No power meter on your bike? No problem. Heart rate based training is the new fashion trend.

Power meters are great especially for short duration higher intensity intervals. But they are not a necessity for training smarter or getting faster. I would argue that many riders would be better off focusing on heart rate. I say this partially because it has been shown that easy rides are a corner stone of performance. Easy and heart rate based training go hand in hand. I would also argue that learning to judge your hard intervals by RPE (rate of perceived exertion) is a valuable step in cycling performance.

Garmin heart rate monitor cycling

As recently popularized, there are 3 primary training zones or intensity targets. Easy, moderate and hard. Arguably, breaking it down farther than this is not a critical component to getting faster. Most people do too much moderate and not enough easy and hard. You can google “Polarized Training” to get a better understanding of this.

So you can use TrainerDay to execute your heart rate based training. Using our calendar and converting Coach Jack workouts or for that matter any workouts to heart rate based workout is simple.

See below where you can click and convert any of our thousands of power based workouts to heart rate based workouts.

TrainerDay calendar — heart rate training

You can also just search and find workouts and send them to the platform of your choice to perform heart rate based workouts.

Send heart rate based workout to TrainingPeaks

If you train with power some times (for example indoors) and have a feeling of what Zone 3 should feel like. You can set up your own custom conversions from power to heart rate. See below

Custom power to heart rate conversion matrix

Give it a try. Find power based workouts in TrainerDay now and convert them to heart rate.

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