rides have slow downs stops and the other half is mostly smooth sailing. I’m somewhat trying to equalize things so I can compare, etc.
if I wanna ride at say 230 watts, do you all just try to make as many pedals strokes as possible as close to 230 watts? and just accept Normalized Power is gonna wind up around 210-215?
or if you see the Normalized Power dip below 230 due to stops/slowdowns, do you ride at 240-250 for a while and get the NP number to 230 then keep it at 230?
This is just what my buddies do for our training, not sure if there’s science behind it.
It depends on what you’re training for and the length of your intervals. If we’re training for crits, working on punchy power, and doing 30/30’s for example, then we’d use normalized power and aim to “catch up” if you had to coast through a corner or something. If we’re training for more endurance rides and the interval is a sweet spot type interval, then we aim to target the power that the interval calls for, and if the ride seemed to be really interrupted by traffic/stops/slows/corners/etc then you can add another interval on the end.
So apparently TR values average power more than normalized power. And that makes sense you’re trying to stay close to a specific steady target. If they used NP then doing a sprint would be the fastest way to get back on target but that would be really inappropriate for a tempo workout.
The key is to just do a small adjustment and settle in at the average power. So I generally compare the difference between the target and actual NP or avg P. If I’m 10 Watts low then I’ll target a 10W higher value until I get within a few Watts of the target. Then I just aim for the target again.
I would think that the stops unavoidably change the workout, but it is what it is. An hour at 150 watts constant is not the same workout as a spikey watt graph with coasting and sprints that averages 150 watts. And once you start coasting, any vo2 max interval you are in is done.
I get out past the lights near my house and on a good loop with right turns and roundabouts before I start anything with important watt targets.
If interrupted, I would just try and get back in the desired zone smoothly and quickly, but interested in what the coaches around here say.
When training outdoor I focus on getting the average power of the work interval as close to target as reasonably possible. If there are stops and such I try to time them to the rest interval. Deviation from target power during the rest interval is normally of less significance.
If I’m doing workouts where the rest interval matter (30/30, 40/20 etc.), then i usually do them on the trainer.
Hitting the exact power of a longer interval isn’t as important as one might believe as every workout is part of the greater picture. There’s no need to be obsessed about it, just perform the workout to the best of your ability and be content.
As I understand it if you’re spending half your time coasting to lights or stopped at them & you’re in the guts of a sustained power or long interval workout, it’s kinda missing the point. If the stoppages are fairly consistent you might be able to make a sprint workout out of it, but I haven’t bothered with that sort of training so far, let alone tried to do it in traffic.
I do a lot of pedalling against brakes in places where I think I’ll be able to keep rolling but still have to slow down to check at a crossing, or to govern speed when navigating downhill &/or through a blind tunnel or tight cloverleaf. But where there are lights I don’t even think of trying to make it productive so I traverse it as part of a warmup, cooldown, or specified recovery, & try to keep it below about 75%. It can take some planning & experimentation, knowing how long it takes to traverse a stretch of road or path. I got it wrong this morning, needing to leave the cycleway, cross a main road, & do laps of the carpark next to the track all within the warmup’s 3-minute sweetspot interval. Probably not critical to the workout though. Another time I got it wrong I had to start a sweetspot interval at 77kph. Such are the inefficiencies & other difficulties of outdoor training! But personally I’d almost always prefer that than being stuck on a turbo.
YMMV, I live in a small capital of about 200000 people so it doesn’t take long for me to get out of the crush.
Outdoors you just have to be more lenient than indoors. Indoors I try to be ideally +/- 2 W on all longer intervals. (For something like 15/30s I am more lenient as it is harder to hit the delta and stay at a power level.)
Outdoors IMHO you should to prioritize safety and accept that some intervals will be interrupted by e. g. traffic, tight curves, road furniture and the like. If you want to use your OCD to your advantage, use it to find a route that suits your workout. Where I live, I don’t think I have any suitable stretches of road for intervals longer than 10 minutes.
I take a longer warm up and get to a place I’ll less likely have to stop (an anti clockwise loop in the UK). Even though I still dont target a specific power but a range.
For structured progressive training, goal is gathering time in targeted energy zone.
On one hand, it is strict: if workout tells to ride 30min in Sweetspot, then ride 30m in Sweetspot because next workout will prescribe to ride 40min in Sweetspot. This is progression part.
But same time it gives you freedom: there is no real need to hit precise wattage. As long as you are in 88-94% of FTP, you are exercising in targeted range and fluctuations do not matter.
Averaging over longer intervals is counterproductive – if you constantly fluctuate under/over zone but average correct wattage, then you actually don’t hit intended energy zone.
Better try to hit target second-by-second.
IMO, normalized power is always better than average. The point of normalized power is that it takes into account the fact that training stress is not linear with power. So, if you’re trying to achieve a given training stress, normalized power is much more representative than average.
Doing workouts outdoors, I’m lucky in that I have a number of place to ride where there are basically no stops. That said, it’s been a couple of years since I’ve done workouts outdoors preferring non-structured riding.
I think Time in Zone is important here. I have set up a screen on my Garmin which has tine in zone for all 7 zones. For example, If I am on a strict endurance day, I have this screen on and try and maximise the Z2 time on it. I don’t try and average out where I have gone over or under as that would fill different Zone buckets.
I do almost all my training outdoors and I used to be really OCD about it and frustrated with how interrupted my intervals were. Then I realized, it doesn’t really matter, just do whatever you can the best you can. If it’s a Vo2/sprint session I’ll do a catch up where I sprint from the light to get power back in range, if it’s threshold I’ll ramp slightly above to catch it up if I can, and if it’s endurance I just continue on riding at whatever the range is. Between the hills here that interrupt the recovery portion of workouts and the stop lights it just kind of is what it is but it’s all work and it’s all progress.
lol.