360 - The Power of Perceived Effort: Your Internal Performance Superpower
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Welcome to the Purple Patch Podcast!
On this episode, IRONMAN Master Coach Matt Dixon discusses the importance of Rate of Perceived Effort (RPE) in endurance sports, emphasizing its role in training and racing. He explains that RPE, influenced by factors like muscle fatigue and psychological stress, is a subjective rating of effort that complements metrics. Dixon highlights common mistakes, such as over-reliance on data, and advocates for developing self-awareness through regular self-assessment. He suggests practical exercises like blind intervals and long runs to enhance RPE skills. Dixon also notes that RPE is crucial in life beyond sports, aiding in stress management and performance optimization.
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Episode Timecodes:
00-:53 Promo
1:21-3:03 Intro
3:05-5:07 What is RPE
05:52-13:14 Reliance on Tech
13:15-20:11 Start with Awareness
20:15-21:05 Do Blind Sessions
22:08-27:00 Use Descriptive Zones
32:51-End Reflect
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Transcription
Matt Dixon 00:00
There is no shortage of information out there. In fact, information, in many ways, has become cheap. It's hard to navigate through the blizzard of bullshit, but knowing what to do isn't the same thing as doing the right thing for you. And that's where Purple Patch comes in. We are the human in human performance with our tri squad and one to one coaching, you'll get more than a training plan. You'll get a whole coaching team, real connection, a personalized path that fits your life, whether you're a beginner or an experienced athlete. We're going to help you unlock your vest without burning out. Reach out at info@purplepatchfitness.com, to see what program fits best for you and your goals. We hope to see you on the train. We love it when people join us and have fun, because they tend to stick around, and there's a reason for that. Enjoy the show. I'm Matt Dixon, and welcome to the Purple Patch podcast. The mission of Purple Patch is to empower and educate every human being to reach their athletic potential through the lens of athletic potential, you reach your human potential. The purpose of this podcast is to help time starved people everywhere integrate sport into life.
Matt Dixon 01:22
and welcome to the Purple Patch podcast, as ever your host, Matt Dixon, let me start off today with a question. You got your power meter, you got your GPS watch, you got your aura ring, your heart rate monitor, all of the sleeptrackers out there, but do you actually know how your effort feels. We live in an era of data overload, and while those numbers can be really, really helpful, they can't replace the single most important tool in your performance toolkit, and that is your ability to feel effort. Today, I'm going to go back a step, and I'm going to explore a foundational but wholly underutilized skill, and is that a skill in endurance performance? We are going to dig into rate of perceived effort, or what is commonly referred to as RPE. Now don't be fooled. This is not a rant against data. I'm a scientist. I love metrics, but if you don't develop a feel for effort, and then those metrics are just going to become noise. And so this episode is all about how to develop your internal compass so that you can train smarter race with freedom and navigate fatigue, not just in sport, but also in life. And you want to work out today, as we go through this, that we're going to be talking about sport, but really what we're talking about is self awareness and understanding, and that's something that is a great tool to have in almost anything we do in life. And so without further ado, let's dive in, ladies and gentlemen, it is the meat and potatoes.
