The Time-Crunched Cyclist Podcast by CTS

Why Data Alone Won’t Make You Faster

• CTS • Season 6 • Episode 306

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Endurance athletes have access to more data than ever before, but data alone doesn’t guarantee better decisions. In this episode, CTS Coach Adam Pulford breaks down the role of Rate of Perceived Effort (RPE) in training and racing, and why internal awareness remains one of the most important skills an athlete can develop.

We cover pacing, training zones, effort calibration, common mistakes athletes make with RPE, and how to integrate subjective feedback with power and heart rate for better long-term performance. Wattage tells you what you did, RPE tells you what it cost.


HOST

Adam Pulford has been a CTS Coach for nearly two decades and holds a B.S. in Exercise Physiology. He's participated in and coached hundreds of athletes for endurance events all around the world.


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Resources:

Why More Data Is Not Better

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Most cyclists think they need better data to improve, more metrics, more precision, more analysis. But performance doesn't come from collecting more numbers. It comes from understanding how hard you're actually working when it matters. You can have all the fancy gadgets in the world, but if you can't make good decisions despite having them, the numbers are worthless. I'm Adam Pulford, head coach of cycling at CTS. Today let's talk about perceived effort and how it may be one of the most valuable pieces of data you could be overlooking. Now, hold on for just one second. Because if you're about to hit skip on this video because you think rate of perceived effort or RPE is a little too old school for you, hear me out. Over the past 20 years, I've seen tons of new tech flood the market. First with power meters of all kinds to go along with our heart rate monitors, then a mix of portable VO2 Max devices, glucose sensors, aerodynamic estimators, instantaneous lactate analyzers, and of course, breathing devices to measure your optimal ventilatory rates during all intensity of exercise. Not to mention all the algos and apps to crunch the numbers and tell you how good or maybe how terrible you are as an athlete today. It's getting real flipping confusing out there for both athletes and coaches, but let me reassure you that just because you can measure it doesn't mean you have to. An RPE remains one of the most valid methods of monitoring exercise intensity amidst all the new new out there in the free market. So let's remind ourselves what perceived effort is, why it matters, and how to use it in training and racing. I'll correct some common mistakes and give you some pro tips along the way with the ultimate goal of making all of the training data more simple and effective for your own training.

What RPE Is And How It Works

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First up, what is RPE? Rate of perceived effort is how hard something feels. The rate of scale is typically 1 to 10, where one is super easy spinning and 10 is a maximum effort. It's not guessing, it's interpreting your body's signals to help guide your pacing and decision making when you're on the bike, and it's useful for when you're planning or prescribing workouts. It's a common language of sorts, but it needs to be calibrated just like a power meter or any other device. The difference is this is an internal gauge. It's between your ears, it's in your brain, and we need awareness of what easy is and what a hard effort is in order to pace well for the race, workout, or the goal of the session. You see, your body doesn't really care what your FTP is, it only cares how much stress you're going through in the moment. Too hard, pace down. Too easy, pick it up. That sort of thing. And your internal calibration matters more than the numbers from the external measuring devices that you're using. However, if you can use the data from the fancy gadgets to help anchor your internal calibration, you can then use external feedback with your internal calibration to ultimately put it all together for your best race performance or long-term training program. Let's talk about why it's valid. RPE integrates everything that your devices can't capture in real time. What I mean by this is uh fatigue, heat, cold, altitude, attitude, fueling status, life stress. It's the force that pulls all this stress together for the here and now. Wattage is what you do. RPE is what it costs you. Power and heart rate are external and are delayed responses. RPE is internal and more immediate. So why does it matter? RPE grounds everything for you as an individual. It teaches athletes how to adjust along the way, not just blindly following numbers. So let's talk about how best to use rate of perceived effort in training.

