The Workout: Are You Making Progress or Spinning Your Wheels?

I just spent a week in lovely Santa Rosa, Calif., at the Vision Quest biking camp, and it was quite a singular experience. Training camp is probably as close to professional riding as I'll ever get, especially given the fact that I'm a slow rider, especially up – and down – hills. Speed limitations aside, I had access to some wonderful amenities. There were pro mechanics checking my bike every night and nutritionist-designed meals served every day. I had top-notch coaches working with me on the road. What's more, I had a CycleOps Power-Tap to track my watts and kilojoules. Like many of you, I had no idea what that last sentence meant.

Robbie Ventura, former pro-cyclist and founder of Vision Quest Coaching, focuses heavily on using power output to gauge how hard an athlete is working. To that end, VQ put power meters on our bikes to track us during camp. There was talk of watts and kjs all week long. While many people were used to training with PowerTaps, several of us weren't. We just wanted to know if we burned enough calories to justify a piece of cheesecake (the answer was yes).

All that talk of power did bring up some interesting questions, though. How does the casual athlete track how hard she is working? How do you determine if you're challenging yourself and improving, or just spinning your wheels and wasting time?

There are several ways you can assess your effort level. First is the low-tech approach: your perceived rate of exertion. Quite simply, you're working hard when you think you're working hard. When you run up a hill, huffing and puffing as you get to the top, you feel your effort level has increased. Well, guess what? You're right. Assessing your huffing and puffing is a little vague though, isn't it? Surely, there's got to be a better way.

For something more concrete, you can look at your minutes and miles. Run or bike exactly the same route, and if your time goes down, that usually means you worked harder. Unfortunately, it doesn't account for environmental factors such as wind. What's more, who wants to run the same route over and over again?

Fortunately, Polar created a cottage industry for itself a few years ago by making wireless heart rate monitors available to the masses. HR monitors are now de rigueur among the fitness in-crowd. At the gym, on the trail, in spin class, you'll see people looking down at their wrists, taking stock of how hard they're working. Personally, I was hooked on heart rate training for years until my watch died. A few weeks without it broke my habit, but I still understand how addictive heart rate training can be – time in zones, max HR, average HR and of course, the golden “calories burned” number. The drawback with heart rate training is there can be too many variables: nervousness and caffeine, for example. What's more, as Robbie Ventura pointed out when I asked him about heart rate training, one's maximum heart rate is influenced by genetics, not just by exertion, so it's not a good standardized indicator of effort level.

Which brings us back to power output. I have no idea how the little CycleOps power meter worked, but somehow it calculated how many watts my pedaling was producing, from zero on a downhill to over 400 on a climb. The PowerTap also captures a range of information for analysis, including information about the grades and distances covered. As a casual athlete, I found the CycleOps PowerTap a fun device, but probably more information than I can realistically use at this point.

In the end, I think the importance of tracking performance really comes down to personal goals. If you have a specific event or race that you are training for, you need a structured training plan and a reliable way to track your effort output. If, however, your goal is to have fun and maybe drop a few pounds, focusing on the numbers is not quite as important. For the casual athlete, while heart rate monitors and power meters may be fun gadgets to use, in the end it's mostly about enjoying your workouts, regardless of whether you're counting miles, minutes, heart beats, calories, or watts. However, if someone comes up with a “slices of cheesecake burned” measurement, I'll gladly start tracking that.