Matt Dixon 03:09
Yes, the meat and potatoes, R P E, R P, E, rate of perceived effort. Let's dig into first what it is. Why does it matter? What do I mean when I say rate of perceived effort or RPE? Well, simply put, it is your own subjective rating of how hard something feels, and it can be highly influenced. It's influenced by things like muscle fatigue, heart rate, breathing, heat, terrain, hydration, even psychological stress. But it is wrapped up with all of those things, a holistic signal that's very different than your garment, and it adapts in real time. It was actually first formalized by a scientist called gunner Borg. You might have heard of the Borg scale. That's back in the 1980s he had a scale of perceived effort from six to 20. Quite commonly, also people do one to 10. It's more simplistic, it's more understandable, but six to 20, both of them are scientifically valid. But in truth, Gunnar was not the first person to think about perceived effort. It's been used for centuries. Long before wearables existed, we've had on a show before, a scientist that's really famous in endurance sports, Dr Steven Seiler, an American that's based up in Scandinavia. He's a leading endurance researcher, and I really like what he talks about when he refers to RPE, he always points to the pointy end of the sport, elite athletes, and he highlights that elite athletes are consistently, constantly, all the time, leveraging RPE to regulate their training, especially the easy work i. And he feels like RPE, as the governor, is critical, because it protects the intent of the session. From my perspective, as I referred to it earlier, I view RPE as almost your athletic compass. Metrics are incredibly valuable for us, but RPE is the thing that's going to unlock and teach you a sense of pacing, effort, management and, ultimately, resilience. But what are some of the common mistakes and misconceptions around perceived effort? Let's dig into what often goes wrong for athletes when they think about RPE, or, you know, as we're going to find out, don't think about RPE. Number one, I think, is really important, which is the most common thing that I see an over reliance on metrics. I've had athletes tell me I don't know how it felt, because I didn't have my metrics with me. How do you feel this morning. Big Ron, I don't know my whoop ran out of batteries, and that's a problem. That's dependency, because you're just taking data information and letting that govern how you feel. Steve Magnus, another great coach, calls RPE the most honest system we have, and I like that, honesty, integrity in effort, if you train by feel, he suggests you deliver or develop awareness, mental strength. Alex Hutchinson has written that the limiters in endurance sport are rarely physical, they're perceptual. And if that's the truth, the fact that you slow down because it feels too hard, not because your body can't go on, doesn't it make sense that you would try and get in tune with those feelings and start to understand them. When athletes obsess over that word specificity and locking into really, really rigid training zones, devices, data, they often miss the bigger picture of what's going on. And here's the truth, if you're an athlete of any level, world class, all the way down to beginner, performance is really, really messy. It's not something that's linear. It is not like baking a cake where you put the precise ingredients in in the right order, you mix them up, you're putting them in the oven at the right temperature for the right time, and hey presto, you would deliver a wonderful Victoria sponge. Equally, it's not like building a bridge where you go through the architectural drawings with the exact angles, the exact design, and you are going to have a robust, rigid, scientifically valid bridge. That's not what performance is. It's chaotic. It's messy, and it's influenced by a host of factors out there. In fact, when we thought about it, we talked about terrain, heat stress, environment, psychological stress. And all the time your body is giving you something, it's giving you signals, internal signals. But if you can't listen to those signals because you're just wholly reliant on data and information that your metrics have given you, you'll never learn to listen. So what we want to do is shift
Matt Dixon 08:30
our reliance on RPE. We want to integrate this and develop the skill. It is a skill. It is not something that is intuitive. It's not something that happens by magic. It's something that you need to work on. But as over time, you do develop self awareness, you do start to establish an internal compass. You start to take of all the different situations, the different levels of fatigue, the different state of physiological redness, we have to realize that stress is stress is stress and it accumulates. And when you start to develop this inner awareness, you get several benefits as an athlete. When you become better at listening to your body, you actually are unlocked to pace more effectively. You're more equipped to avoid injury and burnout. You make better decisions on the fly, and you actually ultimately handle heat, fatigue and global stress better, and in many ways, if we go to what they call Judgment Day racing. That's what it really is about. Because we must prepare for our races. We need to train consistently. We need to get as fit as we can. We also want to arrive as systemically and mentally, as fresh as we can, fit and fresh. But when. We're actually racing, what we're looking to do is to distribute our fitness to give us the best speed possible over the course of the distance, whether you're racing a 5k whether you're racing a 10k whether you're racing a marathon, whether you're doing an Iron Man, and so that requires a certain sense of pacing. You also are going to consistently throughout the day. Need to have to make decisions. Do I push on here? Do I back off? What's going on? How's my body doing? And at the same time, we're doing this in an external environment where you've got heat, humidity, wind, and it's a very stressful situation. And so if you are locked in, and you are guided by perceived effort and then leveraging your metrics, and we're going to talk about that as well, you are going to be better at that skill. Every single elite athlete that I've ever worked with is obsessed with perceived effort. Now they all leverage power meters and GPS monitors and heart rate monitors, etc, but or yet, perceived effort is the driver. And guess what? When I talk about this, you don't need to believe me, you don't need to trust me on this one, because research consistently validates this. There was a study in 2010 it's a robust study by Doctor mauga, and he showed that when runners are guided by perceived effort, they ultimately outperform those that were governed by either heart rate or pace, and this was consistently shown across levels of athlete, across genders. Why? Because they self regulated. They unlocked and had the liberty, the freedom to listen to their body.
