The Performance Manager Chart part 1

This post is going to be interesting to some folks and very boring to others.

I've been training with a power meter since 2005.  In that time, there's a few things I've found to be certain: for me it's been a learning experience the whole way as instead of hiring a coach, I've chosen to coach myself and try to learn as much as possible from reading and just plain old experimentation.

Another thing is that the majority of folks who race bicycles have no interest, or the knowledge for that matter of the actual benefits of a power meter. So what is a power meter and what exactly does it do? Well if you don't already know, it's a device (hub, crank spider, or pedals) that measures power output in watts.

This measurement along with other metrics (heart rate, speed, cadence, torque and more) are recorded second by second with an on board computer and can then be analysed on you home PC with the many different power analysis software that's available.

I'm not going to get into the different types of power meters or software, nor try to convince anybody to buy one. A power meter will not make you faster. Some things it can do that are undesirable are: Tell you how bad you suck when you are out of shape and sometimes even when you're fit. It can also make you very frustrated when it malfunctions.

Now, I'm not trying to convince anybody not to get one either as it is a very powerful training tool if used to it's potential. Anyhow, as I'm to keep this somewhat short, one of the software programs I like to use is TrainingPeaks WKO+. The current cost of the software is $129.00 I believe. In my opinion, it's totally worth the cost. It has a ton of features and customizable graphs. The Performance Manager Chart (PMC) is worth the cost alone and is what I'm going to focus on in this post. For more info on the PMC chart go Here.

So I was talking the other day with Rob, one of my team mates, when the subject of the PMC chart came up. I have training data going back to early 2008, and I thought it would be interesting to see what the PMC charts would look like back to back etc. in about 6 month increments.

3-3-08 to 11-30-08

This is the first 8 months that I used the PMC chart. The basic gist of what all the lines on the graph are =
Acute training load of 7 days is the pink line. Chronic training load of 42 days is the blue line and the yellow line is training stress balance. Another way of putting it is Blue =fitness, Pink = fatigue, and yellow = form.

The 10 green dots connected by lines are my peak 10-60 minute efforts, the 10 red dots are my peak 20 minute efforts, and the 10 black dots are my best 10 minute efforts for this time period.

I'll continue this post with some more explanation on this graph as well as the 6 that lead up to the current date