Dialling Powerpod for Home Trainer

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spangelsaregreat
Posts: 139
Joined: Sun Aug 13, 2017 2:53 pm

Dialling Powerpod for Home Trainer

Post by spangelsaregreat »

Hi

Thought I would share this post to give a bit of advice on how to best set your Powerpod up so that your real world power and home trainer power is as close as possible.

As you know Powerpod has a virtual power mode for use on the home trainer using trainer profiles available in Isaac. Now you may be fortunate and your trainer may be on the list and it may give similar results out of the box. However mine wasn't (Elite Volare Mag Gel) and so I tried some other profiles and they did not match my real world power

I have read that this not uncommon with other virtual power systems and even dfpm users report differences in power.

Firstly you need to select a trainer profile that is close to your own trainer (I used the Elite Mag profile). Now you could simply do a FTP test on the trainer and use that which is what I originally did. However it skews your data in Training Peaks as it is not aligned to your real world power. If you don't monitor your performance in this way then it is not an issue. It would mean doing two FTP tests though!

I approached the problem by firstly doing a real world FTP test to get an up-to date figure. I then set the bike up on the home trainer. You need to remember to check the tyre pressure before each session to make sure your results are consistent.

I then selected a profile from Isaac and headed to the pain cave. You need to have a heart rate monitor on and to have also recorded your FHRT. You will be using this to compare your real world and virtual power.

Start in and easy gear and and a set cadence, I chose 90 cadence. The virtual power does take a few seconds to settle but once it does you need to then wait for your heart rate to catch up and also settle. I have a screen on the Garmin that shows both heart and power zones. You then start changing up in to higher gears allowing both power and heart rate to settle in each gear. Keep moving up the gears until you get to your threshold heart rate. You will be able to see from comparing your power and heart rate zones how close your virtual and real world settings are.

Once you have done this use Isaac to check your figures. Firstly you want to see if your power profile has a similar ramp. By this I mean do power and heart rate increase at similar rates. If they don't then the virtual power curve is wrong and you will need to try another profile. Mine was good but on my first test my virtual power was about 60 watts high. I used Isaac to then adjust the power down. It took two repeats of this process to get to similar virtual and real world power.

It should be noted heart rate and power zone will not be precisely the same but as long as they are close to what you get in the real world then that should work.

It is then just a case of doing some structured sessions and double checking that your test has worked. You might need to further tweak the power profile if you find your virtual power is too high or low.

As with the initial calibration of Powerpod it is a bit more work than perhaps a dfpm but it only took me about 45 minutes to do this setup so not a big issue.

I will report back once I have completed a few sessions as how accurate this setup is in practical use.
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