For those monitoring watts on an exercise machine, how many watts do you maintain?

lgfrie

I recently bumped up my watts on my bike from 75 to 85 for my one hour daily cardio and felt pretty good about that! Then I read online that most people exercise at 100-150. I've worked out at 100, which was OK, and 120, which I thought was too much. Just curious what others here find the right level.

lgfrie

and also, anyone monitoring METs instead of watts? I've tried, but I just find watts more useful.

MikePfirrman

Feel good about what you can do. I do polarized training, paying some attention to Watts, but more to HR. I workout mostly on the AD Pro (an "A" Watts rated machine, meaning it's +/- 1%, it's an Assault Bike) and a C2 Rower (also very accurate on Watts). Many of my rower buddies have WattsBikes or similar.

I train on the rower on Steady State (moderately easy) days around 110 to 125 Watts. On the AD Pro, around 130 to 150 Watts. On the interval days, significantly higher on both. My easier days are between 60% Max HR and 70% HR max. If I'm feeling sluggish after a hard day, I'll drop the HR down (along with the Watts).

I've come to a point in my training where I'd rather be extremely polarized -- hard days really hard and easy days pretty easy.

What you find is that after a while, you can hold higher Watts with relative ease (which I monitor through HR). The day after hard interval sessions, though, Iike today, I'll find I want to work a lot easier. Yesterday was an hour session of hard intervals (where I peaked at over 800 Watts, but only for a few split seconds). As a rower, my Wattage is even weaker than on the bike, though I love rowing more.

Serious riders and rowers can easily hold over 200 Watts for an hour. Most decent cyclists can hold over 250 Watts for an hour (I would hardly say I'm in that great of shape now but could hold 240 for an hour). I know many rowers that can do half marathons sub 2:00 pace, some sub 1:50 pace for the duration (around 75 minutes for them) -- well over 200 Watts, which is just insane on a rower. Elite cyclists hold over 300 Watts for an hour.

So just work on you is the moral of the story. Don't compare or you'll get frustrated. The more work you do, the easier it will seem. But you can improve your average Wattage, relative to how you feel, by pushing the AT and interval work and doing lots of easier meters in between.

How many days a week are you doing cardio and for how many hours? If it's only 3 days a week or so, I'd do one day of HIIT. If you really want to improve cardio, you should be doing 5 or 6 days a week, pushing it once a week or so, maybe twice and going relatively easy all the rest. Going one speed all week long will lead to frustration in performance if that's important at all to you.

NorthCascades

Watts are absolutely more useful. 🙂 They are an objective measure of your effort and of relative fitness changes.

If you can get the data into either Garmin Connect or (free, excellent) Golden Cheetah there's great analysis that can help make sense of watts data and help guide your training.

For me, for an hour, 250w if my life depends on it; around 150w of it's moderately hilly and I want to be moderately fast; around 180w if I'm motivated to be fast, 201w best in the last year. That was an hour of uphill, my best avg on flat ground is definitely lower, but I don't have a way to tease that out of the data.

sijomial

if you want to use MFP as designed and estimate calories you don't want METS.....
METS will give a gross calorie estimate and also in proportion to your weight - which isn't helpful for a non-weight bearing exercise.

Average watts per hour X 3.6 is a highly accurate net calorie estimate - the gold standard and perfect for use when using MFP as designed.

To answer your main question there is a massive range of sustainable watts predominantly determined by someone's cardio fitness for longer durations. But comparison really is the thief of joy.
I asked a talented cyclist friend what was a reasonable goal for me to work up to (bearing in mind I only started cycling seriously in my 50's) and he suggested 200w. Two years of dedicated training later I finally bust a gut to get there only to discover he didn't mean max effort for an hour - he meant for fast rides of four hours+.

Personally as a keen 5,000 mile a year cyclist but 60 YO 205 watts is about my current maximum sustainable power output for an hour. A skinny little male elite professional rider might be pushing out an astonishing 450watts and cruising along easily at my maximum power.
140 - 150w is pretty comfortable and a common average for my outdoor rides.

Continual improvement is a better goal rather than comparisons with others.

PS - what is your typical cadence? Often people with lower outputs don't cycle in an efficient cadence range (80 - 100rpm).

lgfrie

sijomial wrote: »

if you want to use MFP as designed and estimate calories you don't want METS.....
METS will give a gross calorie estimate and also in proportion to your weight - which isn't helpful for a non-weight bearing exercise.

Average watts per hour X 3.6 is a highly accurate net calorie estimate - the gold standard and perfect for use when using MFP as designed.

To answer your main question there is a massive range of sustainable watts predominantly determined by someone's cardio fitness for longer durations. But comparison really is the thief of joy.
I asked a talented cyclist friend what was a reasonable goal for me to work up to (bearing in mind I only started cycling seriously in my 50's) and he suggested 200w. Two years of dedicated training later I finally bust a gut to get there only to discover he didn't mean max effort for an hour - he meant for fast rides of four hours+.

