We talk about how a power meter works, the benefits of using them and what brand should you go with. If you haven't used a power meter before or are looking to get a little more value from your expensive toy this podcast is for you.
You can find all the link I reference in the show at
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Hello and welcome back you absolutely amazing roadman We're back for the a one show Today I want to talk about a topic that I'm getting a lot of requests for it's a little bit off the calter that we've been doing for the last Few weeks. I'm gonna talk about power meters parameters how do they work these complex expensive little pieces of plastic and metal that we strap onto our boygs. How do they work? What's the benefits? What brands should you get? We'll get one and just looking at this. Actually make you faster. The suspicion you know what the answer is that I'm gonna go through it anyway. It's a show that you're gonna get a lot out of if you're currently using a power meter or you're taking a buoyant a power meter. Stay tuned for the next 20-25 minutes and I'm gonna talk you through the ins and of this complicated little piece of scientific apparatus. Before I get started I just like to talk briefly about our sponsor section. It's the A1 strength and conditioning plan. So if you haven't used the A1 strength and conditioning plan yet or you haven't heard about it you've probably got your head under a rock. We launched the A1 strength and conditioning plan about four weeks ago and it's been a blow away success. When I got started there was a lot of mistakes made by me. There was a lot of blind alleys that went down. There was a lot of trial and error. The goal with A1 coaching is kind of based on that quote. He learned from mistakes but they don't have to be your mistakes. So I wanted to give you guys a way to avoid the long trial and error process that took me down many dark alleyways and wasted much much time. I want to give you a guy a way to avoid that and that's what I do with the strength and conditioning plan. Early in my cycling journey a mentor of mine who was riding for our world tour team at the time he taught me about the importance of strength and conditioning and the importance of building a strong foundation. The idea being the stronger you build a foundation the harder you can build a peak at the top and core to that was strength and conditioning. It didn't matter how much training you do on the bike If you didn't have a strong basis to transfer that power, if you had a core, like a elastic band, you were just gonna waste so much efficiency. You were never gonna get that, the muscle that we're working on all the time, being the heart, we're never gonna get the capacity at our heart, transfer it into power on the pedals without strength and conditioning, without building that link. So really simple exercises. Takes about 12 weeks, you do a concurrency bike training twice a week to one-hour sessions a week, 45 minutes to one-hour a week and it'll make such a difference to your training. So I'm gonna pop a link into that strength condition and thing down below. For the podcast listeners, the link it's a massive sale. It's gonna be on 49.95 and normally it's we sell it for upwards of 350. I wanted to get it into the hands EU guys because it's something that's essential. You know, before we start going on talking about parameters, you know, power is one part of the equation. If you can't transfer that power, then the ability to put it into the pedals and the ability to bring your muscles to not fatigue and you see people, you know, we say it's secure, the hips don't lie. If you have those sort of postures, you're just undermining your chances of success. So go check that out, that's the start point. And with that said, let's get into parameters because parameters is a quagmire. And I know a lot of people avoid talking about parameters because it makes them feel retarded and they're like, I just don't feel that smart when I get into talking about equations and maths and if you're like me, you weren't, I wasn't brilliant at maths and skills. So this is something that doesn't come particularly easy to me and it's something I had to work on. But I was a super early adapter of parameters. I think when I got started with a parameter, there probably wasn't another tree so I'd listen or only I had a parameter. Actually, it's a funny story. So I would have been in college at the time and I was basically doing anything I could, with anything I could, obviously within the legal parameters of the sport, to get better at cycling. And, parameter was something I looked into a lot and were just in the year of post-Lancer Armstrong where he's you know this huge industry is built up around Lance Armstrong and for the first time there was massive economic incentives in making sure he won so you couldn't just hope that Armstrong arrived in July in good form it had to be a lot more than that it had to be guaranteed he was going to arrive in good form.
