Had a great
Personal Session on Tuesday with Sarah Caylor. She came by for some supervised indoor intervals. We worked on using all the metrics she has available to her to maximize her intervals, and time, while riding.
Too often we see clients who are really motivated to train but for whatever reason don't take the extra couple minutes to .make sure they are using their time effectively and working towards the goals they would like to see come about in the next few monts. Things often overlooked include:
1) Decide/Read what to do in a given workout ... ie. is there a certain cadence to maintain or a workload that needs to be kept ??
2) Take an interest in why they are doing something, whether they are programming it or have someone else doing the prescription. Learning why one would decide to do a couple of 20min threshold intervals tends to help motivate.
2) Use the metrics available, including any or all of speed/hr/power/RPE/cadence/Breathing rate, to keep efforts high quality, in target workload and purposeful. Using only HR or only power can lead to efforts that either aren't steady or that are too hard/too easy on a given day, using the data from all those screens helps maximize the time you have to train.
3) Direct their efforts towards a goal, such as improving a physiological limiter or technical limiter. Deciding what to focus on in a given ride is huge. If this is done every day the cumulative effects are much better then many workouts done with 50 or 60% accuracy/adherence.

Sarah and I worked on using her Speed and Cadence to keep some shorter intervals at the intensity we wanted. After her first interval we were able to decide what Effort would produce the desired Heart rate response, by noting what speed and cadence she was riding at. We also had Wattage as backup/confirmation but used the speed/cadence as that is what she has at home.
The result ... 1.5hrs of steady work, some data we can use as a baseline to make sure things are going well and hopefully many more short but effective indoor sessions to bring forth the best results we can for 2009.