Personally as a keen 5,000 mile a year cyclist but 60 YO 205 watts is about my current maximum sustainable power output for an hour. A skinny little male elite professional rider might be pushing out an astonishing 450watts and cruising along easily at my maximum power.
140 - 150w is pretty comfortable and a common average for my outdoor rides.

Continual improvement is a better goal rather than comparisons with others.

PS - what is your typical cadence? Often people with lower outputs don't cycle in an efficient cadence range (80 - 100rpm).

My typical cadence is 65, for 60 minutes, 6-7 days per week. Now I'm curious about the cadence aspect - why is 80-100 more efficient than 65? I think I could probably get close to 80, although I tried the full 80 for a few minutes today and it didn't seem like something I could hold for an hour quite yet.

Also curious about the calories. Avg watts x 3.6 is a number I've seen around the web. For today's workout that would be 288 calories, which sounds reasonable. But the machine reported 618 calories burned. Even if I subtract 100 for the net/gross delta for the hour (NEAT=2350), it'd still be 518, which is a far cry from 288. Not sure what they're doing with that calorie calculation, but my other machines have a similar discrepancy between calories reported and calories self-calculated using watts. Thoughts?

sijomial

lgfrie wrote: »

sijomial wrote: »

if you want to use MFP as designed and estimate calories you don't want METS.....
METS will give a gross calorie estimate and also in proportion to your weight - which isn't helpful for a non-weight bearing exercise.

Average watts per hour X 3.6 is a highly accurate net calorie estimate - the gold standard and perfect for use when using MFP as designed.

To answer your main question there is a massive range of sustainable watts predominantly determined by someone's cardio fitness for longer durations. But comparison really is the thief of joy.
I asked a talented cyclist friend what was a reasonable goal for me to work up to (bearing in mind I only started cycling seriously in my 50's) and he suggested 200w. Two years of dedicated training later I finally bust a gut to get there only to discover he didn't mean max effort for an hour - he meant for fast rides of four hours+.

Personally as a keen 5,000 mile a year cyclist but 60 YO 205 watts is about my current maximum sustainable power output for an hour. A skinny little male elite professional rider might be pushing out an astonishing 450watts and cruising along easily at my maximum power.
140 - 150w is pretty comfortable and a common average for my outdoor rides.

Continual improvement is a better goal rather than comparisons with others.

PS - what is your typical cadence? Often people with lower outputs don't cycle in an efficient cadence range (80 - 100rpm).

My typical cadence is 65, for 60 minutes, 6-7 days per week. Now I'm curious about the cadence aspect - why is 80-100 more efficient than 65? I think I could probably get close to 80, although I tried the full 80 for a few minutes today and it didn't seem like something I could hold for an hour quite yet.

Also curious about the calories. Avg watts x 3.6 is a number I've seen around the web. For today's workout that would be 288 calories, which sounds reasonable. But the machine reported 618 calories burned. Even if I subtract 100 for the net/gross delta for the hour (NEAT=2350), it'd still be 518, which is a far cry from 288. Not sure what they're doing with that calorie calculation, but my other machines have a similar discrepancy between calories reported and calories self-calculated using watts. Thoughts?

Cadence has been extensively studied and although there's quite a bit of personal variation the vast majority will have their best efficiency and sustained power at 80-100rpm (perhaps higher). It's a balance between using your muscular strength and your CV abilities. Think of muscle power like a pond and CV capacity as an ocean, rely too much on your muscle power and your endurance plummets as your leg muscles burn out. You will see a contrast on hills of people grinding up a big hill with low cadence versus someone spinning comfortably at the correct cadence. The "grinder" is taking far more out of themselves. My natural cadence was too low and simply working over a few months elevated my FTP score significantly, also transformed my outdoor endurance.

Talking of pedalling efficiency also comes into converting power (watts) to calories. Cyclists typically have an energy efficiency of 20-25% with 24% being very common - you are burning roughly 4 times the calories to create the power you are putting into your pedals.
Conveniently a calorie is 0.24 of a joule, or 24%. That helps bring down a complex formula to a very simple one.
Explained in detail here - https://mccraw.co.uk/2012/10/14/powertap-meter-convert-watts-calories-burned/

I use a high end indoor trainer (Wattbike) with very accurate power meter but they use the data in a very perverse way to come up with an inflated estimate. Their Tech Support staff couldn't explain why!
(Marketing exercise springs to mind - "Use our machine, burn more calories!).
I simply link my Garmin to the Wattbike's power meter to get the real numbers.

