I cycle for fitness only and ride about 600 miles or so a month. I have been reading in this forum (I am new to this forum) about wattage training. I have always used a Polar Heart Rate monitor and added a Cats Eye computer that details RPMs, Mileage, Speed but not wattage. What are the advantages (if any) of using the Wattage over Heart Rate monitor and the Cat Eye computer?

For general fitness and enjoyment, not a lot.

For seeking ways to improve performance, quite a few:
- Objective benchmarking of fitness and performance
- assessing strengths and weaknesses and ways to address those in training
- making training more relevant to your riding/racing goals
- higher level of precision in tracking, managing and planning training workloads
- assessing the precise demands of racing and objectively tests methods of improving performance (e.g. improving aerodynamics for time trialling)
- understand the energy demands of your training
- enhance the relationship with a coach
- provides additional incentives/motivation for training (e.g. goals for each session become easier to set)
- improve pacing
- helps make indoor training productive and more bearable

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Custom Training Plans -- cyclecoach.com -- My Blog -- Power Meter Hire in Australia

Thanks for your input. Again though why use cycling wattage? This is just new to me. Is it just another tool and to make the training more effective? Is this better than using a Polar Heart Rate monitor along with Cadence and Speed on the Cat Eye cycling computer? I would definately agree that using a heart rate monitor is very usefull and I also try to maintain a certain cadence (80 per minute for most of my rides).

For the reasons I listed.

__________________
Custom Training Plans -- cyclecoach.com -- My Blog -- Power Meter Hire in Australia

Yes, it's another measurement tool.

IMO, yes but that assumes among other things the user knows what to look for in the recorded power data and how to influence training, race day pacing, diet or other things based on that data.

Power measured in watts is very directly related to the speed you can achieve and maintain on a bike. With some additional information (weight, rolling resistance, aerodynamic drag or CdA, road grade, air density and wind speed) you can accurately predict watts for a given speed or speed for a given power. That makes sustainable power over different durations a very objective metric for measuring a rider's capabilities. HR or cadence just doesn't come close.

Say you can sustain 165 bpm HR today, next month you sustain the same 165 or maybe your HR on a ride goes to 175 or you struggle at 155, by itself it doesn't tell you much about your training progress, whether you've moved forward, stagnated or are overtraining and need to rest. Couple it with speed or elapsed time on a known course and you get closer but what if there was a tailwind today vs. last month or you rode with friends and traded pace? Is your fitness improving or was the ride simply easier for a faster speed?

Tracking power removes the doubt. Sustain a certain power for a given time this week and compare power for relevent durations over time to assess your progress. If you can sustain 200 watts for 20 minutes today but next month you can sustain 220 then you've moved forward in a tangible way. Track power over a set of target durations such as 5 second, 1 minute, 5 minute and something longer (20 minutes, 30 minutes or a full hour are typical) and you can identify your personal strengths and weaknesses in a way that relates directly to specific dominant physiological energy production mechanisms and target your weaknesses through specific training.

If you pace long intervals on HR you have to be sure to hold back a bit in the early minutes to allow for the HR lag or you'll go much too hard at the beginning and suffer or have to quit the effort prematurely. Similarly if you train with HR zones as many folks do you'll have to back the effort off towards the end and drop power to allow for continued HR drift. Training with power teaches you that HR is a response and not a training stimulus and it's better to hold the power steady or even increase it in the final minutes of a long interval regardless of how much your HR drifts.

For those shorter durations HR is all but useless. It takes 7 or more minutes for HR to reach the average for a long steady time trial like interval and then it continues to climb even if power is held constant all the way till the end. That characteristic of HR lag and HR drift make it very difficult to pace or even evaluate short efforts based on HR. In a 3 minute VO2 Max effort your HR won't have even come up to a typical TT level till it's nearly over but you'll actually be going much harder than long TT pace. In a 5 second sprint or even 1 minute anaerobic tolerance effort your HR won't peak until the effort is nearly completed or you're recovering for your next interval.

Power on the other hand responds to the very first pedal stroke (assuming your powermeter sample rate is set sufficiently fast and display averaging is disabled). So you know right away at the start of a long interval or time trial if you're going way too hard and digging too deep a hole right at the start which is a very common problem for folks pacing entirely on HR or perceived exertion which are both slow to respond to hard efforts.

The list goes on and the differences in training and racing can be substantial. But do you need a power meter to train effectively? No, of course not. There have always been and continue to be riders that get fast, very fast, using no instrumentation at all or very simple cycling computers with only speed, distance and time. Some folks seem to have an intuitive ability to drive themselves hard enough, often enough at approximately the right intensity for the correct durations to progress rapidly without overtraining or burning out. Those folks probably wouldn't see as much value in a power meter (though their coaches might). But for a lot of folks who are motivated by the ability to collect and review objective data the PM is an incredibly useful tool.

It's not essential to riding or racing, but at least for me it totally turned my cycling and racing around after several decades of trying other approaches with mediocre results.

Try reading some of the links on this page for ideas of ways to use a PM:
Power 411, How to train with WKO+ Software and a power meter

-Dave

Thanks for the excellent detailed description. I appreciate your input and it makes sense to me. Tracking wattage may be beyond what I want to do but it is something to think about and you are absolutely correct about HR lag with a HR meter. Thanks again.