Monitoring effort with heart rate or power
As with all training, aside from going on ‘feel’, monitoring your effort with heart rate, power, or both is useful to understand your fitness and athletic capabilities. Over time you’ll establish your exertion levels and by documenting your training it’ll be possible to identify improvements or know when you’re fatigued.
Obviously, if you already have a heart rate monitor or power unit fitted to the bike that you’ll use on the turbo then you can simply just use these. Otherwise look for a turbo that offers such functions. Whilst both heart rate and power offer meaningful performance measures remember that heart rate can fluctuate due to tiredness, room temperature and general stress levels whereas power is an indication of the actual force that you’re able to generate so is therefore a more reliable and consistent measure.
Enjoy your turbo time! If you have any questions, get in touch @cottydale, and I’ll do my best to help. You can find me on Google+, too.
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