Heart Rates or wattage?

[MattI]

With all this talk of FaCT and heart rates, I was interested to read the other day an interview with Dan Martin, the young Irish Garmin climber in Velo News.

He was talking about his training and apparently he's shunned the idea of using coaches and trainers in the past, claiming that he knows his own body better than a physiologist with a PhD.

Anyway, David Millar introduced him to his trainer, Adrie Van Diemen, who used to train Greg LeMond and trains a number of the top Garmin riders. Martin reckons that Van Diemen's ideas have made a massive input into his rise up the ranks of the pro peloton. And, the interesting thing with all this FaCT talk is that Diemen's ideas involve basing the riders training on heart rates exclusively rather than power meters.

[Robh]

When I first came across Juerg his take on powermeters were they are great for 15sec-5min intervals where HR lags.

Also his athletes used power meters during STF rides but paced by HR. The wattage readings on those rides were used to assess when to quit a workout. If there was more than 10% drop in watts it was time to go home otherwise your workout was no longer be a STF one if you tried to maintain the same watts, HR would would go up.

And responses from the likes on the google wattage forum :- "Bin the heart rate strap".

Rob