FEEL THE POWER

With even some pro teams cautioning against an over-reliance on power meters, Dr Josie Perry makes the case for staying in touch with your winning instincts

- Dr Josie Perry

Way back in January, before the cycling world was taken over by Zwift, social distancing and spectator-free races, there was a shock announcement from the management of Italian team Vini Zabù-KTM. The team banned its riders from using power meters or heart-rate monitors during races.

According to the team’s manager Luca Scinto, some of his riders had become obsessed with the numbers and it was holding them back. He wanted his team to race on feeling and judgment, rather than becoming – as team leader Giovanni Visconti called them – “robots” on autopilot.

But is it true? Are power meters really holding us back by making us over-reliant on an external measure of effort? Don’t they simply allow us to be accurate, objective and, therefore, controlled in our riding?

A power meter isn’t a magic wand, it is just a tool. But it is a helpful tool, giving instant knowledge of how many watts we are producing at any given moment – and watts are, of course, the ultimate metric for cyclists. Once you know your wattage for each training zone, you can track and measure your progress with fantastic accuracy. This frees you to keep focusedon specific goals; if you fail to hit your

Being a slave to the data may not be the best policynumbers, you know that it is time to rest and recover. Having an accurate reading of intensity allows us (or our coaches) to design more effective programmes, learn whether our perceptions of effort match the reality of output and help us to keep easy efforts easy and hard efforts hard.