Running With a Power Meter
Happy Friday! 👋
Hope your July is off to a good start! In this month’s edition of the keeping pace newsletter, we’re writing about training with power.
If you’re also a cyclist, you might already be familiar with using power to measure exercise intensity, since it’s been around for decades. However, running power is relatively new, and has only become somewhat more mainstream in the last five years or so.
Power is the amount of energy produced (or work done) per second. In the context of running, it’s dependant on the amount of force you’re applying to the ground to propel you upwards and (more importantly) forwards with each stride, along with your stride rate.
In this newsletter, we’ll be briefly looking at (i) the benefits of training with running power and (ii) the different devices you can use to measure power.
Benefits of training with running power
1. It tells you how much work you’re doing
A first key benefit is that it provides an objective measure of how much work you’re actually doing.
Traditionally, runners have used pace, heart rate, or subjective feelings to gauge running intensity.
However, these each have some major drawbacks. Pace, for example, is highly impacted by things like gradient, terrain, and wind conditions. Thus, a given pace can translate to a very different running intensity under different conditions.
Heart rate and and perceived effort (‘RPE’) are both impacted by a whole host of factors such as hydration, environmental temperature, caffeine and food intake, time of day, fatigue and illness to name a few! We often refer to these two metrics as internal barometers of workload, since they tell you how challenging your body is finding running at a particular intensity. However, they don’t tell you how much work you’re actually doing.
Power presents an objective measure of external workload. It tells you the rate at which you’re expending energy at a given time. This can be really useful in better understanding how hard you’re working and the energy systems you’re likely to be activating and training.
Power can be used across different terrain, gradients or wind conditions to achieve (largely) consistent measures of running intensity, so it’s a versatile measure that can be particularly useful for trail and fell runners who often train in very varied conditions!
2. Quick to respond to changes in intensity
Power is also a real-time measure of work done. This means it’s really quick to respond to changes in intensity. This is in contrast to heart rate, pace and perceived effort, which all have significant lag.
The fast responsiveness of a power can help you pace interval sessions better, so that you’re not starting out too fast while heart rate and perceived effort play catch-up, for example. In effect, it helps take some of the guess-work out of pacing.
It also helps improve the quality of your run training by allowing you to keep the intensity more closely controlled and aligned with the particular energy systems, or physiological abilities you’re looking to develop. Power-based training zones can be used to help determine whether you’re working at the right intensity, as explained here.
3. Monitor changes in fitness
It’s often easier to detect changes in fitness by monitoring power rather than speed, since you don’t need to control for wind and terrain to such an extent.
For example, an improvement in the power you can hold over a 20-min effort can reflect a change in running fitness and speed.
4. Helps with race pacing
A final benefit to running with power is that it helps massively with pacing races; particularly those on flatter terrain, where the optimal pacing strategy is usually to hold a consistent power from start to finish.
Once you’ve performed a few hard efforts of varying durations (for example a 5km race, and a 5-10 min hard effort), then it’s possible to predict the power you’ll be able to hold over different race durations, and you can use this to execute an optimised pacing strategy. This can result in significant time savings of several minutes over a 10km race, for example, without any change in fitness!
Methods of measuring running power
There are four main types of device (aka ‘power meter’) used to measure running power:
Foot pods e.g. Stryd power meter or Garmin Running Dynamics Pod.
Wrist-based running power meters e.g. various models of Garmin, Polar, and Coros watches.
Heart Rate Monitors e.g. Garmin HRM Pro Plus
Insoles e.g. the Nurvv insoles.
The ‘gold standard’ for running power measurement is currently the Stryd power meter, which has the most advanced methods for measuring and modelling power, using accelerometry alongside measures of wind speed and air pressure.
That said, we have seen good data from running watches e.g. Polar. They do tend to over-report power, but as long as you use a consistent device each time you run, then this doesn’t really matter!
We’ll be writing a more detailed article on the subject of training with power, particularly within the context of running off-road soon, so keep your eyes peeled for that if you want to learn more!
News
We have a new set of running plans, focussed on building your aerobic base and endurance abilities. These are perfect for anyone looking to develop their general running fitness, and can be used as a stand-alone, or as a precursor to any of our more specific plans.
We have three levels:
Beginner to Improver, which takes you from running roughly 3-5km per run, 2-3 times per week, up to the level of ‘improver’ (running 4H per week, with a longest run of 1H).
Improver to Intermediate, which builds from a running volume of 4H/week to 6H/week, increasing your longest run from 1H to 2H and progressively introducing high-intensity training
Intermediate to Advanced, which builds from a running volume of 6H/week to 8.5H/week, increasing your longest run from 2H to 3.5H and progressively developing more advanced high-intensity training.
You can also check out our 50 mile/100km, 50km and marathon trail/fell plans by following the links.
All plans come with a detailed PDF user guide to help provide guidance you’d usually get from a coach.
We’ll be adding more plans soon, and if there’s anything in particular you’d like to see, just drop us an email!
That’s it for this month! If you’re relatively new to the mailing list and want to see previous instalments, then you can do so here.
Thanks and happy running! 🏃♀️🏃
Emma & Tom