Calibrating Your Inner Power Meter: How to Train Better with RPE

Summary
In this episode, Coach Dave  discusses the importance of calibrating your inner power meter by pairing your perception of effort with objective metrics like power, heart rate, and pace. He emphasizes the need to tune into how different sensations feel and not blindly follow the numbers on your devices. Dave explains the three energy systems our bodies use and how they work together during different intensities. He also challenges the idea of false precision in training and encourages athletes to focus on effort and how their body feels rather than getting fixated on specific numbers.

Takeaways

• Pair your perception of effort with objective metrics to get more accurate information about your training.
• Tune into how different sensations feel to account for variability in devices and conditions.
• Understand the three energy systems and how they work together during different intensities.
• Training is not as precise as it may seem, so focus on effort and how your body feels rather than getting fixated on specific numbers.
• Pay attention to your breathing and how your legs feel to gauge the intensity of your workouts.

Transcript

Dave S (00:02.251)
Hey everybody, welcome back to Training Babble. I'm your host Dave Schell and today we are going to talk about how to calibrate your inner power meter. And so what am I talking about when I talk about calibrating your inner power meter? I am talking about pairing your perception of effort or how things feel with what you're seeing on your bike computer, whether we're talking about power or heart rate or pace. And ultimately we would want

two of those things. So if we have multiple data channels such as power and heart rate and we pair that with how we feel, the information we're gonna get is going to be that much more powerful and that much more.

Dave S (00:47.273)
informative.

Dave S (00:51.273)
So when I talk about these things, I'm in no way saying that we should get rid of all our devices and stop using power or things like that. In fact, I'm a huge data nerd and all the athletes I work with, I want them to have a power meter. I want them to wear a heart rate monitor. But I find what we work on in the beginning a lot of times is just really getting them to tune in to how different sensations feel.

And the reason for this is that there's a lot of variability between these devices. So if we're talking about a power meter, there might be a difference between your indoor power and your outdoor power. Or if you've got power meters on multiple bikes, you might be getting different numbers between the bikes. And even with the same power meter, there's just day -to -day variability. And so I think it's really important to tune into how certain efforts should feel so that we're not just blindly following whatever the power.

or whatever the training says that day. Same thing with heart rate. Heart rate can be influenced by heat, it can be influenced by dehydration, it can be influenced by caffeine, sleep, stress, lots of different things. And so if we were to just blindly follow that, then sometimes we can get ourselves into trouble. And then I guess as a last example here, if you're a runner and you're using pace as your metric to guide your training, well, if you're

your pace on the track is going to be different than the pace on the road and going to be different than the pace if you're running on the trail. And so being able to use your perception of effort in conjunction with those other objective metrics is really going to help you dial in your training. So when I talk about rate of perceived effort or RPE, what is it?

Well, it started a long time ago with a guy named Borg. He came up with a 20 point system that was kind of confusing, but I believe it was supposed to line up with heart rate at different efforts. And it worked pretty well, let's say for 80 % of the people. But over time, people simplified that down to a 10 point system. And that might be the one that you're more familiar with. But I don't even think it has to be that complicated. I think we could really...

Dave S (03:16.939)
divvy up our training into moderate, hard, and very hard. And it really is just kind of that simple. And I think the really nice thing about this is that it correlates with our energy systems. all of our bodies have three energy systems that use to feel all the work that we do. And so we've got the ATP PCR system.

which is energy stored in the muscle and just used for very hard efforts up to a few seconds. You've got your glycolytic system, which you might have heard called the anaerobic system, which uses carbohydrate to fuel high intensity, moderate duration efforts up to about 90 seconds. And then you've got your aerobic system, which we're probably all familiar with, which essentially fuels everything from 90 seconds and beyond.

Now one thing I do want to say is that these energy systems don't work in isolation with each other. They're always working together. They're just working in different proportions depending on the intensity and the demand of fuel or the demand of energy that our body needs. And so if you're familiar, if you use TrainingPeaks or another training platform and you are familiar with the power curve,

there's an inverse time intensity relationship. And so on the left hand side, on the vertical axis, that would be intensity. And then on the horizontal axis would be time. And we know if we've been training for any amount of time whatsoever, that you can only go so hard for so long. So if I, as your coach told you that I wanted you to go as hard as you could,

You'd probably only be able to do it for 10 to 15 seconds before you felt a huge fall off. If I told you that I wanted you to go hard, maybe you could do that for 10 to 20 minutes. And then if I told you I wanted you to go at your all -day pace, that's something you could do for hours. And so really thinking about that and how it lines up with our energy systems and what we're trying to do is...

