Workout Pacing/Structure

Let's chat a little about pacing in B2G workouts. All of our run and swim workouts are based on RPE. All of our bike workouts are based on % FTP. You may be used to seeing workouts set up based on pace, heart rate, or power with other coaches or programs. Here's why ours are set up this way, and how to interpret our workouts to get the most out of them.

RPE (Relative perceived effort): I love using RPE rather than HR or pace for one very important reason: pace and HR change depending on fatigue, weather, terrain, etc. One day you may be able to run 9 minute miles with a low HR and feel like it's super easy, and another day with different condition 9 minute miles might feel extremely hard. In reality, in training, we don't care about your pace. At all. We care about effort level. Avoid worrying about pace or how the workout is going to look later on Strava or Garmin! Focus on the RPE- the effort level- to make sure you get what is intended out of the workout. RPE is a scale from 1 to 10. 1 should be ridiculously easy- HR barely elevated- you could do it all day and never break a sweat. 10, on the other hand, is an all out, maximum speed and effort, SPRINT. Everything else falls In between. For the run, specifically, you can use the picture below as a guideline, but, again, effort level is more important than pace so this is just a guideline. Your 5 RPE pace today could be different than tomorrow and certainly will change over time as your fitness changes! You can think of the scale the same way on the swim workouts, 1-10, absolute minimal effort up to all-out sprint. You SHOULD NOT be swimming the same pace all the time!

% FTP: On the bike, we use % FTP. We've talked about this one a bit before. Your FTP is you maximum possible power output for an hour long ride. So, % FTP is used to ratio your power target for different intervals in the bike workouts based on that FTP (this is done automatically in Zwift when workout are built using % FTP, so that's why we use it!). It's critical that your FTP is accurate for these targets to calculate correctly. Again, as your fitness changes, your FTP should update automatically on Zwift and the workouts will adjust themselves. If you feel like the workouts are consistently too hard or too easy, it may be time to do an FTP test and check that it's accurate!

Going to hard or too easy on your workouts can both be highly detrimental to your training! We put A LOT of thought into balancing workload against fatigue so pay close attention to your pacing!