Subject: RE: Explain power, in normal terms? Simply put, a power meter is a dyno for your bike. In automobiles, power is measured in horsepower On bikes, it's measured in watts or joules per second. In reality, these are just different units for measuring work per unit time. using simple conversion factors, you can convert your bike power numbers to horse power, just know that they will be much less impressive seeming numbers. So power numbers on a bike are simply your 'horsepower' numbers for your bike's engine. depending on what gear you are in, what cadence you're pushing, and what sort of grade you're riding on, among other factors, you can expect drastically different speeds at the same power. The usefulness of power is that no matter what your speed, cadence, or gear, at a given power you are always expending the same amount of energy and therefor giving the same amount of effort, whether you are climbing a monster hill or burning up the asphalt on a flat. In fact, from your power numbers, with a few conversion factors and the time spent riding, you can directly convert to calories of energy expended for a given effort. |