Dave S (05:41.149)
we can use this perception of effort and how hard we can go to kind of tie it in with what we're trying to accomplish that day. Now I'm sure that everybody's familiar with zones and if you've been training with power, you've heard of zone one, zone two, zone three, and really that's just a way to divide these three zones into smaller zones so that we can be more precise. But really our body is just not that

it just doesn't function that way. It doesn't really know the difference between a few watts. It doesn't know the difference between these energy systems within a few percent. And so it's always just going to, based on the work we're doing, it's going to be using a combination of energy systems. And yes, we might be targeting one more than the other, but training's just not that precise. So this is all a long way for me to say.

that I think what's happened with the advent of smart trainers and more people have power meters than ever.

Training has gotten into this era of false precision. And I see it all the times if somebody comes to me and they've been using something like TrainerRoad or if they've been using something like Zwift, people want to use erg mode. And you look at some of these workouts and let's say it's an endurance workout or a zone two workout and it has you doing three minutes at 74 % and then two minutes at 76 % of functional threshold power. And then another

one minute at 78 % and then back down, your body doesn't really know the difference. It's all happening within that first zone that we talked about, that first energy system. And so it doesn't matter if it's 3 % higher or 4 % or 2 % lower. All that matters is that you're within the ballpark. And so that's where this perception of effort comes in, is if you're supposed to be doing an endurance ride,

Dave S (07:51.999)
and you get into it and it feels too hard, if it feels like something you couldn't sustain for a very long time, if it doesn't feel like not too hard, not too easy, just right, then chances are on that day your body's working harder for those watts or the power meter's off or the trainer's off and that's fine. You should be able to adjust that. Same thing with threshold efforts and I think this is probably one of the biggest

ways that we can use this is a lot of times people will set their functional threshold power off of a 20 minute test. And so you do this 20 minute test and then you take 95 % of that and you say, okay, my new functional threshold power is 262 watts.

And then you go and you try to do some intervals and you're using erg mode and you try to, let's say you try to do three times 10 at two 62. And the first one, you barely get through to the end of it. The second one, you're barely hanging on and you're doing this in erg mode and your cadence is falling and falling and falling. And then for the last one, you get to the downward spiral where you can barely turn the pedals over because it's gotten too hard. And so in this

false precision. How I would have had you do this is take off ergmode first and foremost. I hate ergmode and I've talked about it at length about why I don't like it, but so take it off so that we can be flexible within the range. And as we're doing this threshold work, one, I would say

your threshold is not 262 watts. It's more likely 245 to 260. It's this gray area. It's this big like smear where threshold or the transition lies somewhere in there. But it's not down to a single watt. And so it doesn't matter when you're doing these intervals if it's at 250 watts or 255 watts or 265 watts. What matters is that you're at a spot that feels hard.

Dave S (10:02.571)
but sustainable and that you can repeat it multiple times. What we're looking for with threshold work is you want to be right beneath that red line. We're just beneath it. It's hard, but you can keep doing it. But if you know, if you go over it, you're on borrowed time, shit's going to get real real quick and you're going to have to quit. So again, we don't like, you don't even need to do these tests a lot of times. I don't think it's like.

As you become more experienced as an athlete, you can just do four times 10 and see what you could do. What's sustainable? What's hard and sustainable that you can repeat four times 10 minutes? That's probably pretty close to your threshold. And then when we get into work above threshold, again, we can only maintain it for a few minutes, you know, depending on how hard you're going, it's gonna be like three to eight minutes. And so,

rather than having this arbitrary percentage of FTP, if you're trying to do VO2 work or above threshold work, do six times three minutes or eight times three minutes and just see, use the third one as kind of your baseline. So the first one might be a bit too hard, the second one's still a bit too hard, and then by the third one, you're kind of figuring out what's sustainable and repeatable. And so it doesn't matter.

If it's 15 watts higher or 15 watts lower than this percentage, what matters is that you're doing the work and you're accumulating time at that intensity. So how can you start to calibrate this? How can you put these things into practice? I think the big things, and this is the thing I encourage most with my athletes, is rather than being beholden to a number. So this is...

