Wattage Training

Training by wattage is probably the biggest training tool advantage a competitive athlete can employ. As the old training quote goes, ‘Watts don’t lie’ and it’s true, they are brutally honest. Training by wattage has a marked advantage when compared against training with heart rate or perceived exertion. Heart rate on any given day can be completely flaky in a training session based on the amount of sleep you got, the temperature, humidity, how well you are hydrated, your nutritional state, elevation, stress and more. Wattage isn’t impacted by any of these things which allows you to predictably and repeatedly target specific goals within each training session or within a race, and that is a big advantage.

Want to know what your race pace is? Want to know how long you can hold a certain level of intensity? Want to know if you are ACTUALLY improving? Want a structured training system that is trackable, trendable and inspiring. Wattage training offers all of that and more.

Because wattage is data, it can be uploaded and analyzed and a good coach will be able to interpret the details like it’s a familiar language. A good coach will be able to provide understandable feedback to the athlete on what occurred in the training session and how to modify for next time. A good coach will also be able to determine how much impact the training session had based on what they see in the data stream and thus be able to modify the following days training session in order to provide for recovery when needed.

Of course the more you work with wattage, the more you realize how little you know about wattage, I feel it takes at least two years to start really understanding wattage from a training perspective, at this point I have been using wattage for five years.

On the surface, working with wattage seems simple enough but if it seems simple then you really aren’t fully grasping the complete wattage picture. If you ride for 60 minutes at an average of 200 watts on a Tuesday and then do another ride for 60 minutes at a 200 watt avg on a Thursday you know on both days you accumulated a 200 watt avg and with this in mind you can more clearly understand the physiological impact and how that may trend out for you.

Where things become more complicated is how the 200 watt average was achieved, the ‘intra’ portion of the session can create very different stress loads on the body, so maybe the Tuesday and Thursday weren’t exactly the same, perhaps one was more dynamic than the other or one had a longer warmup with a more conservative wattage at the front end or maybe… Intra can get complicated if you drill down in to the details and sometimes its the details that make the difference within the day and from day to day and week to week.

Just like learning to take a corner at high speed, crafting an intelligent training system based on wattage is a skill that is learned over time and observed through a series of successes and failures.

Typically I analyze (and give feedback on) approx 4000 wattage based files per year. As the amount of files analyzed start to add up eventually you start to see things within a file that were never visible before, a deeper understanding of what was always there but you simply couldn’t form the pattern. It takes a certain amount of experience to be able to interpret wattage and then as a coach turn that into a competitive advantage. I think I offer that advantage.

If you have questions about wattage training or want to learn more about a training solution, go to the Contact page and fire me an email or drop a comment on the Blog page.