I'm a parking him reality what he'd done with around performance and hands and illegal substances aside there was a lot of good sports science in that US Postal team and they were the first team that really helped push that mainstream awareness of PowerMater and that was my entry into researching about it and trying to figure out what this tool was and I've done a lot of research. I thought you know I need one of these and they worked like two thousands your hour at the time and I was like okay I'm a student I work prior to my extra version I barely make enough money for a bus fare lunch and and, you know, just general drinking bags of cans on the weekend. How am I going to get money for a parameter? So, like anyone, a falsified loan application later. Yeah, sure, Mr. Bank Manager, I need a loan for that car. A falsified bank application later, and I was a way, I was the proud owner of an SRM. Still one of the market leaders, and I'm going to talk about that later. But that started my journey, and from there, I got with the catalyst. I never felt I was a talented writer. That was the catalyst for me starting to move up to the ranks, starting to just throw on like huge gains on my threshold season after season and it was probably looking back one of the most important decisions I've ever made because that single choice gave me this whole new direction of my life where I remember the pride of pulling on in Irish jersey for the first time. I remember traveling abroad and amazing races and great friendships and setting up a one coach and it's been an absolute journey and the parameter is one of those real fork and the road moments for me. Let's get the nerdy tech bit away because it's not that important that you understand how it works but sometimes it does help you with the buoyant to know there's there's a solid science behind it. So a power meter, it's a measure of the work you're doing. So first calculate power of power is forced by distance over time. Okay, so this is kind of like, because I couldn't make any sense of this, forced by distance over time, what does that mean? So this is kind of like, force is just to help hard your pushing on the pedals. And time in this equation is just cadence. So once you start thinking about it like that, it's not actually a very complicated equation as to how we do it. The hell is just it's strain gauges built into the pedal. There's little pieces of metal and I'm gonna butcher this for any engineers or outdoor listening and actually work with strain gauges But it's the flex on the strain gauge and the time it takes to return back to its normal post pre force State and that's measured and that's what gives us stuff the that's what gives us the power reading And the big reason we use power over, I know heart rate was around for a long time for a given training prescriptions, but the big reason we use power instead of heart rate is the lag. So if I'm sitting here at my desk recording the podcast, chilled out go like I am, probably 70 beats sitting there. If I just sprint across the fire side of the room, like 20 meters from a sprint, I'll get there probably still 70 beats then I'll stop. Damn my heart rate will go 18, 90, 120, 120, 120, 140 and the heart rate will catch up. So what we got there is heart rate lags behind effort. So as a coach if I want to give you one minute full gas how do you do that with heart rate? If I say to you do a one minute effort at 170 beats you're gonna start the effort you're gonna whack it up the you're going to be looking at your heart rate going on, shoot them, still at 70 beats. You're going to be walking it, walking it, walking it, and then you're going to finish your effort and your heart rate is going to start coming up. So heart rate lagging behind effort does not make sense for shorter duration efforts. So it makes heart rate a valuable tool for endurance. It makes it a valuable tool and a lot of other ways for helping us figure out economy, efficiency. It makes, it's a valuable tool and a bunch of other ways which I'm not going to get into now but it is not a valuable tool for those shorter duration efforts where power is keying. The real benefits I found about using the parameter, one is we're in this big segment culture at the moment with Strava and it's not always helpful because I go off to my local hill and I ride and it takes me eight minutes and then I do a big train of blocks six weeks, get the head down, nail the door and I go back and I do the same hill and it takes me nine minutes.
