For roughly the first hundred years of organised cycling, the sport had no language for effort. Riders measured distance and time. Coaches measured perceived effort. The most sophisticated assessments — the lab-based step tests, the lactate threshold work — happened once or twice a year for elite athletes and never for the amateur. The rider on the bike, in real time, had no way to know what the work they were doing actually cost.
That changed in 1986. The change came from one engineer in Ulm, Germany, working in his workshop with strain gauges and an obsession with cycling that medical engineering had not displaced.
Uli Schoberer's conversation with Anthony Walsh on the Roadman Cycling Podcast is one of the most important historical pieces in the archive — not because the man is famous to the average amateur, but because the device he built is sitting on the bike of every serious amateur who reads this site. The SRM power meter, the first reliable on-bike measurement of mechanical work in cycling, started a chain of consequences that reshaped how the sport trains.
Listen to the full conversation with Uli Schoberer →
This piece walks through the origin story, the engineering, the early adoption pattern, and what the existence of the device has done to amateur cycling in the four decades since.
What The Sport Looked Like Before 1986
The starting context is unrecognisable now. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the average competitive cyclist had a basic odometer that measured distance. The early Polar heart-rate monitor reached the consumer market in 1982 and was the first widely available physiological measurement on the bike. Beyond that, training was managed by feel, by the duration of the ride, and by the rider's own subjective sense of effort.
For the elite athlete, the lab existed. A national-team rider could go to a sports-science department two or three times a year, ride a step test on an ergometer, get a lactate-threshold value, and use that data to inform a season's training. The interval between visits was the structural problem. A rider in March who had a lactate threshold value from October had no way to know whether the value was still accurate. The body had moved on. The data had not.
Schoberer's framing across the conversation is direct. Cycling is unique among endurance sports in needing this kind of on-bike measurement. Running has speed — and on a track or a flat road, speed reflects effort. Swimming has timing across a known distance. Both sports give the athlete instant feedback on their output. Cycling speed tells the rider almost nothing — wind, gradient, rolling resistance, and group draft all change the relationship between speed and effort. A 35 km/h average across a flat-headwind ride is a wildly different metabolic load to a 35 km/h average down a smooth descent.
This is the structural problem the power meter solved. Power is an instantaneous measure of mechanical work the rider is producing — independent of wind, gradient, or terrain. The wattage on the screen reflects the actual cost of the effort regardless of what the speed is doing.
The Engineering Challenge
The challenge Schoberer set himself was not trivial. Power on the bike is force multiplied by angular velocity. Force is what the rider applies to the pedal. Angular velocity is the cadence. The two values multiplied together give the mechanical work in watts.
The constraint that mattered was that the energy produced by the rider has to keep going forward. The measurement system cannot consume the work. If the device is in line with the drivetrain, it cannot dissipate energy or it slows the rider down. The strain-gauge approach Schoberer used solves this elegantly. The strain gauges measure micro-deformation in the crank arm under load — tiny bends in the metal — without consuming the energy that produced them. The crank still transfers full force to the chain. The deformation just gets read off and converted to a force value.
Force multiplied by crank length gives torque. Torque multiplied by cadence gives power. The math is straightforward. The engineering — building a unit that survives weather, vibration, road shock, and crashes while staying accurate to within one or two per cent of true value — was the work that took years.
Schoberer built the first units in his workshop. Each one was individually calibrated against a known reference. The early generations had wired connections between the crank and the head unit. Wireless, battery life that lasted a season, and the various refinements that made the device practical for daily use came later.
The product Schoberer was selling in the early 1990s was effectively a hand-built scientific instrument priced like one. The cost put it firmly in the professional and serious-amateur segment. The pricing relaxed slowly across the decades as manufacturing scaled and competing technologies emerged.
The Early Adopters
Three names anchor the early adoption story. Greg LeMond — the American who had won the 1986 Tour de France and was looking for every legitimate edge in his preparation. Mario Cipollini — the Italian sprint specialist whose attention to bike technology was decades ahead of the field. Beat Breu — the Swiss climber whose engineering curiosity matched his racing résumé.
