hi there. Would be great to have a feature in which one could specify a target heart rate (or range) and the power output is adjusted accordingly. One related feature could be a ‘ramp up’ period, where you can specify starting watts, a power increase amount per unit time to get to the heart rate if power needs to be increased initially. So you might start out at 60bpm and want to ride for 25 minutes at 145bpm - so you specify a starting watts of 100, 10% increase in FTP watts per minute to get to 145 bpm initially, then 25 minutes at 145 bpm. Thanks for considering. Cheers Anthony
Thanks Anthony, As I said via email, I love this request. I am not sure how to make it perfect in our editor, but it would be nice to make it simple so you can switch from power targets to HR targets
In this example it is showing 80% of your threshold HR instead of specific BPM. I know that is not as convient but would that work for you?
I have to think about it longer to see if I can think of a way to improve the workout creation process but maintain our simplicty.
Just signed in to back up this request. I’d love to see training mode, where you set a heart rate target, so that the target power is automatically steered by this heart rate.
It’s funny because I am a huge fan of training with HR yet we put very little investment into our HR solutions. We are moving in that direction now. Meaning we are adding more HR features to the web site, once we get a few other things done maybe we can move to this. I am currious if you or anyone else interested in this feature plan to only use it for Z1 or Z2 work or similar. I am not sure what to do about trying to control it on the harder efforts. It’s very similar to power match feature which is complicated to get right but for low intensity efforts it should be not so difficult.
@MedTechCD I bet you have good ideas on how this should work. Not talking about FatMaxer HRV… but just power match to HR and what you think the algorythm should look like.
Intuitively my first reaction would be twofold:
- It will be very difficult to adjust power with the purpose of remaining in a small HR zone. HR easily has artefacts. Stand up on your pedals to reseat your bum, take your water bottle to drink, burp, have a deep breath, etc. will all have an impact on your HR while it should not influence resistance because those are short HR changes that have nothing to do with your physiological response on the workout. So you should already look at longer averages or an integrated/differentiated signal. That on its turn will cause problems when you have a step from one interval to another.
- It seems like overcomplicating things. I’m absolutely not against HR training, on the contrary. But I think we all agree that HR targets should only be used for longer steady state work. It’s not that difficult to match a Power zone with a HR zone for that kind of work. So just set your Power target and analyze the HR post workout. There can be a lot of information gathered from steady state workouts to check if you’re improving. The P/HR ratio for different zones or part of zones is a very nice metric. But there is also the decoupling, maybe even sensitive to smaller changes. How much is the decoupling if I ride 1 hour at xW? And how much bigger is the decoupling if I ride the same power target for 2 hours? Am I up to that kind of power for that time… These 2 metrics can give you some very good insight on how much you improve for steady state work at low Z2 to high Z3 work. And it’s easy to do like that, by targeting Power (external load) and measuring HR (internal load). So why would you want to achieve the same thing by targeting HR and measuring Power? It’s something much more difficult to achieve and it isn’t giving you anymore information.
I do all my Low Intensity work indirectly based on HR by setting power targets that get me in the correct HR zone. Mostly “below AeT”. When I see that my HR dropped 2-3 bpm for the same workout, I add a couple of Watts to the target and get on. When I see that decoupling over a 1 hour AeT workout drops below 3%, I add 1 or 2 beats to what I consider my AeT HR and check if decoupling raises again to about 5%. (This is based on the AeT method of uphill athlete)
All my High Intensity work (not much 
) is based on the Power Distribution Curve and has Power Targets without paying much attention to HR.
I never do dedicated FTP tests. I use Xert’s “What’s my FTP “ IQ field or the eFTP from Intervals to set an FTP that is somewhat in the ballpark. Not because I want to know my FTP but because a fair estimate of FTP is mandatory to get the load and the PMC chart correct.
Is that making sense?
Will do some more thinking about the HR regulated workout and maybe I’ll change my mind. The above is just some “thinking out loud” so anybody is welcome to add his opinion on the subject and totally disagree with me.
I think the main reason is to watch shows and just pedal and forget 
But I partically feel like you especially that it would be hard to keep someone in a tight zone.
I have an idea here. I believe the main case is that people want to do Zone 1, 2 or in more rare cases Zone 3 HR targets. Once you have done of few of these you realize usually this requires just small adjustments as you go. This is very easy for a human but less easy from a programming standpoint because there can be a lot of different use cases.
What if you were in HR mode and it would get a specific beep when you were out of range and another different specific beep when you were in range. I know Polar watches allow this I assume Garmin does too, so a very similar feature to this? Then you can watch a movie or zone out in your low zone workouts and get notified when you need to make an adjustment.
Having a discussion about this with one user. I don’t want to do automatic “interval HR” workouts as I think they are too problematic for a wide user base. I am wondering how many people would be just satisfied with automatic heart rate based workouts that were pre-defined? Zone 1, Zone 2, Zone 3, Zone 4? You could shorten or legthen while riding and you could increase or decrease intensity with + - This way you could just ride and it would automatically adjust the intensity to your workout.
It would look like this.
I’ve been using my HR Based Structured workout for some time now. In Fact, it’s all I’ve been using. (There a post in intervals.icu on this feature)
I’ve changed the algorithm to improve the responsiveness and while it won’t do things like 30s on 30s off type intervals (due to HR Lag), anything that’s like > 2mins should be enough time for the app to adjust the power to get the HR in line.
I suspect you’re right as It’s a niche need and would likely generate more user queries
Ok finally this feature is going into beta now.