Cycling Computer Lies: How Numbers Can Hurt Your Training
- A bicycle computer is splendid: you see wattages, heart rate, pace, everything neatly listed.
- On paper you can drive perfectly within your zones and still come home feeling like you've pushed a truck.
- RPE is simply put: how heavy does this feel on a scale of 1 to 10? It sounds soft, but it is actually a skill, you learn to...
Why your cycling computer sometimes makes you train worse
Table of Contents
A bicycle computer is splendid: you see wattages, heart rate, pace, everything neatly listed. Only, those numbers have one annoying feature: they act as if you have the same body today as you did yesterday. While your body is also just a human being, with sleep deprivation, stress, a full working day and that one sandwich that turned out to be a bad idea.
The pitfall of ‘following your numbers carefully’
On paper you can drive perfectly within your zones and still come home feeling like you’ve pushed a truck. That especially happens when you cycle in real life, with wind, cold, heat, traffic lights and that group that suddenly decides it’s time for a mini escape. Your bike computer only sees the output, but often misses why it feels so heavy.
RPE is simply put: how heavy does this feel on a scale of 1 to 10? It sounds soft, but it is actually a skill, you learn to interpret your own signals. Breathing, burning legs, cadence that suddenly becomes syrupy, and also your mental state, everything counts.
training by feeling is not vague, it is calibrating
The great thing is: the more often you train by feeling, the better you become at estimating your real limit. Research into ‘interoception’ shows that people who recognize internal signals better can also dose more intelligently. In practice, this means: less stupidly pushing over your limit on bad days, and pushing through on days when you are stronger than your numbers suggest.