What have I learned from that? I haven't really learned anything. I've just learned that maybe I had a little bit less tire pressure that day. Maybe my drive strain efficiency wasn't brand. Maybe it was a headwind. Maybe it wasn't as aero. I've learned noting from that. But if I go and I ride the same eight minute hill, but I go, yeah, I'm I'm going to break it down instead of being an eight minute hill. I'm just going to make this a, you know, even it's a five minute test. I'm going to write five minutes as hard as I can. Now I average 450 watts. Now I'm going to do my block of training. I'm going to come back and I'm going to do it a force of five minutes again. And now I'm going to go, okay, I average 470 watts. I have improved. Now that's assuming that I haven't added weight on because weight is the second variable in this. We use power to weight a lot. Your power can be going up. But if your weight's going up as well, you're not actually getting any weight. faster. So power and weight are two variables we use for measuring sort of improvements and speed and things like that. So the power meter helps us remove that average speed culture of going out and going, did I average 30 kilometers an hour today? Because it's irrelevant if you average 30 kilometers an hour. 30 kilometers an hour into a tailwinds, 30 kilometers an hour downhill is very different to 30 kilometers an hour to a wind assisted wind. What's the opposite to assisted wind inhibitors. Hmm, it's a nice wind inhibitors and wind assistance. It's very different. It's very, very different. I could be 300 watts into the headwind. I could be 150 watts without the headwind, bulk keeping an average speed of authority. So it helps us to understand that these metrics are flawed and they're not a good way to train. Also, you're gonna go faster in races instantly by just owning a parameter. You know, just very little, like the training effect and stuff we're going to get into and how you use it as a tool. But you're going to go faster just by the fact of owning one and having it on and learn that small little bit about pacing. Because if I want to ride the local climb, I think the record on it is like seven minutes, six fifty eight or something. If I want to ride that local climb, I know what power I can do for six minutes and fifty eight seconds. So instead of going out at five hundred watts and go, maybe I can hold five hundred watts all the way up this climb. I know I can't hold 5'h or what's all the way up the climb. What can I hold 440 all the way up the climb? Yeah, maybe I can hold 440 what's all the way up the climb. So I go out and instead of sprinting out of the traps I go out and I sit at 440 and I know the 440 from bottom to top is the fastest I can make it up that climb. This is the argument we're seeing with riders like Vincenzo Nibali saying that They're like team Inios and Wiggins in particular started this Where they weren't responding to attacks on climbs. They know if it's called the Gallibiae The best I can average up called the Gallibiae is 390 watts So if nebulae attacks a 500 watts Grant I don't care. I'll just let nebulae ride off 500 watts because he'll low Yep, go again. He'll stop. He'll start fits and bursts all the way up but I'll just be steady as a die. Training 90 is the power that I can ride from the bottom to the top fastest end, regardless of what everyone else does. So that could be good enough for 15th on the stage or could be good enough to win the stage by a minute. So you're giving the very best out of yourself regardless of what your competition is doing. Also, I think probably the key reason, or one of the key reasons to get a parameter is as a reference point. it's a testing tool. So if I go and I started training block, which I did get ready for Tokyo, my first test is 360 watts, my sort of on-train test. Now I've put down a block what I'm 5 weeks back training. I'll do a test maybe heading to your own in next week so I'll make a test in your own in next week and I'll look to have improved on that 20 test. So the protocol I do for an FTP test, I like to get out and I like to ride the road. I like to find a hill and I like to hit it pretty hard. I don't like to hit a pretty hard. I like to hit it very easy, but I like to pace it because you know, hitting it very hard is as a grammatical slip up from either.
If I go now to 360, I mean, oh, I'm going to hold 360 to the top. Save my next test. I'm going to want to improve. It's also a 370. I'm not going to start a 370 on the nose. I like to segment it into 4 or 5 minute sections. And those 4 or 5 minute sections, I'll try negative split. So I'll start out at 360, then I'll try and bring it up to up to tree 64, then I'll try and go to 370, then I'll try and finish up a tree 75. I'm not gonna spring a massive surprise in this test. The only surprise would be if the wheels come off, if a tree 60, I'm going, oh my God, I can't hold this. Instead of going up to tree 65 for my second five minutes, I may be just trying to consolidate and hold the tree 60. And if I can build in the last quarter, a little bit I do. But if not, you just hang on for dear life. out and around field testing. For me it's the best way, it's easiest for motivation. You have a few corners, those visual benchmarks. When you're on the bike on the WAP bike, 20 minutes, it's pretty grim, it's a lonely place for 20 minutes. You take 95% of your 20 minute test, you plug it into a threshold. Actually, you know what? I will get a threshold calculator and I'll link it down below. So pop your email in and I'll set it up where you just get emailed the threshold calculator automatically. The threshold calculator is definitely something that it's really good when we get into explaining what the zones are and why zones are important and why it's different to trying different intensities. The threshold calculator will actually save me, have to explain some Really laborious points where I'm talking about zone one and here's the