Matching RPE To Training Zones

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You've seen this chart before, so nothing new under the sun here, but I'll highlight the RPE scale we use here at CTS. This is pretty much the same as Training Peaks, Trainer Road, High North, and several other coaching companies that use to explain how a training zone should feel on a scale of one to ten. So, real quick, for those who may be uh listening and not watching on YouTube, here's what I'm showing. Zone one recovery should equate to around one to two out of ten on this RPE scale. Zone two endurance should feel like a two to five out of ten. Zone three tempo should feel like a five to six. Zone four threshold should feel like a seven to eight out of ten. Zone five, which is VO2 max, should feel like an eight to nine. Zone six, which is anaerobic capacity, that's starting to feel like a nine or maybe even a ten out of ten, depending on how you're prescribing it. And finally, zone seven, this is neuromuscular power or any maximum sprint, that's a 10 out of 10. Some scales may limit zone two endurance to two to four out of 10. CTS and some others bump it up to a five because that's the upper end of zone two and the low end of zone three, which is tempo. And that's all just aerobic. Recall that training zones and ranges, each on the low and high end, they touch each other. And so when you have broad ranges of power and heart rate, they'll have broad ranges of RPE as well. And that's intentional. The harder or more anaerobic you go, typically that zone tightens in both power, heart rate, and RPE until max efforts, where it's just a 10 out of 10. If you need help calibrating your internal RPE system, or heck, maybe you're not even sure your training zones because this chart really isn't aligning with what you're feeling. Maybe you do a one-hour consult with a CTS coach. I've got links to that below. And how it works is you simply schedule a time, have your data and questions ready, and a CTS coach can help get all this dialed in for you. Check it out below. And if you're enjoying this video, be sure to hit that like button

Common RPE Mistakes To Avoid

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too. Now let's go over some common mistakes when you're using RPE during a training session. First one, there's too much ego involved. All too often I see athletes, whether it's in person, like in a Fiz lab setting or at a training camp, or a ride file after the fact on training peaks, they under-report how hard the RPE felt because they think that if they put a lower number, that the coach or whomever is looking at the data will see them as uh more tough or super fit or something ego-based. Don't fool yourself. Otherwise, you'll look like a fool. Reporting lower than normal will only skew data. So be honest with yourself. Report accurately and you'll have more accurate training. And especially in a lab setting or a field test power file, you can typically see when a person cracks, no matter how how they reported the RPE. So it's better to be on the same page and calibrate the RPE accurately, like in the chart that I just showed you. And just leave the ego out of the equation. Second one, thinking RPE is too subjective. I mean, so are race tactics, so are group rides, so is life. You need to learn how to read the subjective changes to achieve the objective goal. So much of racing or taking an FKT or climbing your best is reading your body, the terrain, and then the competition to see where you can push, maybe dial it back, sit in the wheel, then go for it at the right time. Knowing your effort in the moment and how much more you could go is super important in all of this. It's pacing. And pacing is a big subjective art form, which you can use objective numbers to help dial in. But the beautiful winning move is usually done when the rider attacks at the exact right time, not looking at any computer or any device, but being in the moment with a high awareness of self, course, and competitors. Learning your perceived effort should be the first thing that we teach all juniors and beginners. And this is well established as a scientific fact. I've got at least five of the best research journals that I have found showing the validity of RPE as one of the best metrics to use to monitor intensity. So check those out if you want further reading. Finally, in my interviews with Dr. Steven Seiler, who is one of the best of the best, the goat of the GOATs when it comes to exercise physiology research, he refers to RPE being alongside heart rate and power as the holy trinity of monitoring endurance intensity for cyclists. It's these three aspects that give feedback to you in order to keep pushing, dial back, or go full gas. And RPE is the glue that holds it all together. I don't think he and hundreds of top coaches and researchers are wrong in thinking of how important RPE is. So if you're not ranking your perceived effort for your workouts each time, please start doing it. If not, you're

Session RPE Vs Interval RPE

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missing out. Now, one thing I should talk about here is ranking session RPE versus interval RPE, because they are different. It's helpful to clarify how hard the intervals are and felt compared to the ride overall. For example, if I give one of my athletes a two and a half hour ride with four by ten minutes at zone four with five minute recovery between, they may tell me that the intervals felt like a seven or eight, but the ride overall felt like a five to six to their body. The intervals were clearly hard, seven or eight out of ten, and that's where threshold efforts should be, by the way. But because most of the riding was done at zone two endurance, the overall session felt like a five or six. So I do ask about both within a hard workout, and it's valuable to think about interval RPE and total session RPE as two things when you're zooming in and zooming out on the intensity.

