I test bikes for a living and I never use a power meter: Here’s why you shouldn’t either

You’d be right in thinking that, as professional cycling tech journalists, we have access to the best equipment money can buy. I’ve tested more of the best road bikes than I care to mention, as well as wearing the latest clothing, cycling shoes, aero helmets, and the freshest shades on the market. It may also surprise you to know that, despite all this, cycling tech journalists aren’t all actually using the best tech themselves. 

Take my colleague Tom for instance. He could have enough sealant to fill a bathtub, and we have a pile of tubeless tyres in the office as high as a car, and yet he chooses to use inner tubes on his road bikes. I don’t agree with him, but I can see his reasoning. For my part, despite having the best power meters available to me, either on test bikes that come with them fitted as stock, or as aftermarket parts I have never used them, and unless someone can convince me otherwise I probably never will. 

This is inevitably going to stir the pot, and I can already feel the comments section swelling below me, but if you already have one and are happily using it then please continue to do so. I’m just going to outline why, for me, they just aren’t worth it. My hope is that if someone is on the fence about purchasing one and reads this, and decides against it, I’ve just saved them a wedge of cash. 

The upgrade treadmill, and why it’s healthy to hop off

I think a lot of people buy a power meter, or purchase a bike that comes with one, because they feel they should, and that isn’t a good reason to do anything quite frankly. Cycling is a beautifully upgrade-heavy sport, with everything from carbon headset spacers through to paying for wind tunnel access promising to give you free speed. 

The general flow chart of upgrades is, roughly speaking, as follows: Alloy road bike, cycling computer, heart rate monitor, carbon road bike, aero helmet and clothing, aero wheels, power meter. It is for many people the final step in becoming a totally serious cyclist, and for a great many of you reading this it is actually probably going to make you faster - providing you use it properly - than a lot of the previous stops on the upgrade pathway. 

But you don’t have to follow the flowchart to completion. Our Associate Editor, Josh, uses power data so effectively I’m convinced he sees the world like the opening credits of The Matrix, in addition to optimising his diet, sleep, and everything else his Whoop tells him can be tweaked. He does this because he races, and uses power as a tool to target his training in the most effective way possible. 

I don’t race. I have raced a few years of Cyclocross, but I probably won't race again. I love riding bikes, more than just about anything, but my primary goal is enjoying riding my bike. A power meter adds nothing to my levels of enjoyment besides the curiosity of ‘big number go up’. 

The times I have dabbled, either when I’m forced to ride indoors, or out of curiosity on a test bike, it’s simply provided another number against which I can judge myself. I have been in situations before in my riding career where I’ve come home from a wonderful, hard ride and convinced myself I’ve had a bad time because my stats weren’t what I was hoping for, and power is just another stat to me. 

A heart rate monitor is probably just as good for most people

There’s a meme that I have come across that’s actually been extremely liberating. I cannot find it, but effectively it is a bell curve graph. At both extremes, high and low, it says ‘ride your bike as much as you can and eat plenty of sugar’, and in the centre is a beleaguered cyclists, out of his mind with worry because he didn’t hit his carbs per hour, his coefficient of drag isn’t ideal, and his FTP needs to be higher. 

I don’t train. At all. I ride my bike as much as I can, and I eat plenty of sugar. It’s made me pretty rapid. Could I be faster if I train properly using power? Absolutely, but I honestly think it would sap the joy out of the whole experience. 

I do wear a heart rate monitor almost all the time though, which may sound counter intuitive. A power meter does everything a heart rate monitor does, but better, right? Yes, in terms of measuring one’s efforts, pacing a climb, sticking in zone two, all can be done better (with a proper understanding of power data) with a power meter. 

I don’t really use a heart rate monitor for any of that though. It tells me when I’m absolutely redlining up a climb, at which point I back off or not as the situation dictates, and it also is a good measure of when I’ve been overcooking it over the course of a few weeks to avoid ‘overtraining’. From my days racing cyclocross I know I can sit at 180bpm for an hour, with a few excursions to 185 and that's enough knowledge to pace myself as and when necessary, as well as a decade of going off rate of perceived exertion. 

On the rare occasion I use it to actually pace myself it’s perfectly adequate. It’s been fine for big alpine climbs, and it’s been fine for trying to stay in Zone 2 for a 200km trundle. Just because it isn’t the pinnacle doesn’t mean it doesn’t work at all and if you aren’t going all in on training, optimising your diet, sleep… then a heart rate monitor is probably all you need. If you’re just riding your bike as much as you can and eating plenty of sugar then I’d say just stick with a heart rate monitor. 

