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Power meters are everywhere, but few people really know how to use one to get higher performance

Using a Power Meter to find your super power on a bike.... with Coach Hunter Allen

Hello, and welcome back to the Wise Athletes podcast with Joe Lavelle and Dr. Glen Winkel.  On today’s episode, number 40, we are joined by the one and only, the legendary cycling coach  Hunter Allen.

Hunter was co-author of the book  “Training and Racing with a Power Meter” (with Dr. Andy Coggan) which has been translated into 8 languages and sold over 120,000 copies.  He also co-wrote “Cutting-Edge Cycling” with Dr. Stephen Cheung, was the co-developer of TrainingPeaks WKO software, and was the founder of Peaks Coaching Group.

Widely known as one of the top experts in the world in coaching endurance athletes using power meters, Hunter Allen has been instrumental in developing and spreading the power training principles. Hunter is a USA Cycling Level 1 coach, was the 2008 BMX technical coach for the Beijing Olympics and has taught the USA Cycling Power Certification Course since 2005. A former professional cyclist for 17 years on the Navigators Team with over 40 road victories to his credit, Hunter has been coaching endurance athletes since 1995, and his athletes have achieved more than 2000 victories and numerous national, world championship titles and Olympic Medals.

If there is one person on the planet who can help us get more from our power meters, it is Hunter.  Listen in as Hunter walks us through the basics of what to track and how to use the information to get faster on your bike. 

Outline of Discussion

To get benefit from owning and using a power meter, you need to collect data.  Just ride it in various ways;  go up hill, do some sprints, what does 300 watts mean, that is the first step.

You have to test.  Testing is training; training is testing.  

Test a few different areas of philology:

1. Neuromuscular power:  ability to contract a muscle as hard as you can for a very short amount of time.  Do a 15 second sprint.  Use the best 5 second portion of that 15 second effort.
2. Anaerobic ability.  Test for about 1 minutes for as hard as you can do for 1 minute.  Average power for 1 minutes.  A 6-8% hill or ride into the wind.  The last 30 seconds will be hell, but push through.
3. VO2Max:  the volume of oxygen you can bring into the lungs and deliver to the muscles.  3-8 minutes.  Use 5 minutes.  Go hard but pace yourself.  Remain at your VT2 threshold at the end.
4. Functional threshold power.  FTP.  The hour of power.  The original thinking was that the gold standard for endurance efforts was the 40k time trial, which takes about 1 hour.  Less if you are really strong (25 mph with no draft).  Hard.  That’s the baseline.  This also correlates will with a threshold and seemed to be a good metric for ability to be successful as a cyclist.  One of the key mistakes people make relates to the short cuts used to estimate FTP in less than an hour.  They came up with a 20 minute test and subtract 5% off the result to estimate FTP.  The problem comes in where people forget to the the 5 minute test before doing the 20 minute test.  Cannot do the 20 minute test fresh…will result in too high FTP as a result of too much anaerobic power available to artificially