Any "Running Power" Skeptics Converted After Trying It?

You think you are going to get negative responses from those willing to admit they bought into the time-wasting hype of 'running power' bloviation?

However, Heart Rate monitoring for training purposes actually has considerable practical merit.

No...I'm wondering if there's anyone that experienced the opposite: an expectation of bloviation, but ended up actually appreciating it.

Training by heart rate and training by 'running power' seem like opposite sides of the same coin to me: trying to estimate effort by external quantification instead of listening to your own senses.

It is the same thing essentially. They are all different sides of the same coin. Same as training by relative perceived effort. For any defined exercise intensity (easy, lactate threshold, etc) — you will have a HR range, power range, min/mile range, perceived effort that corresponds to that intensity.

Power can be useful on hilly terrain to ensure you are in a certain zone consistently. But you can achieve the exact same thing with HR or perceived effort.

The same argument can be made against HR training that is usually made against power. Why do you need to know your HR data when you can just run based on perceived effort and achieve the same thing?

I don’t view any of them as superior to another and use all of them at different times when it is appropriate so that I’m in the right intensity range for the workout that I’m performing.

Bought the FR645 a year ago also to use running power since it can calculate it based on the HR belt. Had expectations, but the accuracy of it depends on good GPS and an accurate altimeter to adjust for elevation changes/hills. The altimeter is not at all accurate enough for the purpose and the running power basically follows the changes in pace. So I do not use it.

I have used HR all my life since I was running orienteering on the forest so pacing is impossible. But the recent year I have used pace, and the same known places to track my pace or time deviation to my threshold times, and the more I do use pace the more feel I get for the pace and I have ended up using feel and breathing rate and to some degree cadence.

That is a cheap option since it needs only a decent GPS watch with a timer and maybe cadence too.

I was looking for a footpod to increase the pace accuracy, but have not found anything yet.

I bought Stryd for pace accuracy, not to train with power.

However, over time I see that the power can be very useful metric if you run a lot of hills (wish I had more of those, alas Berlin DE is notoriously pancake flat)

It is definitely consistent and predicted my performances pretty well.

Another practical application is tracking progression on stuff like hill sprints. You can't really track those by pace even if you run the same hill. With Stryd I can see if my average power increases with time or not.

Not sure how well the wind power works, I don't have it, but if it works, it can be additional value.

Generally, the criticisms of running power that I hear fall into two camps. There's the "just run, baby" crowd. And there's the people who complain that "it's not really power the way a cycling power meter is." To the former people, I'd say that it's absolutely possible to get too wedded to the data, but there's also no reason not to collect it and make use of it when it makes sense. To the former people, I'd say that what matters isn't how the numbers are collected (and I won't even get into the fact that cycling power isn't as "direct" as they think it is), but rather whether the numbers are reliable. If you're using Stryd, they are. Stryd's running power correlates with oxygen consumption, which means it gives you a good snapshot of your metabolic output at a given moment.

I don't think running power will ever be as significant as in cycling because runners have the track. Pace on perfectly flat ground, on a measured course, is an excellent way of measuring effort in running. If cyclists all had ready access to indoor velodromes for training, then they could probably use pace for training as well.

On the other hand, if you are racing on a hilly course or if you want to do workouts on the roads rather than on a track, then running power can come in handy. Just think of it as an instant grade-adjusted pace measurement. People are actually very bad at measuring their effort on hills. I always thought I was a smart hill runner in that I'd let people get away from me early in races, and they'd eventually fall off the pace from pushing too hard on early climbs. After getting Stryd, it suggested that I should go even slower uphill, and the result was faster overall times and stronger finishes on hilly courses. On flat courses, on the other hand, I find it pretty pointless.

The other thing I really like it for is measuring peak power when I'm doing sprint work. If I'm doing 60 meter accelerations, hill sprints, flying 30s, or whatever, it's pretty hard to self-time yourself. And if you're going by feel, where you're only holding your top speed for a few seconds, then even an accurate stopwatch isn't going to tell you that much. But with a running power meter, you can compare all of your efforts and see what power level you were able to hold for a couple of seconds, which is not a bad way of measuring progress.

I know people who have adopted it, I know people who work at Stryd, and I have yet to see any noteworthy performance improvement as a result.

Great post 800 dude. I agree.

Can anyone here answer whether something like the Stryd foot pod can be useful for this concept.

Running a certain pace and changing your form in a certain way (cadence, stride length etc) to make that same pace happen with a smaller effort (in this case, power output). I guess one can do this with HR to a degree but I’ve never found a consistent reliable way to do so as my HR is all over the place on different days at the same pace even with a chest strap.

It would be interesting to repeat reps of a certain distance in a certain time and try to lower the power consumption.

Yeah you could dive into your data and see what happens since you get instantaneous information (every second you’ll have a data point). You will have pace, power, cadence, HR, etc on a second by second basis. You would just need to know the timing of when in your run you did something different with your running form or mechanics to see how it affects the numbers. And you’d probably need to be on a track to do this sort of experiment.