MikePfirrman

Great insight by @sijomial. Also, don't forget that Watts, like sijomial touched on, have a power element to it. I'm really slow on the rower in Watts this year compared to two years ago because I had a disc injury. Your peak wattage or "low pull", as they call it in rowing, helps to determine how much sustainable power you have, but only in part. I used to regularly generate 650 or so Watts in very short sprints (a few seconds at a time). Now I'm lucky to generate over 500 on the rower (800 something on the bike).

djproux used to post a lot on the "What workout have you done today?" thread. He does triathlons. I learned a lot from him on Wattage training. When he would bike, it wasn't always about what wattage he produced, which was the end game. It might be about working each leg separately in drills to produce more power with each leg when you put it together. Rowing is the same thing. There's a guy that's destroying the over 50 records right now in the Indoor Rowing world. He does a ton of powerlifting. It's nothing for him to do 500 lb deadlifts for 20 reps. So when he gets on the rower, power is less of a factor. He did a half marathon recently at 287 Watts (at 52 or 53 years old), on the rower. And an Aussie Olympic rower destroyed the old 2K record this past year averaging 570 Watts or so for 5 minutes and 25 seconds. You don't get to the point of being able to average those numbers by never doing short, intense work, coupled with longer easy rides/workouts to build aerobic capacity.

I realize my AD Pro (though it's watt rated to +/- 1% isn't the same as cycling trainers), but all the same concepts apply. I might do standing runs to work my hamstrings more versus sitting the entire time, which seems to work glutes and quads more. My wattage goes down, but I don't care. It's training.

Today I might do an EFT test (20 minutes hard) just to ballpark where I'm at. All the training that goes into this is more important than riding Watts for Watts sake every day, if that makes sense. Riding or training with purpose makes much more sense for now. Then after several months, test. Then go several more months and test again. It's just a benchmark of where your training is now.

NorthCascades

Most people gravitate towards a cadence of around 60 rpm. It feels easier in some ways, and it makes you push harder on the pedals, which you'd think produces more power.

Power = torque vector * angular velocity. In other words power is how hard you're pushing and how many rpms.

Most people make their biggest power numbers at really high cadence like 100 to 120 rpms. (But your maximum power for a very brief period doesn't mean a lot.)

NorthCascades

lgfrie wrote: »

sijomial wrote: »

if you want to use MFP as designed and estimate calories you don't want METS.....
METS will give a gross calorie estimate and also in proportion to your weight - which isn't helpful for a non-weight bearing exercise.

Average watts per hour X 3.6 is a highly accurate net calorie estimate - the gold standard and perfect for use when using MFP as designed.

To answer your main question there is a massive range of sustainable watts predominantly determined by someone's cardio fitness for longer durations. But comparison really is the thief of joy.
I asked a talented cyclist friend what was a reasonable goal for me to work up to (bearing in mind I only started cycling seriously in my 50's) and he suggested 200w. Two years of dedicated training later I finally bust a gut to get there only to discover he didn't mean max effort for an hour - he meant for fast rides of four hours+.

Personally as a keen 5,000 mile a year cyclist but 60 YO 205 watts is about my current maximum sustainable power output for an hour. A skinny little male elite professional rider might be pushing out an astonishing 450watts and cruising along easily at my maximum power.
140 - 150w is pretty comfortable and a common average for my outdoor rides.

Continual improvement is a better goal rather than comparisons with others.

PS - what is your typical cadence? Often people with lower outputs don't cycle in an efficient cadence range (80 - 100rpm).

My typical cadence is 65, for 60 minutes, 6-7 days per week. Now I'm curious about the cadence aspect - why is 80-100 more efficient than 65? I think I could probably get close to 80, although I tried the full 80 for a few minutes today and it didn't seem like something I could hold for an hour quite yet.

Also curious about the calories. Avg watts x 3.6 is a number I've seen around the web. For today's workout that would be 288 calories, which sounds reasonable. But the machine reported 618 calories burned. Even if I subtract 100 for the net/gross delta for the hour (NEAT=2350), it'd still be 518, which is a far cry from 288. Not sure what they're doing with that calorie calculation, but my other machines have a similar discrepancy between calories reported and calories self-calculated using watts. Thoughts?

First, don't subtract anything from the number you get from a watt meter. It doesn't include your BMR calories, only what you put into the bike. It would read zero if you stayed on the couch.

Here's another way you could do the math, I'm posting this hoping to clarify.

Set your computer to record a data point every second. Open that data in Excel. Take the sum total of the watts column. Change the label to calories. Bob's your uncle. 🙂

1 watt = 1 joule per second.

1 joule = 1 calorie on a bike. Small c calorie.

300 watts = 300 calories per second = 0.3 kCals per second.

The formula @sijomial gave produces the same number, and you don't need Excel. 🙂 Your bike tells you avg power so his formula is easy to use, that's why you see it so often.

Finally, this will be plus or minus 2.5% from the truth if you're measuring watts accurately.