Matt Dixon 14:30
Now this can become even more important for females. Female athletes, as Stacy Sims points out, shows how crucial it is to feel training effort, particularly during hormonal fluctuations. This occurs, of course, during perimenopause and menopause. It also occurs on a monthly basis for all female athletes, perceived effort, as Stacey points out, provides the nuance that metrics just are cannot capture, it's impossible to capture. So in other words, perceived effort is the thing that makes you adaptable, more aware, and ultimately, more resilient. The thing we want to dig into, though, is sure, perhaps you're persuaded by this, how do we actually train it? How do we develop it in a really practical sense? Because Okay, for me to sit in this wonderful studio and Performance Center in San Francisco and say, use perceived effort. It's really important. But how do you actually develop it as a skill? If you buy into it being a skill? Well, firstly, begin with self awareness in every single training session, ask yourself, How do you feel? How am I actually feeling before the session? Maybe give yourself a rating of, okay, this is how I feel, general mood, general energy. And it doesn't matter if it's scientifically valid. What matters is it's repeatable. You're always using yourself the same sort of metrics to get that feel like a six out of 10. I feel like a seven for me. It doesn't matter because you're only worried about you. It doesn't matter how Johnny and Jane are feeling for me, it's at my six great. How do I feel during the session? That's a really important litmus, just building self awareness. Yeah, that was pretty strong. I went through little periods, but mostly it was a six or seven. Went through those periods of discomfort, maybe the intervals, about an eight out of 10 today. And then how do I feel afterwards? And what you want to do is start to marry those sensations and feelings with the intent of the workout. This is really, really important. In fact, in our tri squad program, in our one to one program, we prescribe a lot of training sessions, and we have three things that we are really looking at. Number one, here's your framework of output that we would anticipate you're doing paces, or, of course, your power zones. And that's one component that's the least important. We then have a descriptive element. This is what the intent of the workout is. This is what we're looking to get accomplished, and this is how it should feel. And there's description on words there. And then finally, this is what your perceived effort should feel like. This should feel about a six out of 10, seven out of 10. The intervals are going to feel like an eight out of 10. And you have these three elements so but rather than just. Pushing blindly into a training session. Take a step back and think, what's the mission of this workout? What am I looking to get accomplished? It's easy endurance. It's soul filling, where the purpose is to build general tissue resilience, maybe a little bit of cardiovascular conditioning. But it should feel conversational, or it's terrifyingly hard. I'm doing eight by one minute at very best effort. Here, it should feel like a nine out of 10 effort. So before you execute a workout, have an understanding, not just about what are you trying to hit, but actually, how should it feel, and what is the intent. And then you marry those what do I feel like before? What do I feel like during? What do I feel like following? And when you start to marry those session by session, it starts to become a self fulfilling loop of building self awareness. Now, this is important at every intensity that you're going to execute. So this is really important on the sessions that are easy. Let's just take an example, a 50 minute soul filling run. The purpose of that is really basic. I'm just building general cardiovascular fitness, a little bit of tissue resilience. But I also want to leverage this session for a little bit of stress processing. It's soul filling. So in order to do that, this should feel very, very easy, I'm going to include walk breaks if I need to, because I want to avoid it being high stress. And my litmus of success is I should be able to lead a conversation in a soul filling workout, and so I should be able to chat to you just like I am now. What does that feel like? A three, a four out of 10? Good. Go and execute it. And don't spend all day looking at your watch thinking, oh my goodness me, my heart rate's 135 it should be 140 and if it's 142 it's too much. 138 is all too low, so I need to be really accurate here.