This leads me to the next point…

Power meters are expensive

Taking a straw poll of our guides to the best power meters versus the best heart rate monitors there’s a pretty large gulf in terms of price. If you take something like the Garmin HRM-Pro Plus, which retails for about £120/$130, you could buy three or four of them for the price of a lower-tier, single-sided power meter like a 4iiii left crank model, which retails at around £400/$400 depending on the groupset-tier it’s hitting. 

With the cost of living spiralling out of control, and the price of all other bike stuff also going through the roof, saving yourself even $400 is a lot but at the other extreme, comparing a value-oriented strap like the Polar H9 versus a set of SRM X-Power road pedals for dual-sided data you’re looking at a saving of over $1,000. A grand. One thousand dollars. You better be sure you want that extra data field, and you better be sure you’re going to use it for that amount of money. It’s a very expensive curiosity if you’re on the fence. 

More than just the initial outlay, the replacement cost is also higher. Damage your heart rate monitor and it’s annoying but not going to ruin your week, but write off a power meter and you’ll be eating beans for months. 

Finally, do you have more than one bike? Yes, pedals can easily be swapped but if you go for crank-based then you’re only getting use out of it some of the time. Road and gravel, or MTB? Then you’ll need one for each I suspect. 

Do you need accuracy?

The best power meters, and the best indoor trainers as it happens, boast accuracies of +/-1%. For my purposes, I don’t need that. I need a general vibe, and would probably be perfectly well served with a simple half-moon dial that ranged from ‘you’re at the cafe’ through ‘lovely trundle’, ‘ticking along’, and ‘giving it some’, before finally landing on ‘if you keep this up you’re going to be sick and your teeth will start tingling’. 

If you need to know exactly what power you’re doing then more power to you, but I’d also lay some money down on the table and bet that consistency and reliability are more valuable than absolute accuracy. If you do an FTP test and your power meter tells you your FTP is one million billion trillion watts, and scales accordingly, it’s still going to be a valuable training tool, though you may need the screen size of the Wahoo Elemnt Ace to fit the numbers in. Likewise, if it turns out that your brand new power meter tells you your FTP is 15 you may be pretty glum, but if it’s consistent you can still train properly with it even if your actual FTP is a bigger number. 

A handful of other grievances

This is the ‘one more thing’ part of this article. There are a few more things I simply can’t be doing with when it comes to power measurement.

First up, it’s another thing to charge. Yes, I’m absolutely on board with electronic shifting, and yes I know that my heart rate strap also needs charging, but when even budget bands like the Garmin HRM-Dual have a battery life of three and a half years the battery life is effectively infinite in my eyes, until it dies, in which case it’s off to Big Asda for another coin cell. 

More than battery life, and having to plug another power umbilical into what should by rights be a relatively simple machine, I want as little faff as possible when I head out the door and ride. Things have come a long way from having to calibrate the power meter every ride (which I’m reliably informed takes no more than a couple of minutes, which is a couple of minutes too long), but if there’s an option to forget to do so I will (and have, pretty often, making the power meter something akin to a random number generator). 

Lastly, and this is subjective, I think power meters are generally ugly additions to a bike, in much the same way as the old under-stem Di2 junction box was. Pedal-based systems often have weird bulbous axles, and spider-based systems can make a beautiful crankset look ungainly. If you’re serious about speed then aesthetics shouldn’t matter, but I love bikes and I want them to look their best. 

If heart rate is good enough for Tadej Pogačar…

The pros, with very few exceptions, train with power, but in an interview ahead of the World Championships in Zurich (a race which he famously won), Tadej Pogačar revealed that he could quite easily train just using heart rate data:

"I've been training with heart rate monitors since I'm I don't know, 12 years old," Pogacar revealed to Peter Attia of The Drive Podcast "So I would say, I know how my heart rate responds when I'm tired or when I'm good. So, yeah, I could go by heart rate only, but it's always good to compare heart rate to power, but power meters are not so reliable these days."

Adding further clarification the Slovenian said, "You always need to be careful with the temperatures of the outside, the calibration, everything. And yeah, sometimes can be off. You need to be careful about this."

If the best cyclist in the world isn’t convinced on the merits of power meters versus heart rate monitors then maybe you could manage without a power meter too.