Hi all,
I recently acquired a power meter and this has been motivating me to train more consistently than I have ever done in my life. I used to ride a lot when I was 15-18, a bit less when I was 19-30. Then I resumed when I was around 35, but I was demotivated by the hilly terrain of the place I had moved to. I am now 47, still living in this hilly zone and I am more motivated than ever to do some serious training.
So here is my question.
I would like to do some sweet spot training, but I find it hard to do it with constant hills that force me to go above threshold when climbing, and then way below when speeding downhill.
I do have an indoor spinning bike that I can use, but I do not have a power meter on it. So I thought I could do SS training based on my heart rate. Yet, I checked the heart rate zones under settings and they do not seem to match the empirical heart rate values I have for a given power level. So I was thinking of doing the following.
Take a set of recent rides considering only the first 30 minutes after warmup (to exclude fatigue) and essentially correlate power with heart rate. Once I know the heart rate I have for a given power level, then I can train at that power level without needed the power meter.
Obviously I can make things more refined by training a classifier to predict power based on heart rate, but some simple manual data analysis should do at the beginning.
I was wondering if you know of anything like this on this website or elsewhere. It seems to me something pretty straightforward that should work, so I would be surprised if no one had done it before. I guess it might even be a very common feature that I simply missed because I am very illiterate in terms of training.
So please let me know 
thanks
Dave
Hi @DavF
That could sound easy plan, but it is not as straight forwardly simple as it sound.
As watts are the input you put on your body and heartrate is its output your plan might work on short period riding with easy resistance and smooth cadence on your spinningbike.
I attached a picture of my 3h indoorcycling from where you can see how heartrate stays nicely 120-125bpm, but watts are drifting up and down.
There are also quite a lot variance in cadence, but heartrate stays still in 120-125bpm.
In the end after 2h45min heartrate starts to drift up too much and i needed to stop riding.
Also decoupling stays low except after that 3min drop after 1h16min. I don´t remember reason for that drop, but it is not relevant in this case.
Someone wiser could also answer for Dave if I´m totally wrong.
Here are also my 2,5h indoorcycling with 160W where watts are quite smooth, but heartrate varies from 115 to 125bpm and cadence are also not so smooth.
Maybe these gives you some advise for riding with spinningbike.
It’s more or less doable for longer steady state intervals but only in a ‘manual’ way. HR always lags, so you would need to search the intensity where your avg HR over 30-60sec is about on target and then keep that intensity. If you start adapting intensity to what your HR does, things go south…
Some examples as @IlariK mentions:
- HR Drift after a while. When starting to fatigue your intensity will go down if you follow HR
- HR lag at start of each work interval. Chances are you will start off to hard
- A simple burp will make your HR drop several beats for 20-30sec
- Sudden sounds or events will bump your HR up for a short while
- Heat will raise your HR a couple of beats, better make sure to have some good fan(s)
If you were talking Aerobic endurance training, I would say to go for it. I do that kind of training almost always based on HR. But for more intense training, it’s a bit hit & miss… unless you factor in all the above and accept to be somewhere around the intended target.
