Hunter Allen, coach and widely recognised as the co-author of "Training and Racing with a Power Meter" sheds light on how to get started with power meters, how to become an advanced user of them, and shares general bike training tips for triathletes.

• How to get started training with a bike power meter.
• How to become a "power user" of power meters, by using things like Performance Management Chart and quadrant analysis.
• The best ways to raise your Functional Threshold Power.
• Example bike training schedule for triathletes.
• Motion analysis with the Leomo Type-R device, and how it can be beneficial.

1:10 - 

• Hunter co-authored Training and Racing with a Power Meter with Dr Andy Cogan.
  • This has been highly recommended by many previous guests of this podcast!
• He also co-authored Cutting Edge Cycling with Steven Chung.
  • Related listening: Cycling Science and Myth Busting part 1 with Stephen Cheung | EP#74
• Hunter is a former professional cyclist.
• He is the founder of Peaks Coaching Group and has coached a number of professional and Olympic athletes.

4:11 -

• It's easily quantifiable - we're measuring the amount of work you can do on a bicycle which is a critical piece of information.
  • Previously we had rate of perceived exertion (RPE) so we knew if it felt hard.
  • We then moved to heart rate monitors, which started to quantify the intensity of exercise.
    • I like to call it the intention of your intensity - how hard you are trying to go.
  • Power meters assess your work rate.
• They are a tool that you can measure improvements by.
• Power meters can also be used as a measuring tool to ensure that you're riding in the correct training zone.
  • We do a test to get the athletes FTP (functional threshold power) and then we figure out individual training zones based on that.
  • E.g. when you're riding between 91-105% of your FTP you're training your lactate threshold. You're training the system you want to train so you should get some benefit from that.
• Once we can understand that we're training that system, we can track how much time we train that system and then see how the person improves.
• Heart rate monitoring is very individual, so it's hard to say how accurate it is in general.
  • There are a lot of compounding factors to add to the inaccuracy of heart rate monitoring: sleep, caffeine, environment, temperature etc.
• There is also fatigue. I had an athlete that was training for the national championships, he was really focused and in the last 2 weeks before the race he was really tired but he wanted to push himself so I gave him a bunch of intervals to do.
  
  He started out with his normal threshold heart rate (175 bpm), his FTP for that same heart rate was around 350 watts - so a very good athlete. By the end of the week he was tired and he couldn't get his heart rate above 170, but he was still doing the workouts and hitting the numbers.
  
  He had a rest day at the weekend and the next week he worked with a moto-pacer in the final week. The first day, the highest his heart rate got was 165 bpm, but he's now hitting 360-370 watts all the time, no problem.
  
  He called me up, worried that his heart rate was 10 beats lower than normal, I told him to keep doing them and if he can still make the numbers don't worry about the heart rate.
  
  He goes again tomorrow, heart rate hits 163 max but now he's doing 370-390 watts, so I tell him to keep doing them because he's still getting improvements.
  
  I finally rested him, at the end of the rest week and his cardiovascular system has had time to recover, his heart rate was back up to even higher than it was before - his threshold heart rate is now 178-180 but he's almost hitting 400 watts on all his intervals.
  • Had we decided to stop the training based on his heart rate, he'd have lost 4-5 really critical days in the final build up to the national championships.
    
    He ended up winning the national championships and he maintained 178-180 heart rate in his Olympic distance triathlon.

12:25 - 

• You've got to capture data. For the first couple of weeks you just want to capture data and learn about the power data itself.
  • E.g. how hard can you go up a steep hill for a minute? What's your normalised power on a long ride?
• In that first two weeks, it's good to do some tests.
  • FTP test: this is the best power you can maintain in a quasi-steady state until you start to fatigue, which is generally around an hour.
    • If you don’t have an hour, or you don't have a location to do an hour steady, you can do a 20 minute test. From there you can reduce the average power from that test by 3-7% and that'll be close to what your hour power is.
      • Don't always expect the (adjusted) 20-minute power to be exactly the same as the hour, but it's a good starting point.
  • Power profile test, introduced in 2003, gives a clear picture of strengths and weaknesses. Start with a 1-minute effort all out, which represents your anaerobic capacity. Then a 5-minute test which represents your VO2max - this is more aerobic than the 1 minute test.
    • For a draft legal triathlete/cyclist, you want to also test sprint power. You do a few 10-15 second sprints and you take the best 5 seconds of that sprint and use that to find your neuromuscular power (your ability to generate a high amount of force and how quickly you can do it)
• Once you've got your FTP you can set your training zones, and then you use your power profile to evaluate your strengths and weaknesses.
  • Related listening: Training Zones part 2: Cycling | EP#29

