Quantifying Hard Efforts

Dr. Stephen Cheung explores the various ways athletes and coaches can quantify hard efforts, and how this can inform training.

How do you know what impact a hard effort has on your overall training? For that matter, how do you know how hard is hard?

In this workshop, Dr. Stephen Cheung explores the multiple ways athletes and coaches can quantify hard efforts, from individual metrics, to perception of efforts, to breakthrough efforts and failures.

Dr. Cheung first addresses how to make sense of the chaos of rides or races with stochastic efforts. Should you simply let computer software model the effort for you? Or is an integrated value, such as TSS or Xert’s XSS value, more appropriate? He explores.

He then addresses the power of Ratings of Perceived Exertion (RPE) as a valuable tool for assessing a given workout. Click below for a separate workshop in which Dr. Cheung goes into greater detail on this subject.

Finally, Dr. Cheung discusses how breakthrough efforts and failed attempts to complete a given workout can each offer valuable lessons.