How strong cyclist am I? One of the ways to answer this question is to look at how much power you can produce. However, some of us will look at the maximum power, others at the 1 min or 20 min average. It depends, what one considers as important. This determines our training methods. However, focusing on one sometimes we are losing the other. Hence, it would be great to see our power performance as a whole to gain more control on our training process.
Mean Maximal Power Curve, a complete picture
What is the complete picture then? The idea is to encapsulate your power records from different durations inside one curve, the so-called Mean Maximal Power Curve (MMP Curve in short). In other words, search for maximal efforts of all possible durations within the given date range. It can be one year back from today or the whole season 2018. Let us have a look at the example below. This is MMP Curve for the whole year 2019. You can read from it that for example, the maximum 5 min average power is 421 W. In other words during one of the athlete’s rides in 2019, he/she obtained average power of 421 W for 5 min.
If you look at two such curves from different date ranges you can make a comparison and track progress. The example at the next picture shows such a comparison of season 2018 and 2019.
Comparing both MMP curves one can see that this athlete improved a lot in 2019, especially in the case of shorter anaerobic efforts (between 10 and 60 seconds). For example, if you compare mean maximal 30 seconds power for 2018 and 2019 you can notice an improvement from 672 W to 887 W. On the other hand, for 40 min efforts, the mean maximal power is the same for both 2018 and 2019. Does this mean the athlete did not improve for this particular duration? Not necessarily. He/she could simply not undertake a 40 min maximal effort in 2019. It is even more probable when you look at the picture above and see that he/she has improved a lot his 30 min power. This suggests that if the athlete tests his maximal 40 min power, the result obtained would be much better than it is now. However, it is impossible to perform tests for all the possible durations. Instead, we can estimate it.
Power Duration Model – your own mathematical model
Let us consider the MMP Curve for 2019 as in the example above. Using WKO 5 software we will fit the Power Duration Model that will predict our best performances for any possible duration based on all the data from a given date range (in this case for season 2019). In the picture below it is the red curve.
As you can see it is not 100% accurate. It is just an estimation, but a very good one. More efforts to exhaustion, the better accuracy you get. Hence, based on PDM, we can estimate that the athlete could average around 343 W for 40 min in 2019. Also, if you compare your max performances from season 2018 and 2019, as we did above, it is better to use PDM curves instead of MMP curves, as the picture is much clearer.
In the example above, you can clearly see that the gains were obtained for every duration, what was not so clear when comparing MMP curves. In particular, our models predict, that for a 40 min maximum effort the athlete could ride 343W in 2019 vs 320W in 2018. The biggest gains can be observed in the range 10 sec – 2 min, hence in the anaerobic zones.
How to find your Power Duration Model?
Finding PDM for given dates requires good quality data. So whenever you want to fit a model you should use the most recent maximal efforts of various durations. Hence, you should fit PDM curve to an MMP curve that corresponds to the date range that contains some short anaerobic (20 – 90 sec), anaerobic efforts (2 – 5 min), aerobic (7 – 30 min) and longer aerobic (1 – 5 hours). So do not try to fit your PDM curve to an MMP curve that is based on your recovery week unless you performed some kind of full testing protocol. We mentioned also that the maximal efforts should be the most recent, so it is better to fit PDM for 2-3 months period rather than one year as your fitness varies during a longer period. In order to find your PDM, you can use analytic software such as WKO (paid) or Golden Cheetah (free). Both very good and powerful. This is the example from Golden Cheetah:
The red smooth dashed curve is your PDM. The curve with shaded zones (Z1 – Z7) below is your MMP curve so your actual mean maximal efforts. For points that are marked on the PDM curve, there are maximal efforts of various durations chosen, based on which the PDM curve is fitted. Here it is a slightly different approach than in WKO 5, where the curve is fitted based on all the data, taking into account also max performances that were below your actual potential.
What is it good for?
Let us closer look at the possible conclusions that can be derived from a power curve like tha
Summary
The PDM curve is a great method to visualise your current or past performance. Tracking changes in your PDM may cause that you finally stop chasing your max sprint or 20 min power and focus on the whole picture, seeing the areas where you can improve most and seeing your