physiological adaptations you get zone two And here's the physiological adaptations. I'll include all that I build all that I'm not showing into this own calculator And you guys can download that for free. Okay, so you take your 20 minute test get your 95% of it Ping it into our threshold calculator and that's gonna break it down and it's gonna give you your zone So you're gonna have your zone ones on two zone trades on for zone five and you're gonna have an associated Physiological benefit you're gonna get from training in that zone So example, if you want to burn fast, build mitochondria, increase endurance, you're gonna try it in zone one and zone two. So depending on the results you put in, it's gonna give you different power levels. You need to try and to get those benefits. If you want to increase muscular endurance, it's gonna have a zone you need to try and infra-life. You want to increase neuromuscular power, it's gonna have a zone. If you want to increase peak force, it's gonna have a zone. So it's really cool. It's really it just means I actually put out a blog today, depending on when you're listening to this, but it's on medium. I will, yeah I link the blog as well. I give them a lot of links down below and you need to start setting up a show notes page because it's just gonna be scattered with links. But the blog down below is talking about the number one trying to mistake I see people make and the number one trying to mistake I see people make is they don't have a parameter, they don't have a heart rate monitor, so what happens is they end up going out and roiding coin a heart, coin of the average speed culture. I call it headless chicken roiding because they're not going out with a plan. The plan they're going out with, it's kind of hardy or rather than cycling. The plan they're going out with is to roid coin a heart, especially if you're time crunched and you're trying to get this session in before a worker, after a walk, what ends up happening is you end up in what you'll see when you get this threshold calculator is zone 3. Because zone 1's on 2 feels too easy. Zone 4 feels unachievably hard so you gravitate towards zone 3. And there's nothing wrong with riding around in zone 3. In zone 3 you'll get a set of physiological adaptations but you're not going to get the physiological adaptations from riding in zone 1's on 2. Zone 4 is on 5's on 6. in zone 3 you only get the adaptations associated with zone 3. So if you spend 95% of your time, of your available training time, training one zone and neglecting all the other zones, when it comes time to race, when it comes time to go and do your Mallorca tree one two, when it comes time to go and do your sporty and you go into the base of a climb and you throw it in zone four, your body's in pure shock, it starts building lactate really fast, doesn't know how to clear because it hasn't encountered it.
No other example, when you're five hours in and your body's like, oh my god, I'm shutting down because you haven't built enough mitochondria. You're like the powerhouses in your cells. You haven't built enough mitochondria for your endurance that lasts for the day, because you haven't spent enough time riding in zone one and zone two. Your screws, the wheels are going to come off. You're going to fall apart badly and that's just because you've neglected training and all the training zones. And that's what we do. We build training plans Based off your event so we know what the demands your event are if your event is 10 months away. Okay, let's look at this. It's a four-hour a miracle tree one to bunch of our clients are doing that What's the demands of it's 312 kilometers? You don't have to train 312 kilometers I'll get into this a little bit and how we use power as a metric this could even end up in a two-part podcast Let me see how long we've been going Yeah, we've been all 20 minutes. This guy ended up being a two part podcast. And I'll get into talking about how you actually use, so yeah, no, I'm committing to up in a two part podcast because I think it's too much information. We're already on 20 minutes and I wanna go through the brands and the types of parameters you're buying. So rather than going on and talking about how to use performance manager charts, what's chronic training load, how do we build training plans. But the rough idea here is you take an event like New York at 3-1-2. We know the demands of an event like New York at 3-1-2. We know how many errors it's going to be in the saddle. We know how difficult the physiological toll is going to be. We know what zones you're going to have to ride in and for how long. So now we need to make sure your training plan reflects time in those zones. So we look at each of those zones like a bucket on your way to your New York at 3-1-2 goal. And it's like, Okay, we need to put enough time into each of these buckets to prepare you for the event. That way we take the guesswork out and we know when you get to the race, your knocked wheels aren't going to come off, you're not going to fall apart, you know, burn something like you get a stomach bug or a crash. We know pretty much how you're going to get on the event because we know we've put enough time in your plan where you're going to be doing the endurance. We know you've spent enough time in zone four for your climbing, you know, we know you've spend the time years on Foyford, a really steep pitches where you have to go super deep, but for only 30 seconds or a minute, we know they're not going to ruin you. This is the power of having a power meter, the power of the power meter. Actually, I'm going to segue briefly here because I have something in front of me that's pretty cool. My girlfriend got me a present and it's like an egg timer. It's like a 15 minute egg timer and the idea is you flip it over and it gives you 15 minutes of time. just reading the box of there before I start. It's really cool. So the idea is inside of the box, it's just called 15 minutes. I