This is probably one of my biggest gripes with things like the workout builder and training peaks and Zwift and TrainerRoad is that training is always a range. So we call these things zones. The reason they're zones is because they're a big range that you can be at the bottom of, you can be at the middle, you can be at the top, and it's gonna fluctuate from day to day or even within a workout. And so when you're doing these workouts,

Dave S (12:23.657)
if you're doing it in a platform like Zwift or something like that, it's only gonna show you one number. And then it's gonna scream at you like, you're too high, too low, too high, too low. Turn that off, turn off the erg mode and just know that like as long as you're within the range, it's going to, you're accomplishing what you're after. And so rather than being beholden to that number,

try to find the effort and then see where does my power line up, where does my heart rate line up when I'm doing these efforts. How does it feel? What's my breathing doing? How do my legs feel? Are my legs burning or does it feel okay? It feels like they're working but I could do this for a long time. These are gonna help to clue you in if you're in the right zone or not. And so this is another thing I do with my athletes a lot is

really just asking about how is your breathing? Could you have a conversation? How are the legs? Do you think you could have done one more interval? Things like that. And so let's say you're doing an endurance ride. This will be my takeaway because I feel like I'm just talking in circles at this point. But let's say, let's kind of bring everything together. If you're doing an endurance ride. So this would be zone one in a three zone model, or this would be zone two that we've heard so much about.

I just want to call it an endurance ride. How should an endurance ride feel? It should feel like your all -day pace. It's not like you're noodling along doing nothing. You're still pedaling with a purpose, but you're not killing yourself. It's something that would feel maybe too easy the first hour of a ride, but after five or six hours, it's going to take an effort to maintain that same pace. And so as you're doing your endurance rides, paying attention to your breathing, are you breathing heavily?

Or is it kind of light and rhythmic? Could you have a conversation if you were riding with somebody? How do your legs feel? If they're burning, it's probably not an endurance ride. You're probably pushing it a bit too hard. And if it's not going, and you would know at that point, it's not gonna be sustainable. Okay, so endurance rides, conversational pace, breathing is light and rhythmic, legs are not burning. When we get into tempo and threshold rides or sweet spot,

Dave S (14:45.559)
Lots of names for that zone two type effort. How should those feel? Okay, at this point, our breathing is starting to pick up a little bit. So rather than being light and rhythmic, it's probably gonna be a little bit more labored, but not horribly so. Conversation is becoming a little bit more difficult. Your legs are burning, but it's like an effort that like, okay, I could probably do this for like 30 to 60 minutes if I really had to, you know? But it's not comfortable. You're not having fun doing it.

So that would be your threshold effort. And then when you get above threshold, now we're getting to the point where breathing is very heavy. It's starting to get ragged. Your legs are burning like crazy. You want it to stop. I always say that at this point is where the clock stops. Like time just stops moving and it's the longest, if we're saying three minutes, it's the longest three minutes of your life because it just seems like time stops moving and you just want it to end. And then once we get

less than kind of three minutes at this point, it's just like, I would say it's max. It's like, what can you do? You know? And it's gonna sort itself out. And the last thing I'll say about this is I think there's a lot of variability with efforts kind of less than three minutes. And so if we're trying to come up with targets for like sprinting or like 30 30s and stuff like that, it's like,

at that point, like it's just how hard you can go and the body's gonna sort itself out. And so you might start too hard and after a few reps, you're gonna find out what's repeatable and what you can do. And so I wouldn't be so beholden to whatever that target is that day. Some days it's gonna be high, some days it's gonna be low. It's just gonna depend on how fresh you are, how rested you are, things like that. so big takeaway, final takeaway here is that training is not as precise as

we would have you believe when we're putting out these structured workouts and putting out these articles and these percentages and everything else, it's all kind of a gray area. And as long as we're operating within the ballpark, we're probably accomplishing what we're after. And so I would implore you to really tune in to what your body's telling you, pay attention to your breath, pay attention to how your legs feel, and then see what numbers that lines up with on your power meter, on your heart rate, on your pace, et cetera.

Dave S (17:12.392)
That's it for me today. There is a new feature if you want to send a text and get in touch I would love to hear from you. You should just be able to click the link wherever you're listening to a podcast or you can hit me up on Instagram at Kaizen Endurance. Thanks again for listening and until next time, take care.