The credibility of those riders mattered. A new technology in cycling does not get accepted by the conservative middle of the pro peloton until visible riders have validated it. LeMond, Cipollini, and Breu provided that validation. The pattern Schoberer describes is consistent with how technology adoption works in any sport — early adopters who are willing to experiment, results that demonstrate the device produces useful information, gradual migration of the more conservative riders once the technology is no longer novel.
The Italian and Swiss professional teams started running SRM units across their training programmes through the 1990s. The data became part of the way coaches managed riders. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, the device had become near-standard in pro cycling. The British and American teams that came up through the 2000s were already operating in a world where on-bike power was a given.
What The Device Did To Cycling Training
The downstream effects of the power meter are difficult to overstate. The training methodology that defines modern cycling — functional threshold power testing, training zones, sweet-spot work, polarised distribution, periodisation by training load — was built on the data the SRM made possible.
Andrew Coggan and Hunter Allen's work on training with power, published in the early 2000s, codified the framework most amateurs now use without thinking about it. The TrainingPeaks platform that the Roadman audience runs against is built on the metrics the device produces. The Performance Manager Chart, the Chronic and Acute Training Load values, the TSS-driven periodisation that structures most serious-amateur seasons — none of it exists without the underlying measurement.
For amateur cyclists, the effect has been levelling. The data that elite athletes had access to in the lab two or three times a year is now available to any rider with a power meter on every ride. The serious club rider in 2026 has more performance data per training week than a 1990s pro had per season. The information asymmetry that defined cycling for most of its history is gone.
For deeper context on how the framework runs against modern training plans, see the FTP training zones piece, the power meter guide, and the comparison of power meter versus smart trainer for indoor training.
The Cycling-History Layer
What makes Schoberer's conversation particularly worth listening to is the cultural detail across the sport's transition from a primarily intuitive practice to a primarily measured one. He talks about the resistance from older riders and coaches who saw the device as a threat to feel-based training. He talks about the surprise some pros experienced when the data revealed they were under-doing their own threshold or over-cooking their long endurance days. The internal dynamic of a pro team adjusting to the new visibility was not always smooth.
The conversation also covers Schoberer's relationship with the pro teams that adopted SRM most aggressively across the 1990s and 2000s. The level of access required to deliver and maintain hand-calibrated units across a Grand Tour campaign was significant. The engineering relationship between SRM and the early-adopter teams shaped both the device and the methodology that grew up around it.
For listeners interested in the broader story of how cycling's relationship with measurement and data has evolved — including the marginal gains era, the shift toward AI-driven training, and the ongoing tension between coach intuition and data-driven planning — Schoberer's conversation sits as one of the foundational pieces. The device he built is the substrate everything else runs on.
What Amateurs Should Take Away
Three things from the conversation translate directly to how the average serious amateur should think about their own training.
One. The data is a tool. The training is the work. Schoberer's framing across the conversation is consistent — the engineer's job is to give the rider accurate, permanent measurement. What the rider does with that data is the rider's problem. The presence of a power meter does not produce fitness on its own. The training programme the rider runs against the data is what produces fitness.
Two. The history matters because the methodology matters. The training frameworks the Roadman audience uses — zones, sweet-spot, polarised, threshold testing — exist because the device exists. Understanding the origin story makes the framework more legible. The 80/20 distribution Stephen Seiler validated in his research depends on accurately measured intensity, which depends on the device.
Three. The amateur era is the result of forty years of cumulative work. The serious amateur in 2026 is operating in a world where one of the highest-leverage training tools in the sport is sitting on their bike. Use it. Track against it. Build the season around the data it produces. The historical alternative — feel-based training without measurement — is still available, and a small minority of cyclists still prefer it. The data-rich approach is more efficient for most of the audience this site is written for.
For amateurs working through the question of what power meter to buy and how to integrate it into a structured plan, the Roadman coaching system is built around evidence-based training that uses the data the device produces. For a faster answer on a specific session question, ask the AI coach.
Listen To The Full Conversation
The full episode with Uli Schoberer — including the deeper engineering history, the stories from working with LeMond, Cipollini, and Breu, and Schoberer's view on where on-bike measurement goes next — is on the Roadman Cycling Podcast.
The device on the bike has a person behind it. Schoberer built the foundation the modern sport runs on. The work now, as ever, is the rider's.
