Power Training for Indoor Cycling Chapter 17 Part 2: Teaching With Power

What About Group Competitions In Class

In recent years there has been a spate of group training software solutions that initially just highlighted every student’s heart rate (those who agreed to opt in before class started). Now the addition of power on almost every indoor bike has pushed these vendors and a variety of new ones to extend this concept to include power.

This has seemed to catch on much more than heart rate. I presume this is because heart rate did not really offer any reasonable way to create ‘competitive scenarios’, since we know the highest heart rate does not determine the person who is the strongest, fastest or even working the hardest. Posting everyone’s power numbers on the board, however, starts to get a lot closer to a performance metric than simply heart rate. However, without adjusting for power-to-weight ratio (see Chapter 8), raw wattage will not produce a fair comparison from one person to another either, unless it was assumed that pure flat road time trialing was the nature of the competition.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *