Recent advantages in technology have made training with power or heart rate more affordable and accessible. But before we had power targets and heart rate zones, endurance athletes used to train solely by feel, also known as Rate of Perceived Exertion (RPE). In this episode of The Knowledge, Wahoo Sports Science coaches Dr. Jinger Gottschall and Mac Cassin discuss the benefits and limitations of taking off your heart rate monitor, unplugging your power meter, and training the good old fashioned way. Get ready to get in touch with your feelings. The doctor is in.
It seems like if training by RPE is a good practice, SYSTM would have a simple single switch to suppress the HR, power and possibly cadence data and/or targets from the screen, allowing a user to ride solely on RPE while collecting data for later use.
Of course the occurrence of the words “possibly” and “and/or” might explain why this seemingly simple feature isn’t there- it would take longer to get a committee to define the standard than to implement it. A better solution might be to allow users to define alternate display dashboards for Normal and RPE (and maybe others), with a single switch to toggle between them.
It would also be nice to be able to optionally display targets without measured values for things like cadence and power. Bonus points for a user-chosen heart rate which will trigger an on-screen warning if actual data exceeds this value but is not being displayed.
I think this can be done currently using by recording data on another device and disabling some subset in SYSTM and using the switches in SYSTM to choose which fields to display, but that is a lot of suffering before the ride begins…
I like that idea. It really isn’t that hard to implement but it definitely is an edge case and would be dropped to the bottom of the list. However, one never knows what is in GVAs evil mind.