Justin Wagner of TeamODZ leads the “Watts up with Power?” ride each Wednesday at 6:30AM PST.
The “Watts up with Power?” ride is likely the slowest group ride you’ll find on Zwift, because it focuses on learning the basics of power based training while riding together on Zwift.  Each ride is streamed live to Zwift LIVE on Facebook and focuses on teaching specific principles of power based training. Each teaching is made available for all to review afterwards.
The content taught in “Watts up with Power?” is based on the book “Training and Racing with a Power Meter” by Hunter Allen and Andrew Coggan, PhD.
Here is the summary for Wednesday February 8th.
In power-based training, the holy grail is to be able to plan your training perfectly so you can peak at the right time for the race that is most important to you. Doing this is quite achievable, yet requires some fundamental knowledge of concepts such as Normalized Power (NP), Intensity Factor (IF), and Training Stress Score (TSS) to be able to achieve that training goal. In this week’s lesson we dive into the definition of each of these concepts so that you can fully understand them and how they apply to your training.
Normalized Power takes into account the variability of your power output during a ride, in order to quantify the physiological “cost” that comes from highly variable power output, as compared to steady power output that would result in the same average power. Intensity Factor builds upon Normalized Power, and expresses Normalized Power as a ratio of your FTP. Training Stress Score takes duration and intensity into account in order to quantify the total training load put onto the body, and is used as the foundation for long term training planning.
This week’s lesson was based on Chapter 7 of “Training and Racing with a Power Meter” by Hunter Allen and Andrew Coggan, PhD, titled “Interpreting the Data.”