800 dude wrote:

The other thing I really like it for is measuring peak power when I'm doing sprint work. If I'm doing 60 meter accelerations, hill sprints, flying 30s, or whatever, it's pretty hard to self-time yourself. And if you're going by feel, where you're only holding your top speed for a few seconds, then even an accurate stopwatch isn't going to tell you that much. But with a running power meter, you can compare all of your efforts and see what power level you were able to hold for a couple of seconds, which is not a bad way of measuring progress.

I've never used a Stryd, but I would like to know if you can check your exerted power after each sprint repetition. If so, I think it would be a great tool for knowing when to end a workout (i.e. end the workout when you notice your last rep or two steadily decreasing in power).

Yea you can.

Power is an immediate proxy of effort. HR is a lagging proxy of effort. Neither is an accurate measure of perceived effort.

Example: You do your normal run after not recovering from the previous day's workout. At your normal perceived level of effort, your HR will be higher than normal and your power reading will be lower than normal.

Does that mean that you can't use them in training? No. They both have a place in training. In the above example, HR gives you a measure to let you know that you have NOT recovered sufficiently from the previous workout. In my opinion, a power meter would give an instantaneous measure of effort when you first start up a hill to tell you to back off sooner than perceived effort or HR would indicate. By the time your HR ramps up, you've probably expended more effort going uphill than you should have.

I think power meters are more important in cycling because cycling is closer to fartlek than steady pace running.

Creek Path Hero wrote:

I know people who have adopted it, I know people who work at Stryd, and I have yet to see any noteworthy performance improvement as a result.

"Noteworthy performance improvements" for experienced runners are quite rare. We're mostly operating fairly close to our limits. If you do see a "noteworthy performance improvement," how would you know whether it's a result of training with Stryd?

It's the easiest thing in the world to critique a training method by saying, "there's no evidence that will make you faster." That's true of pretty much everything. Sport science doesn't really tell us how to get faster; training is far to complicated for that. It gives us plausible methods that we can try out, but ultimately it's "an experiment of one" guided by a lot of intuition about which things feel like they work and which don't.

fisky wrote:

I think power meters are more important in cycling because cycling is closer to fartlek than steady pace running.

I agree, but a potential counterargument is that it's much easier for cyclists to keep their power constant just by feel. You just keep shifting so that the pedal strain "feels" the same, at the same cadence, and you end up with a pretty constant power output. You tell runners to keep the same effort going uphill, and their power still jumps 60 watts.

Stryd is helpful in a few ways:

* Much more accurate & consistent in measuring distance/pace in areas where GPS struggles

* Better at measuring how hard training has been by taking into account both duration and intensity continuously (Run Stress Score) vs. just logging mileage.

* Somewhat faster (20 seconds for me) in measuring changes in running intensity vs. heart rate

For advanced runners or for those with a good coach, I’d say that perceived effort (or following your coach) is a great way to train. For less experienced runners who need guidance, Stryd can be a useful tool to regulate training intensity for different types of runs on the flats and hills.

Also things like Stryd are good for runners who have lots of disposable income and like poring over data. :)

One benefit of training by power that doesn't get enough attention.

When you give a runner a pace target - nearly all of them are going to try to always hit or go faster than that target - they treat the pace target as a floor.

There's not the same emotional connection to a power #, so runners are more likely to stay within a reasonable range both above and below that power target.

Hence, runners who would overtrain when training by pace train at the appropriate effort when training by power, resulting in improvement.

Here's the way I see it:

The power number in running (based on accelerometers mainly) is a total estimate and not going to be very accurate. It may have precision with relative running numbers, but not accuracy.

Think of the physics involved. It is not like a very direct transfer of mechanical energy like a strain gauge on a bike crank/pedal etc. In cycling power is the end all and of course very, very useful (probably even more so than HR).

But in Running it's different. Too many variables at play and energy transfer going all over the place.

If you want to run sub 3:00 in the marathon and qualify for Boston or something then you better train for a pace of 6:52/mile pace. Better yet you should get your threshold and a lot of long workouts run in the 6:40-6:30 pace rage. So pace on flat runnable terrain is basically the end all for performance. It doesn't matter if your Heart rate is 150 or 180 at those paces or if your "power" is 300 watts or you "feel like it's an 8 out of 10".

What matters is that your lactate threshold pace is faster than 6:40/mile....or else you're not cracking 3 hours in the marathon. Now we can say HR has more value here...because if we actually have had a legit Vo2max test in a lab and got 100% max HR values measured - then at least we know what percent of relative HR our 6:40/mile might be. Is it 80% or 85% for example?

Better yet would probably be measuring Running Economy values at different paces and lactate values. Now that is good data!

But most people don't have access to that. So really (if you are training for a flat road/track race). Pace is your best bet and some HR data isn't bad. Sure, it can be windy some days and you have to adjust pace/effort accordingly (HR will usually do that in a headwind!). But the "power value" simply should never be compared to something like it is in cycling. And the Physics say that these sensors are at best just totally guessing most of the time. Some are probably smoothed out by algorithms.