I am new here and would appreciate your help. I have noticed that my time in zones varies a lot between power and heart rate.
On a recent ride my time in zones was a follows:
Power / Heart rate
- 50mins / 1hr 4mins
- 52mins / 1hr 34mins
- 48mins / 20mins
- 17mins / 3mins
I believe my eFTP setting of 273 is about right based on doing some intervals. My heart rate max and resting Hr are entered correctly. Should I edit my individual heart rate zones so that my time in zone more closely reflects my power zones?
Yes and no.
Depending on the duration of your rides, and your aerobic fitness, you will have HR and power aligned (coupled). After a certain duration, you will experience a decoupling of HR from power. This is why it would have a response called āit dependsā.
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Thanks for that. I get what you are saying about power and Hr decoupling.
My aerobic fitness is good. I get the same power and Hr zone variations in rides under 2 hours where I know for sure that fatigue and Hr decoupling is not an issue. I would expect some drift once Iām over about 3 hours.
I would definitely endorse customising your zones, if you have an idea of your LT1/VT1 and LT2/VT2.
Which of the default settings are you using?
I find Coggan (5) better matches my HR compared to Friel (7).
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The higher the intensity, the more it will depend on how this intensity was done. Multiple short bursts of intensity will count in the Power zones but will not be long enough to make your HR go up far enough. Thatās because HR has significant lag regarding to power which is instant. If you have a ride with only longer Tempo and/or Threshold sections, the difference will be much less. In a criterium with lots of bursts coming out of each turn, the difference will be higher.
If you edit HR zones, only do it for the lower zones.
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Itās on Friel 7. Thanks, Iāll take a look at those options.
Thanks thats helpful. Iāve lowered the upper Z2 Hr setting which I think was high.
What are you chasing? Why do you think it is important for power and HR zones to match? How will that improve your training?
Over the years I formed the opinion that in the context of training, HR is only useful when
a) referenced to power and observing trends. Here is a long range trend over 4 years:
3 years of consistent training averaging around 7-8 hours/week for each year, and easily see improvement in HR for power around upper zone2. Then I focused on strength and conditioning and allowed cycling fitness to drop. Pretty easy to see the changes.
b) doing easy rides well under that top of HR-zone2 from above, which I determined by changes in breathing around 135-137bpm so its really something like vt1 with lt1 being below that. And by easy, I mean under 10bpm so keeping average HR under 128bpm no matter what zone power is in (often around 40-55%).
FWIW as someone that tried aligning power and HR zones, I donāt find value as itās chasing numbers without any real value. It doesnāt help make training decisions.
Understand the basis for the physiological zone and then focus on field testing that. In the case of HR, riding under LT1 has been shown to reduce autonomic nervous system stress. So estimate your LT1 and ride well below it on easy days.
Those are simply my opinions, all without getting into a discussion of the high variability of HR zones between individuals and within some individuals.
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What am I chasing? Nothing but I would have expected there to me more correlation between time in zones for power and Hr.
I expect power to have more time in the higher zones because of spikes in power when standing or accelerating that do not produce the same Hr response.
I find Hr guided training as useful as power meter based training. I was interested to listen to Tadej PogaÄar say the same thing recently. For him heart rate is the primary metric he looks at most and then he cross references to power numbers. But day in and day out his training is guided by heart rate.
There are a myriad of different HR zones so itās no surprise that things donāt match.
HR zones will not change much once you are regularly working out. All changes in HR zones from a certain fitness on, will be minor. All you really need for setting HR zones is your aerobic and anaerobic threshold. All the other subdivisions have little to no use.
Power zones can change a lot when getting fitter.
HR guided training is not as useful as Power guided training, simply because HR canāt catch short bursts.
But HR training still remains very good and at some points even better then power, especially in the lower zones around VT1/LT1. Point b) in @WindWarrior 's post.
And guess what the elites are spending most of their training hours in?
My advice is to use HR for anything steady state with a minimal duration around 12min. The advantage is that you can very easily spot the average power that goes with it.
For shorter intervals, like VO2 and higher, donāt waste your time with HR, you need to use Power.
The strength of having both HR and Power is that you can spot other more subtle things. If your HR spikes up fast with a very high intensity effort, that is usually a good sign. It signals that you are ready to do hard work and if HR also comes down fast, you recover quickly.
If on the other hand, HR reacts very slowly on higher efforts, that might be a sign of fatigue and even more if it takes a long time to come down again.
If over longer periods, you see higher and higher power numbers at the same HR, it means you are doing more external work with the same internal effort, thus getting fitter. Point a) above.
You need to learn how to use all the metrics you have available and avoid misinterpretation. That is becoming more and more difficult for new users because there just is so much. And if you go the way of āhigher is betterā, then problems are coming your way at high speed.
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This is the reason I used the word āchasingā because the more you try to create a correlation to more you chase the correlation across different zones. And then end up with something that isnāt that useful, and you wasted time that could have been spent on better things. A lot of smart coaches realized that a long time ago.
Iām not Tadej with high metabolic cost of training in zone2. I train up to 8 hours/week, by power, and use HR as guard rails especially when I do (big for me) endurance weeks in the 10-12 hour range. My best upper āenduranceā power was a couple years ago, around 200W, and with lower hours (averaging 8 hours/week) I could handle riding above my self-assessed LT1 but it did require focusing on getting enough sleep.
In normal temperatures my power-to-HR is predictable, things like steady tempo at 85% ftp is usually around 142-148bpm and averages out to ~145bpm on longer intervals. But that isnāt true for everyone. And you donāt know without paying attention to your data.
There are other considerations when picking a HR zone scheme (Friel vs Coggan vs USA Cycling vs British Cycling, to name 4).
My opinion is to pick one, train by power and use HR as guardrails. Even if that means using larger power ranges like I do (easy endurance 40-60% ftp, which happens to be roughly 70-80% LTHR). Increases in fitness are measured by power, not HR, as your HR at lt1 and max aerobic steady state are relatively fixed.
hope that helps.
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Thanks to you and @MedTechCD thats very useful info. Much appreciated.
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last thing Iāll mention is that if you are new, your HR at FTP will increase a bit as you develop more fitness at FTP (can ride 30+ minutes at FTP). For example when I got a road bike my first ~30+ minute or 10 mile time trials the HR stabilized around 156bpm. After a year of training it was 159-162bpm. Now 8 years later my LTHR is still 159-162bpm. Of course if I stop riding for a month or two, and then try testing, it will be lower around 156bpm, but after a month or two of consistent training it goes back to 159-162bpm.
Chapeau. This is pure gold.
Chapeau this is golden advice