18:50 - 

• The next step is to define the demands of the event.
  • We always have big picture demands e.g. I'm going to do a half Ironman.
  • The distance itself doesn't change but the demand of the event does - maybe it has a 30 minute climb, or lots of short sharp hills.
  • Once you've defined the demands, you start training to them.
    • E.g. If you're doing a very hilly half Ironman, there are 15 small hills that are all at least 2 minutes long in the first half, and in the second half there's another 15 hills but these are longer, 3 minute hills.
    • We know you're basically going to do 30 hill repeats that will be around your FTP during the bike ride.
    • If you're not doing 30 hill repeats in your training, you're not training specifically.
    • You can use your power meter in training to do these reps and ensure you're at your FTP
• As a more advanced user I recommend learning about the quadrant analysis tool, which tells you how you create the power.
  • 300 watts is 300 watts is 300 watts but you can create it differently.
  • E.g. you could put your bike in the biggest chain ring at the front, say 52 tooth, 14 in the back, and you could create 300 watts by pedalling slowly at 60rpm but with a lot of force.
  • Or you could create 300 watts by putting it in the small chain ring, say 39 tooth, pedalling in the 17 at the back spinning at a high cadence, 120rpm with low force on the pedals. That's a different way to create those watts.
• Quadrant analysis: If you imagine an X/Y plot, on the X axis you have cadence, Y axis is force.
  • The cross hairs of the graph dictate the four quadrants.
    • Quadrant 1: high force, high cadence = sprinting.
    • Quadrant 2: high force, low cadence. This is typically mountain biking, but many triathletes mistakenly work in this quadrant.
    • Quadrant 3: low force, low cadence. This is endurance riding.
    • Quadrant 4: high cadence, low force. This is either a group ride, or a race such as a criterium.
• The biggest mistake I see most triathletes make is pedalling too slowly. They're in quadrant 2 or 3, pedalling too slow with too much force.
  • That uses the muscle glycogen which hurts you on the run.
  • The best triathletes pedal with a little less force and a higher cadence - 90-95rpm. It saves the legs and the muscle glycogen.
  • Quadrant analysis is critical to understand for the triathlon world because if you're creating watts in the wrong quadrant you can change this in training.

• When discussing cadence, efficiency can become a 'catchphrase' - it's more about economy.
  • Saving energy or producing more power with less energy.
    • Pedal at a high cadence, lower force which is less energy than pedalling at 70-80 rpm with a higher force.
    • That translates as well into the metabolic side of economy - I'm saving energy because my body doesn't have to use as much glycogen, my body doesn't have to pump as much blood etc.
• Another thing that's really critical is the performance management chart, which we created in Training Peaks' WKO software.
  • It's an outstanding way to quantify and understand when you're too fatigued, when you're fresh, when you can peak and how your freshness relates to peaking.
  • One of the things it comes up with is a score called 'training stress score' (TSS) which gives a score for every ride.
    • It's based on how much time you spent riding close to your FTP, and what was the intensity.
    • You get TSS for each of your minutes training, whether that's below FTP, at FTP or above it.
    • Gold standard is back to 1 hour, an hour at FTP would give you a TSS of 100.
      • One of the goals as an Ironman triathlete is to do your Ironman bike at less than 300 TSS points to give you the best chance of a good run.
  • That TSS goes in to your performance management chart to see how fatigued you are, how fresh you are etc.
  • Related listening: Level up your triathlon using Training Peaks | EP#39

38:19 - 

• From 2 months out, you'll be doing sweet spot work, and transitioning into lots of FTP work.
• 10-15 minute intervals at 105% of FTP work well at this point, and offer big improvements.
• FTP work will be done twice a week, VO2 max once a week.
• E.g. FTP workout on Tuesday, VO2 max on Thursday, Saturday combine them to do a 'kitchen sink workout'.
• Kitchen sink workout: a little bit of everything! 3-4 hour long ride including endurance, VO2max, FTP, sweet spot.

