Garmin setup for RPE based outside workouts

Training
1

I was reading this blogpost:

and was wondering how others use there garmins for outside workouts without power.

Most of the time I train indoors, and just ride hard of for fun with friends on my MTB, but with the nice weather I want to give the outdoor workout another go, but I don’t have a power meter… I did a recovery ride once and just tried to stay in the right HR zone I used to see when doing recovery indoors.
I do have and OK feeling for HR/RPE on the trainer, but I’m only training with power (kickr core) since 6 months, so matching the power zones to RPE is not a natural thing…

I guess the whole point of TR is to NOT use HR for training, so they won’t include HR zones in there (outside) workouts, but how can I do the most productive and precise (as much as possible anyway) outside workouts with my Garmin edge 530. The one workout I did, the garmin was quite useless with the default setup and the lack of power. Which target fields can you best use on the workout page? How do you guys use your Garmin without a powermeter for outside workouts?

I see the same question in the comments on the garmin setup blog post:

but no real answer.

2

I think it works pretty well for specific kinds of workouts e.g. endurance or sweetspot efforts. I don’t know if it is incorrect but I made the estimation of sweetspot as the same percentage of Threshold heart rate as it is of FTP - so for me HR(t) is apparently about 152 so I go for 88-94% and then round them up for drift i.e. 135 - 145 (and because numbers divisible by 5 I can remember easier). Then I set up the Garmin with the same setup as TR recommend but have HR in there instead of power.
Once things start getting suprathreshold or they have lots of little ramps in them, I will tend to sit indoors for them as I cant seem to cope with the cognitive load at intensity.

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