don't even know where you get this. And the school of life, Mika, it says, our lives are so busy and frenetic. We're always forgetting to make time for what really matters. Inside this box is finely crafted hourglass, who grains of sand measure out 15 minutes. This isn't very long, but that's the point. It's longer than we give to many of the things that are ostensibly think of as important, like properly listening to her partially analysing her career ambitions, or playing a concerted way with her child. The hourglass is a tool that prompts us to carve out 15 minutes of time for what truly counts. It creates a floor beneath which it challenges not to fall and as the sand flows from one vessel to another it also looks extremely beautiful. It's a class idea, it's absolutely brilliant, it stops me during the day now, I'll flick it over and go I'm going to read for 15 minutes, I'm going to meditate for 15 minutes, I'm going to do core work for 15 minutes. It's brilliant. I don't even know much. It's probably a tenor. But they're amazing. I'd encourage you to get one of those shotgun on the desk. Okay, let's talk about one other really cool application of the power meter. It's power profiling. So you get your power meter and I say to you, okay, go out right 10 seconds full gas, right one minute full gas, right five minutes full gas, or 20 minutes full gas. And I know your weight. So now I divide the power you can achieve for each of those duration, it's boy or weight and I have what we call a watts per kilogram figure.
Now I look at a chart because we've had hundreds of tells and some people do it is since the advent of the power meter. Now I look at your chart and I plot it and I say ah okay Johnny is a cat for 10 second power but he's a cat 2 on 1 minute power and then he's a cat 4 on 4 minute power and he's a cat 4 on 20 minute And I'm looking at it and I'm going, ah, okay, so Johnny is a count two on one minute power but he races in count four. So now I can look around the courses around, say we're based in Ireland and I go, okay, well of course has a one minute drag or of course has a one minute challenge and then I can say we can increase Johnny's chances of success because relative to Johnny's peers he's a very strong one minute power. So now we call this power profiling. So now using a course that has a difficult one minute section and Johnny's tactic for that race becomes wack at full gas for that one minute section because other CAF4s aren't going to be able to follow you and we statistically increase the likelihood that Johnny is going to win that race or achieve separation from the break. It becomes a super interesting tool when we dig a little bit deeper into that. I'm going to dig deeper on how we use it on the next follow-up podcast on this, but I want to talk briefly about brands Because like I said in my falsified student loan application. I ended up paying 2000 euro for my SRM But right now I'm thinking 500 to 800 euro is going to get you a lot of value in the power meter market actually before I came on here I was just looking at a review DC Rainmaker has it on YouTube It's an old one I've gone to check and since that they're actually in production. It's IQ squared 150 euro for a parameter. I can't speak to its Quality because I haven't used it but the review looks pretty legit might be worth checking out But I think there's not one best parameter out there There is a best parameter for your needs and there's a best parameter for your budget. So Let me explain so the different ones that I've had that I've you know, I have experience with and it's pretty much, there's some of the newer brands I haven't used like IQ squares but I've used most of them at this stage. Wheel-based power meter is a very good option. Power top, the original polyneres and the power meter markers, there you go too for this. I think the new hub, it's the G3 hub. You're in that five to 800 euro price bracket, dependent on spout, you go with type of rim, you go with. And void wheel-based is very good. It's reliable. We don't have left-right discrimination, which is a little bit of a drawback. So I can't tell if I have a, you know, a disbalance between my left leg and my right leg. But the best way to actually just get around that is if you have a friend or a gym who has a walkbike, go jump on that. That has left-right discrimination. If you're 48, 52, 49, 51, 50, 50, you don't have any major noteworthy discrimination. So you don't need to worry about a parameter that does left right balance. In my experience, 95% to 99% of clients I've met have no need for left right discrimination. So the power tap is brilliant for that. Super easy to change from your time trial bike to your row bike to your cyclocross bike onto your commute bike and you have power on everything because as we'll get into the next podcast on this, having continuity of your data is super important. The drawback you're stuck with this one wheel. So if you race and you try on two different wheels, like most of us do, you're going to need two different parameters. You're going to need a race, a wheel and a training wheel, a bit of nine. And also having a gap in the data, especially from races is not ideal at all. Pedal based has emerged in the last couple of years. Companies like Garmin have come out with them, PowerTap also have them. Benefits, easy to move from one bike to the other, a few accuracy problems. And for me, I've never had a crash where I've smashed a crank, I've had plenty of crashes where I've smashed a pedal. I've even smashed a pedal off the wall, you know, loading bikes in our cars, you have leaned against a wall, bringing up the stairs to my apartment, I'm buying pedals all the time. For me, I won't use a pedal based power meter, the reliability issues, but also just, it's a delicate piece of case and you're exposing it to a lot of risk. Your pedals are going to to hit the ground. Pedals and bar tape, hit the ground, look at your pedals, better scraped up.
