Power and heart rate data on the training load chart, together

17 October, 2012 by David Johnstone

You normally ride with a power meter. Occasionally you only ride with a heart rate monitor. You want all your rides to be represented on the training load chart. Does this describe you? If it does, you’re in luck, because Cycling Analytics can now show rides with power or heart rate on the one training load chart.

At the end of the last blog post I pointed out the correlation between the heart rate and power metrics calculated to indicate the stress of the ride. Now, if you have rides with both heart rate and power (to calculate the correlation), as well as rides with just heart rate (or else this isn’t needed), the TRIMP score (from heart rate) is scaled so that it corresponds with training load (from power). Thus, TRIMP is used to estimate the training load for a ride. Traditionally, one would have to estimate the training load for a ride (it was two hours at 75%, therefore it’s 150), but automatically using heart rate is a lot easier.

If you are curious as to how well this actually works for your rides, you can look at a chart that shows how TRIMP and training load of all of your rides correlate. This chart is found at the bottom of the training load chart (and you have to click on the button to make it show).

One other recent change with the training load chart is that starting values for short-term stress and long-term stress are calculated automatically if custom values aren’t provided. The guess works well if the first week or two of your rides uploaded are representative of the riding you were doing previously, but it won’t be so good if you had an unusually big first week. If you know that the guess is inaccurate, custom values can be used instead.

One more thing: mini-training load charts are shown on the main “rides” page in the monthly summaries. These show the same information that the training load page shows when it loads. That is, it defaults to showing the same data (power and HR together if it can, else just power, else just HR) and uses the same initial values.

This is the blog of Cycling Analytics, which aims be the most insightful, most powerful and most user friendly tool for analysing ride data and managing training. You might be interested in creating an account, or following via Facebook or Twitter.

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