 Do you need a power meter to become a faster cyclist? This is what we're going to be getting into today. I'll be discussing the advantages of using power over perceived exertion and heart rate, how to use power in your training and racing, and at the end of the video, I'll be getting into which power meter brands I think are the best on the market right now and that I recommend. Welcome back to another video. Power meters are getting more and more common every year and it's really not too much of a surprise as they get cheaper and cheaper. There are even stock bikes being sold with power meters now, which is a feature that I could easily see becoming the standard for high-end bikes in the near future. Even people who don't have power meters on their bikes are getting more familiar with power numbers through apps like Strava or the increased popularity of smart trainers, or by looking at pro power stats after races, which is also a very quick way to deflate any ego you may have. Here's a pro tip for you. Set your weight on Strava to 400 pounds. That way it always looks like you're putting out pro numbers. This is guaranteed to get you more kudos. Just remember to do the exact opposite when you hop on Swift though. So while of this emphasis on training with power, well, power has revolutionized the way cyclists train. There are two things that determine training stress, duration or how long you ride and intensity or how hard you ride. Duration is easy. All you need is something that measures time. Intensity is a little bit trickier though, and this is where a power meter comes in. And to show you just how valuable a power meter is for measuring intensity, perhaps a good place to start would be to look at the alternatives, which for the most part are heart rate and perceived exertion. Perceived exertion is simply how hard you feel like you're going. And shockingly, our internal power meter between our ears can be wildly inaccurate. For example, this study on the impact of starting strategy on cycling performance had subjects perform three 20k time trials. The first was self paced, and then they took the average power from that time trial and had subjects ride at 15% below and 15% above that power for the first four minutes of the next two time trials. What they found was that when subjects were forced to ride 15% below their self selected pace for the first four minutes, they actually went on to produce more power and a faster time than when they self selected their pace or rode harder than their self selected pace. And we can see that it's because the riders were simply going out too hard. The study stated that when allowed to freely choose, subjects did not select an optimal start strategy. If you watch my race report videos, you've seen me talk about how almost universally people go out too hard at the beginning of races. If you don't have a power meter, the same is true when you do an interval session or go for a Strava segment. People simply don't have a good idea of what is sustainable. This is not necessarily a problem that's solved by using a heart rate monitor either. Yes, heart rate can tell you whether or not you're in the right zone over the course of a long ride, let's say. But good luck trying to pace shorter intervals or the start of a time trial using heart rate. Unlike power, heart rate doesn't adjust instantaneously to how hard you're going. If you're doing threshold intervals, for example, it may take a couple minutes for you to actually reach your threshold heart rate. And this makes it very easy to start off too hard. Using heart rate to determine what zone you're in is also problematic because heart rate is highly variable and affected by a lot of different factors, some of which have to do with training and some of which have nothing to do with training at all. This article on heart rate monitoring in Cyclis stated that the position on the bicycle may change heart rate at a given exercise intensity and that heart rate can increase over time through a phenomenon called cardiac drift. This is especially true in the heat or at altitude. Heart rate can also be lower in cold conditions and as we get older, our heart rate decreases as well. For these reasons, a power meter may be a better indicator of exercise intensity. All of these factors make training with heart rate problematic. For example, 150 beats per minute on a hot day may be a different intensity than 150 beats per minute on a cold day. And even under the same environmental conditions, heart rate may not be the best way of determining what zone you're in. This study on power output during stage racing compared power and heart rate data gathered from professional cyclists during a stage race. They found that when looking at time and zones, the power and heart rate data didn't match and that the heart rate data overestimated the time spent in zone two and underestimated the time spent in zone one and three in a three zone model. Heart rate, while it's still better than relying off your own perceived exertion, still has a lot of issues as a tool for measuring intensity. These issues are resolved when using a power meter. Power is instantaneous. As soon as you start pedaling, you can look down and see exactly how hard you're going. This is incredibly valuable for pacing intervals, climbs, time trials, or other solo efforts. The second you start that effort, you can make an assessment about whether or not you're going too hard rather than waiting for minutes for your heart rate to catch up. And as you get more familiar with your power numbers, you get better at pacing with it. For example, if you know that your 20 minute power is 250 watts and you get on a long climb that you know will take you more than 20 minutes, maybe don't start that climb at 300. Believe me, you'll thank yourself 10 minutes later. 