40:28 - 

• A company in Japan has created a device that has 5 motion sensors: 2 go on the top of your leg just under your shorts, 2 go on the top of your shoes, 1 goes on your lower back.
• Each measures different movements. E.g. the sensor on your foot measures how your foot moves around the pedal for each rpm. Are you pedalling toe down, heal down, where do you transition, are there any dead spots?
  • You can then start to change the way people pedal to reduce the wasted energy output and become more economical.
• The thigh sensor helps understand how much movement the thighs are making up and down - known as the leg angular range.
  • E.g. the sensors see one leg moves at 45 degrees of movement and the other moves at 50 degrees of movement. That can help with bike fits.
• The sensor on the lower back helps with understanding what's the angle of your pelvis - known as the pelvic tilt.
  • This can be a great way to improve your aerodynamics, and know that e.g. if I'm riding at 48 degrees I'm as aero as I can be.
  • It also helps identify if your hips are rocking up and down, or moving forwards and backwards.
  • These can be a good way of identifying if you're positioned in the most suitable place to produce the best power.
• It's an incredible tool especially being able to see what the dead spot is for each person and how to change those things.
• There's a great blog post by Hunter that shows how useful a tool this is.
• I had a triathlete and we looked at his foot sensors and found a huge dead spot on his left leg when he came over the top of his pedal stroke, which is bad because you should start to be producing power at this point.
  
  So I asked him some questions about why it might be just on the left, and he said "well I think my seat height is a little too low".
  
  We raised his seat by 5mm and immediately his dead spot on his left leg went away.
  
  It opened up his hip angle and he was able to lengthen out a bit more, and his leg was able to go over the top of the pedal stroke even better. We made a small change to raise his handle bars by 3mm which opened his chest and also helped, so overall it was really quick changes that made a big difference for him.

46:32 - 

• I really like the dual-sided power meters because I want to know what's happening between both sides.
• I really want to know, is the left leg stronger or weaker? Is it releasing more power than the other side or is it absorbing more power?
• One thing that we often forget about is that when you press down on the left leg, it's the right leg going up on the other side that is resisting (=absorbing), and vice versa.
• Left leg forward, right left back = left phase.
• We need to find out what your dominant phase is, and can we reduce the absorption?
• A lot of times the absorption is a problem - people are uneconomical with their pedal stoke and absorb too much power so it needs to be addressed.
• This can only be done with a left/right power meter.
• Find the one that fits for you as there are lots of great power meters out there!
• It depends on where you want to measure power, and it also depends on what kind of bike you have.

49:20 - 

• What is your favourite book, blog or resource?
  • Cycling Science - Steven Chung and Mikel Zabala.
• What do you wish you had known or done differently in your career?
  • I wish I had had a coach. I really feel like that was one of the reasons that I did a become a coach was because it allowed me to take people under my wing and shortcut their two years of hit and miss training, trial and error that I made.

• Who is somebody in endurance sports that you look up to?​
  • I look up to a lot of guys! Andy Coggan has been an incredible mentor. Same with Steven Cheung. Joe Friel has done some incredible things with all of his books and his teachings over the years. Those guys have been outstanding. Of course Dr. Tudor Bompa who wrote about periodisation back in 1968. 

Links and resources mentioned

• Hunter's bio
• Hunter Allen Power Blog
• Training and Racing with a Power Meter book
• Cutting-Edge Cycling
• Cycling Science and Myth Busting part 1 with Stephen Cheung | EP#74
• Training Zones part 2: Cycling | EP#29
• Level up your triathlon using Training Peaks | EP#39

Connect with ​Hunter Allen​

• On the Peaks Coaching Group website 
• On his blog - the Hunter Allen Power blog

Connect with host Mikael Eriksson

Hi! I'm your host Mikael,

I am a full-time triathlon coach and an ambitious age-group triathlete. My goal is podium at the Finnish national championships within the next few years.

I first started the website Scientific Triathlon in autumn 2015 as a passion project to share my learnings with a larger triathlon audience. Later on, in early 2017 I started the podcast That Triathlon Show. 

I sincerely want you to contact me to

• Send me feedback
• Give constructive critic​ism 
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• Send me your triathlon-related questions 
• Tell me that you've rated and reviewed That Triathlon Show so I can give you a shout-out on the show and tell you how much it means to me!