If your pedals are scraped up, stay away from this. Crank arm is a very nice way to go at the moment. Companies like stages are doing a crank arm and it's possible to swap the crank arm. If you assume and you're using the same group set on your China boykin, your race boykin, it's possible to swap the crank arm across pretty easily. It's a couple of volunteers, you'll do it in a second. And stages have had issues with water when it rains really heavy. Their reliability is gone. Actually not their reliability, they stop working and you need to send them back. That is a pain in the ass. Upside that stages have been very, very good at customer service. So they're something I would recommend having used them. But if you can afford a slightly higher price point, you're looking at kind of the 800-foot and your remark, it's chainsets. So you're looking at things like Quark SRMs, a bit more expensive, power to max. The drawback, very hard to swap over now. Unless you're fairly proficient at bike maintenance, it's difficult to swap over, especially with the plethora of bottom brackets we have on the market now. What I was, had my SRM between my training bike, race, bike and time-troll bike, they were all using OctaLink bottom brackets. It took five minutes to swap it over. now you're probably BB-tority, BB-Royce, press-face, you know, there's so many buck brackets out there. It's unlikely all your bikes have the same buck and bracket, so it's going to be difficult to swap it over. Also a drawback on the chain set is your chain set's not going to match your group set. So I have, I've had chain sets, parameters before and the chain sets won't match your integrity or your duration or whatever you're using a bit of a drawback but the crank sets are the way to go for reliability. They're the way to go for durability. I think the crank arm is actually the best compromise if I've always had people at the moment. I think the crank arm gives the best bang for the buck. That change ability still has the reliability few issues but the customer service is really good. Things I would look out for when you're getting a parameter. I would look out for a company that has good warranty, you're going to have issues regardless of what parameter you go with, you're going to have issues. They're complicated pieces of technology, we're out in the elements all the time so ensure it has good customer service. I touched on the single sided the left right discrimination, if you don't have left right discrimination, I don't see a problem with going with a wheel based which has a combined left and right in one or just a single sided parameter. And just a couple of Q-factor actually as well as warts talking about Q-factor is the width. So if you go with a pedal based crank or pedal based power meter, it can increase the Q-factor. That's sort of the width that apart. That is the changes that so we can bring it out another 10 mil which can muck your position a bit. But typically studies that I've seen is only mucks with your power output. Like if you're to test on your bike straight after going to a new queue factor, you're gonna have impaired results, but after a week or so, that normalizes and you'll be back to normal. Also important is just make sure you always run your firmware updates. This stuff's changing all the time, so lace firmware update is essential for your parameter to record accurately. and make sure you zero offset it before every roll it. Some of them automatically zero offset, zero offset, it says calibration. If you're using a Garmin or also if you're using a Wahoo, it's not actually a calibration, calibration something different, it's just a zero offset. It's like jumping onto the bathroom, weighing scales and making sure it actually reads zero before you jump on. Okay, they are some things to really bear in mind before getting a power meter. I'm gonna get into it in the next podcast of making this a two part one, how we use the data, what is training stress, how we work backwards from our goal, what's chronic training load, acute training load, training stress balance, and really getting the most out of our parameter. So I really hope you enjoyed that. Check the link down below for that strength and condition because that is an essential piece. I'm gonna pop those other links I mentioned in the description as well. Thanks for listening, road man. And I'll chat to you in the next one.
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