300, what is this amateur hour? I'll start the climb at 400 watts and hold it until I either get the KOM or pass out in a ditch halfway up the climb in a full body cramp. It's all or nothing. Team Sky, now Team Ineos, perfected this strategy to help them win grand tours. They knew that the fastest way to the top of the climb was to put out a steady consistent pace. If a rider attacked, they wouldn't respond, they'd just continue to put out that hard tempo and reel them back in. One could argue that a lot of Team Sky's success is owed to the power meter. Power is also not variable like heart rate is. Power doesn't care whether or not you got a terrible night's sleep or chugged a bunch of coffee or it's hot outside or you're fatigued. It'll simply show you what your output is for that day. Now obviously you can have good and bad days and your power will reflect that and that's one of the advantages of using a power meter. If you've got intervals to do but your power just isn't there that day, then you should probably hold off and wait until the next day. This gets us into using power and heart rate together. I know I just spent the last couple minutes trashing heart rate training but that doesn't mean that I think that you should throw away your heart rate monitor when you get a power meter. In fact, using power and heart rate together can be extremely valuable, especially to monitor fatigue and overtraining. Going back to this article on heart rate monitoring, they state that during overtraining, maximal heart rates as well as submaximal heart rates may be decreased while resting and in particular sleeping heart rate may be increased. This is something that you should keep an eye on when you train with both power and heart rate. When you're fatigued and you go out for a ride, your heart rate is going to be lower even if you're putting out the same power. If for example you know that when you ride at 200 watts, your heart rate is around 140 beats per minute but you're warming up for some intervals at 200 watts and you can't get your heart rate over 125, that interval session is probably not going to go very well. Of course, you should also take into account how your body feels, but a low heart rate is usually a good sign that you're fatigued. It's okay to have a low heart rate after a hard workout or towards the end of a hard block of training but if you're consistently seeing low heart rates day after day, that could be a red flag and a sign that you're overtraining. And of course, power allows you to track your improvement like no other metric can. Many riders may look at their times on local Strava segments or perhaps they have a loop that they do where they can look at their average speed to monitor whether or not they're improving. The issue here is that environmental conditions can greatly affect your speed. Temperature, humidity, wind, these can all affect how fast you complete that loop. For example, if you have a 40K loop that you do when it's freezing in January and then you do the same loop when it's hot in July, you may think that you've improved your fitness since the winter because your time is over two minutes faster when in reality cold air slows you down more and you put out the exact same power for both rides. And we didn't even take into account the fact that winter riding gear is less aerodynamic. If you're trying to compare average speeds from different loops, then at that point you're comparing apples to oranges because you're also throwing elevation and riding surface into the mix. On top of this monitoring improvement with power allows you to monitor improvement at any duration. Just because you've improved your 20 minute power doesn't necessarily mean you've improved your five second max power or your five hour power. As you start to get specific with your training you may want to focus on your power at specific durations. Those are all the reasons you should get a power meter and hopefully by now if you don't already have one you're thinking about getting one. I've said this before but a power meter should be the first upgrade that you make to your bike. Arrow wheels, a top of the line drivetrain or a carbon frame will all make your bike marginally faster but a power meter will make you as a person significantly faster if you know how to use it. Sure whatever man, arrow wheels marginally faster power meter significantly faster. Hypergain Beast Mode Mask Gainer Raw Edition in the cupcake flavor. It's overdue, you're gonna lap the field. Twice. That being said there are many different power meter types and brands on the market and it can be a little overwhelming deciding which one to go with. As a cycling coach I've coached many athletes who've used all sorts of different power meters and it's given me a pretty good idea of which ones work well and which ones don't. The two things that you want from a power meter are reliability and accuracy. You don't want your power meter giving you bad numbers or for there to be power drops or for your power meter to stop working all of a sudden for no apparent reason right before you're supposed to do an FTP test. Nah that's fine. Just a good excuse to put it off till next week. SRM has long been considered the gold standard for power meters and it's the power meter most commonly used in research for this very reason. That being said it's also the most expensive power meter you can buy. This is why for a crank based option my recommendation is Quark. Quark's accuracy is on par with SRM at a much lower price point. Quark is what I use personally. I actually have three of them on various bikes and I rarely ever have any issues with them and that's the same for all my athletes who use Quark. No power dropouts or weird data and if the battery needs to be replaced all it takes is a CR2032 that you can find at most grocery stores. There are also pedal based power meters which can be convenient because if you have multiple bikes or you're flying somewhere and you rent a bike it's a lot easier to swap pedals than it is to swap cranks and a lot of times cranks from one bike don't fit on another bike anyway. For a pedal based power meter my recommendation is the Feverro Asioma pedals. This is likely the most accurate pedal based power meter on the market because it uses an integrated gyroscope to measure instantaneous angular velocity as opposed to average angular velocity meaning that it stays accurate even with oval chainrings. They're also more affordable than other pedal based power meter options at $432 for single sided and $674 for dual sided. If you are serious about training with power I recommend going with the dual sided because most people have a discrepancy in the amount of power they can produce with their left and right leg. This isn't necessarily something that needs to be fixed unless it's really out of whack but it will affect the accuracy of your power meter if you have a single sided. As far as reliability goes I've been testing these pedals all year with no issues whatsoever and the reviews on these pedals seem to come to the same conclusion. I've left links for Quark and Feverro down in the description. Thanks for watching. If you enjoyed this video be sure to give it a like subscribe for weekly cycling videos just like this one and share this video with your cycling friends. I'll see you in the next one.