When RPE Matters Most

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The key takeaway that I want everyone to learn is this. You should train yourself to know where your efforts are. You should know what zone four feels like, what zone two feels like. You should be able to ride blind from the data and still hit the prescribed power. That's how good you should be. Sure, capture all the data so that we have good past history on it, but challenge yourself by picking an RPE to ride at and see if it matches the corresponding zone. Here's another common mistake: ignoring RPE when it doesn't match power or heart rate. This is when RPE actually matters most. If you're feeling super good but the power is low, maybe the power meter isn't calibrated, or maybe you have some bad data going on. Heart rate straps are notoriously dropping out these days, I have no idea why. And we've all been at the start line when the battery is dead for one of your devices. Shit happens. Don't freak out. Trust your inner gut, trust your RPE. If you've been training properly with the Holy Trinity and something goes away during your workout or on race day, you'll know how to tune into RPE and still have a great day out there. But you need to practice with accurately calibrated internal effort to have full confidence in this. One last mistake I see is only using RPE when you're tired. Many athletes don't report how good they feel day to day on normal training sessions, but as soon as they're tired or as soon as they're sick, here comes the bad session, RPE rankings. Get into good habits of ranking RPE on your good days as well as your bad days, because this helps tell the full story of the training. I've had athletes wanting to die a thousand deaths during a hard race. They get to the end, don't even look at the data, they just type in comments about how they wanted to barf, quit, and die the whole day. When I check the data, they sometimes are hitting PRs across the board, all-time peak powers. So I show them that data, and when they're feeling like a nine to ten out of 10 or doing a max effort, yeah, it hurts like hell. But you're pumping out the best power and the highest heart rate of all time. And that's why you're going places in your body that you've never been before, and of course it's going to hurt. But that's why we captured the data, and that's why we tried to capture the rate of perceived effort as well. This wasn't a bad day, even though you felt bad. You gave it your all. And sometimes that's what it takes. Sometimes you hit peak numbers and the rate of perceived effort is low. You're in the flow the whole time, and it's like you just floated right up to the finish line and took the win. Report that too, because it's super important when to have that subjective feeling in there. This is the qualitative data to measure, whereas the power and the heart rate and some of this other stuff is the quantitative data. When you consistently report your rate of perceived effort in both fresh and fatigued states, this creates a process of increasing more awareness of your body, feeling your body in every effort, and it's wildly beneficial for knowing when and how hard to pace at every intensity. Finally, the goal here is not to replace your power meter or your heart rate monitor. The goal is to be so good at knowing

The Go Blind Interval Challenge

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where you're at in your effort that you don't need to rely upon those devices. Sure, check in every so often, but get away from the screen and feel the effort more. This will build a ton of confidence and awareness for the next group ride, race, or heaven forbid, the next time your power meter cuts out. So here's your challenge. Next time you're doing an interval workout, pick one of the intervals and go blind. Don't look at the power or the heart rate, just use rate of perceived effort. See if you nail it. Or maybe you have some work to do in dialing in your perceived effort. Tell me about it in the comments below, and I'm actually curious how many people have it dialed. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe to the CTS channel for all things endurance coaching, training, and racing related so you don't miss any of the content that we're putting out there. And if you want another set of eyes on your training to help out, remember we do consults as well as monthly coaching. That's it for today. Hope you liked it. See you back here for the next one soon.

Head Shot

Adam Pulford

Host