 In this video today which is part four of a four part series, that's right this is the final video in the series brought to you by these Asioma power pedals. I'm going to share with you what I believe is a very simple and easy to use cycling power graph that will if you don't already currently use it change the way you look at your cycling training and performance forever. Now I can appreciate you need a power meter for this data so this could be an incentive this video for you to save up your pennies and invest into a power meter or for those of you who do have a power meter this will hopefully compel you to look into the data a little bit more. Now I am a coach at the Road Cycling Academy so in this video what we will be doing is using the same training platform that we use at the Road Cycling Academy being today's plan and that is where I will show you this graph however from my understanding you can obtain this information from most if not all other cycling training platforms so it's not just today's plan and additionally the data that I'm going to share with you is not my data it's from a gentleman called Ali from the UK who's been with the RCA for quite some time now since April 2020 so we have a bit of data to look at and if you want to hear from Ali himself there's a video story we did at the RCA which I'll link to below but I did want to share a quick little snippet from that video now something I've always struggled with so it's always just you know just keep going keep going don't stop you know this and you've got to understand that you know you can't stay up here all the time there's times when sorry um that you're going to need to just ease it off of it you know and then build it back up and go higher so before I just go yeah I could do it just give me the session don't get it done but now I'm starting to feel that you know I am tired and there's no point doing a session where it's just not going to do anything for you because you're tired you know because you're constantly asking me how do you feel do you feel like you can do the sessions properly or you're just getting it done so that was the main question and it took me a while for me to understand what you're asking me and then I decided to ask myself these questions and then you know oh I see I get what he's trying to tell me here so despite this power graph that we're going to be discussing today and the subsequent data that you're going to want to go and analyze off the back of it please always keep front of mind as your number one priority how do you feel listen to your own body so this graph here is the peak power curve and essentially what this is telling us is Ali's best power per segment so for five seconds he can hold 1252 watts for one minute 529 watts for five minutes 380 watts all the way out to say 40 minutes where he's recently PB'd for 312 watts and you can keep going out further if you want also note that this graph is telling us most of Ali's PB's in power have been in the last six months that's the darker blue line this is since we've been collecting data since April 2020 and we can play around with the timeline if we want but ultimately this is additionally telling us the training is working and if we add the green line which tells us his PB's from the 12 month period starting six months ago is clearly stronger now across the board so there are three massive insights we can now leverage to our cycling advantage using this graph but before we get into those three I'm pretty sure once you appreciate this graph you're going to want to dig further into the data and with these acioma power pedals you're going to be able to go a fair bit deeper such as left right power balance with their duo model torque effectiveness and pedal smoothness however for me it's more the mitigation of dropouts and erratic peak powers that makes these acioma power pedals which I've been using for some time now so reliable and it's that reliability that bolsters the data that we're going to be looking at today and as you will learn as we deep dive into this data there's three critical pieces to the training puzzle which we'll touch on briefly today including chronic training load aka your fitness a queue training load aka your fatigue and training stress balance aka your form which all center around a training stress score that we give to each ride thus having a clear understanding of our sustained efforts our top end efforts which should be definitive with aciomas inbuilt gyroscope for instantaneous power readings this is so critically important to understanding the stress that we've put on our system you see some of these other power meters they'll go an average reading versus instantaneous which can lead up to a 4.5 percent error rate and as you examine the data more and more having a 4.5 or up to a 4.5 percent error rate is going to affect what you're seeing so having a reliable power source such as acioma is so critically important to what we're looking at today so insight number one is what type of rider are you now I know many of you watching this will be like I ride with my mates I do the local group rides I know what I'm good at well Ali he came to us he does Ironman that's what he's good at that's what he likes to do he rides with his mates that's pretty much it however I still investigated his data and looked at his graph and I was like hmm Ali can hold over 1100 watts for 10 seconds that's pretty good I wonder if you can do that after a sustained effort because you might Ali enjoy doing some Zwift racing over the shithouse UK winter periods he'd never done Zwift racing before turns out he went from C grade where he started and I told him to start in C grade just to get a feel for it for his first race to very quickly moving to A grade where he's even landed a podium or two due to looking at this power graph Ali now loves wifting and I'm trying to convince him to get down for a criterion now to add further meat on the bone here here's a spreadsheet from Hunter Allen who wrote a famous book training and racing with a power meter here we have samples from thousands of cyclists at different levels and we can see power to weight ratio how we fare Ali is roughly 15 watts per kilogram for his sprint which puts him in roughly the good category for a sprinter now with Ali he can output that sprint capacity after a 20 to 30 even 40 minutes sustained Zwift race effort so that's another factor you would also need to take into account here insight number two is are you improving as I've mentioned in the series already I like to think of cycling training zones as a weight rack at a gym we understand what we need to lift in order to work different zones or different physiological systems additionally we now know how much we can lift or how much power we can output for five seconds 20 minutes one hour etc we have tangible evidence of our capabilities now and moving into the future so for example Ali was recently Instagramming he doesn't mind a story or two so do I so I was watching his stories and it was clear to me he just ripped out a monster climb in I think it's Palencia in Spain so I immediately went and looked at his data and at a workout level I clicked on the peak power's graph and you can see he's done a 40 minute PB power which validated that he did climb well he certainly thought that because he was told any time under 40 minutes was great he did it in 37 minutes but we can also look at the data and he's just done a 40 minute PB so we know from these types of efforts if we're improving and if the training is obviously working insight number three it shines a light on investigating what works best for you now we're talking about an individual here who's P being he's progressing he's doing well and obviously I've handpicked Ali but the fact is sometimes people will train they'll even train to structure and things won't be improving so what if you're training hard and you go and do a race or you go do a hill climb or you go do an event and you really push it hard and you come back and all of a sudden you realize that you know where near your PB's and this progresses for a period of time well what you can do in this instance is go find the periods when you were P being look at the data look at the training you were doing at the time and leverage it but for this example if we look at Ali's calendar from history now I know he performs better when we've backed off the training a bit leading into an event but he likes to carry a little bit of fatigue just leading in so the green yellow and red bars are an indication of fitness or chronic training load and the colors of the bars they're an indication of fatigue red being carrying fatigue yellow being in between and green being fresh in an ideal world we want to see the bar graph rise over time are you getting fitter with some drops into orange and green to freshen up from time to time but keep in mind looking at this data that Ali is a human being he's a busy person he's married he's got kids he owns his own business so don't expect there to be perfection with what you see there will be inconsistencies however let's look at the week of 5th of September here he completed an Ironman and PB he also PB'd again on the week beginning the 10th of October where he ripped out that 40 minute PB climb I just mentioned and if we go back in time and just so you know Ali actually came to us with an FTP of 250 wanting to get over 300 and we initially got him to just below 300 after a round of base training and a block of intensity but it was this downward trend having a rest from it all as he described at the start of the video and coming back up again backing it off here a little bit and retesting an FTP where Ali hit 330 watts so looking at this data this kind of high level helicopter view data we can start to see what works best for you as a cyclist are you better off during an intense round of training carrying fatigue into a target event or goal are you better off being fresh or somewhere in between the point I'm trying to make here is everyone is different and we can leverage the peak power graph to our advantage we can find periods where maybe we did two or three PB's maybe they correlated with an event where we also perform well go back and investigate the data look at the type of training you are doing look at your training load look at the fatigue management and so forth if you've gotten value out of this video today please don't forget to give it a like and if you're after more information on power training I've got a free e-book here which I'll link to below I'll catch you in the next one