Wattage meter & Rest days

I'm reading the book 'Training and Racing with a Power meter' and it states that 'your wattge will be the key to knowing when you truly need a rest day'.

How do you use wattage to tell you this? I'm not sure I fully understand.

Also, due to now living in a very hot climate (Texas) would this have an effect on wattage threshold. It certainly feels a lot harder to maintain 260W in 35 degree weather than it did in the UK when riding in 15 degrees.

How do you off set this? Should I offset it??

Thanks.

What I go by is how my PE matches my power output. When I have consecutive days where it takes a Herculean effort to maintain 85% FTP (for example) I know it's time to take a rest.

Some folks do well in heat; some don't. I would just see what you can do and use that. After all "All you can do is all you can do".

Dave

I'd have to know the page reference to be sure, but I believe it simply means that if you are not able to reach the wattage target of a particular workout then you should take a rest day rather than plowing ahead with a low-quality effort.

While this may seem so obvious that one would question why it even appears in a training book, consider how the same situation would be handled without benefit of a PM:

HR -- people typically find that fatigue causes HR response to be depressed during exercise. So, if a rider observes a low HR during a particular effort, they may attribute it to increased fitness and push even harder trying to raise HR, thus digging further into the fatigue hole. Post a question on the forums when overtraining starts to become a concern.

PE -- without the benefit of a measured output, a high PE means a successful workout. No pain - no gain. Nice job and keep training despite the fact that output and training stimulus is getting lower and lower, leading to stagnation. Post a question on the forums when riders are dropping you despite working your butt off 6 days a week.

Obviously, experienced folks would use a combination of those methods to successfully adjust their plan, but you might be surprised how many fall into one of those two traps. In any case, by a PM definitely speeds the learning curve because it is a straightforward measure of output, rather than response.

Not unless you plan to freqently switch training locales between Texas and the UK. Set your FTP based on what you can regularly do (in TX) and leave it. If you ever go back to the UK for a ride, it'll just feel that much easier.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_rate_variability

This is quite informative reading about HRV and relationships between heart and autonomic nervous system (there is good link at the end of wiki-page). These two have pretty much to do with overall performance. Quite heavyweight HRV tools are included to Polar CS600 with power meter. It's often said here that HR is meaningless, but personally I have chosen best from both systems. Power instruments are good for training, but for recovery tools I'd rather take HRM w/ HRV than to rely just in PE.

I use the following biomarkers to monitor fatigue in the following systems :-

HRV/RLX for cadiovascular system. (Polar CS600)
Power for rmusculo-skeletal system. (Powertap)
Lactate/glucose for metabolic situation. (Lactate pro)
Cadence for neuromusclar system.
Respiratory rate for respiratory system. (Counting/Zephyr Bioharness)

Rob
FaCT Level I & II Certified.