Garmin Screens - Power?

JesseD

Just had a power meter fitted to my bike and synced up to my Garmin Edge 510, I have started to play about trying to update my screens to show power etc but there are so many different fields you can add that it got me wondering what is actually useful when you ride?

On screen 1 I have

Elapsed Time
Speed
Distance
Hear Rate
cadence
Power 3s
Time of Day (so I am not home late)

Screen 2 has:

Average Power
Normalised Power
Max Power
AVG Heart rate
Average Speed
Temp
Gradient

What do you lot have on yours?

kingstongraham

Screen 1:
3s Power
Speed

That's on about 90% of the time. I should get rid of speed from it probably.

I have another screen with average lap power and lap time, cadence, plus a couple of others, then a "whole ride" one with normalised power, time of day, battery remaining etc etc but there's too much on there to make it possible to just glance at.

sloppyschleckonds

Gradient, 10s power

paul_onabike

Screen 1
3 secs power and current heart rate.

Only having 2 fields makes it easy to follow when riding, and these are the two most relevant to me.

For the rest, I view the summary at the end of the ride.

thegreatdivide

Speed, 3 sec power, cadence, ride time.

gethinceri

Cadence, power 3secs, heart rate.

StillGoing

3s power, cadence, speed. I also downloaded a power widget for a better screen display.

supermurph09

Screen 1:

3s power, av power, speed, distance, av speed, lap time

Screen 2:

Time , TSS, elevation gained, last lap power

Screen 3:

If I'm racing (TT)

3s power, av power, speed, distance,

You'll find what works best for you as you use it more, some people think 3s power is too jumpy others will want cadence and all manner of things. I may adapt slightly depending on what I'm doing, for example if I'm doing intervals on the turbo I'll have lap time, lap power, 3s power maybe.

thomasmorris

Page 1: general riding
- 3sec power ( i could put 10 sec here, but i find 3 sec a good 'what am I doing right now')
- HR
- Speed (not sure why I have this, but it does interest me)
- Time of day (from this and distance you can quickly work out other stuff without cluttering the primary screen)
- Distance

Page 2: TTs / intervals
- 10sec power
- Lap Power (over an interval or TT i think this gives the most realistic value of my performance)
- Lap time (I take this off if I know the course well)

Page 3: general interest ride stats
- av speed
- av HR (coupled with NP give a good idea of how hard the ride has been, alos nice to know ration of HR to NP).
- av cadence
- av balance (i had an injury and imbalance so like to keep a tab on this)
- calories (sometimes altitude gain if on a hilly ride)
- temperature
- Normalised Power (over a long ride this gives a better idea of 'how hard' than just average power).
- riding time

I don't know anyone who uses 1 sec power. 3 sec power i find pretty good for 'what power am i doing right now'. However, I still find it fluctuates a bit too much for pacing and I end up over compensating. I started using 10 sec power and that seems better.

I may try 30 second power for intervals over the winter and see how I get on.

JesseD

Thanks for the responses all.

I rode with it last night and found that I had way too much info on screen 1 to take it all in and i was in a constant battle with myself between keeping a high cadence, staying in zone 2/3 and wanting to see how much power I can put out.

I have been lent Joe Friel's "The Power Meter Handbook" to read to try to make a bit more sense of it, plus when i get my winter programme through from the guy who is coaching me I am hoping that it makes it easier to structure my training properly and also gauge my improvements better.

Also I found last night that I constantly wanted to give it a full beans sprint just to see what max power I could generate, luckily I refrained as I was riding in a group and probably would have got abused for it quite a bit.

mugensi

Speed
Ride time
Average speed
HRM
Cadence
Time of Day
Total Ascent

chris_bass

I have basically every number possible across as many screens as possible!

I'm an analyst by trade so it is a bit of an occupational hazard! I like numbers and data (i'm cool, right?!)

You don't have to look at all the numbers so why restrict? if you order them logically and you know where they are then just look at the ones you want to at the time. You can always ignore numbers that are there but can't see numbers that are not!

charlie_potatoes

As an aside if you go to www.fitfiletools.com then you can tweek your power up by varying amounts. This saves the hassle of all the hard training and drugs etc.