Monday, January 07, 2019

Training with power without power

I'm trying out a couple of new things for my workouts this year.

One of them is to stop looking at power numbers.

I've been training with a power meter for over 10 years now. While it has been a great aid I am concerned that it may also be a limiter.

I have developed a Pavlovian reaction to seeing certain numbers on my Garmin..

2xx is easy
3xx is hard
4xx is painful

It may be that my body really does change dramatically when I hit 300W but I don't really think it does. Rather I think it's my mind that's the issue.

The single biggest piece of evidence for this is a 20 minute test I did a couple of years ago.

I recorded an ATB of 346W but the key thing was the way I did this. I did a Sufferfest workout (Hell hath no fury) and set my "FTP" to 500W or so. I then set the workout level to around 65% and nudged this up by 1% several times through the workout if I felt OK.

So I ended up riding power blind. My eyes were seeing numbers that it associated with long steady workouts so my brain didn't get stressed out by seeing numbers it associated with VO2 efforts.

I didn't really build on this experience last year but plan to this. 

I'll be using Connect IQ to display power level data in a new, neutral way so I never see the raw numbers and have to ride more on RPE.





 

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