Matt Dixon 17:35
Oh my goodness me, that pace is 730 pace. I should be 735 I was 735 last week, and that felt better. And oh my goodness me, I'm running to etc. You know, he said, do that am I conversational? Am I flowing at a 345, out of 10 effort? That's success. That's okay. And on the flip side, if we're doing eight minute intervals at a very strong output, where we're looking to hit that proverbial threshold, or zone four, understand what that should feel like over the course of the eight minutes, the first couple of minutes, the effort is going to build. It's going to plateau to a very uncomfortable but sustainable effort. I should have to have all of my focus going into this interval, and I should feel creeping up to an eight, eight and a half out of 10. And I could wish it's going to be over, but I can carry on. That's what I'm looking here. And I'm not leading a conversation. I'm breathing heavily, but I'm getting under control. That's what threshold feels like. It's uncomfortable but sustainable. So when you execute it, rather than targeting a specific power or a specific pace, look to chase that feeling, and if your pre designated specific power is blowing you up where you're getting higher and higher and higher on cost and breathing. Your heart rate and breathing is going up. You're starting to pop your champagne cork back off a little bit because, for today, for any reason, accumulation of training fatigue, maybe a little bit of poor sleep, maybe some personal stress, maybe dehydration, whatever the accumulative reason is that power isn't appropriate today, and you're building a body of work at this so you start to have an awareness of what should this feel like? What is the effort that I should correlate it with and execute to that and then leverage the metrics around so in order to build this skill, it's those first two prongs. Number one, how do I feel before? How do I feel during? How do I feel afterwards? Making sure that you're continually asking yourself that question, and then number two, going into any workout, understanding this is the mission. This is why I'm doing this session, and this is what it should feel like. And perhaps most importantly, this is what success is. Now at Purple Patch, we spend a lot of time educating athletes on exactly that, whether it's via the actual workout that you're getting or, of course, your dialog with your coach, because without that, we believe it's very, very difficult to build that skill. But
Matt Dixon 19:54
then it goes beyond that. That's your self awareness. That's number one. Step two. Two Well, I would encourage you to start to do some of your intervals that you do where there are easy intervals, whether they're very short, high intensity, do them what we label blind. In other words, cover your screen, go by feel, and it's okay if you're running, just turn your watch over or shift the screen where you're not getting the actual information of pace and heart rate on there, if you're riding on the bike, throw a towel over your Garmin or over your screen. If you're actually a part of Purple Patch. We build this into our program, where we might have you doing eight minute intervals, and every two minutes we're removing the dials and you're locking in, and you're forced to build self awareness, both in terms of your leg speed on the bike, as well as your output go by feel. This is what you're looking and it's amazing. If you remove the data, you can start to compare afterwards. So it's good to capture the data, because you see what your success was like, and you marry in perception of effort and fatigue versus actual quantifiable output. But blind intervals are really, really important. Step number three is having a really good understanding, and in my lens, a cute, fun way of remembering what the different physiological zones are. Now there's a ton of different ways to measure zones. There's the three zone method, the five zone method, the seven zone method. There's 24 zones. With some people, I would love to use three zones. We tend to use five Purple Patch. And I must say, I quite like three, which is really easy, really strong and very completely insane. But let's go through how we design and we talk about so five zones are basically marrying what's going on with your physiological curve. Zone one is very easy. We call it smoking jackets. You can sit by the fire, you put your slippers on, you've got your smoking jacket on, perhaps your brandy and your cigarette. Nice and smooth. Smoking jackets, this should be two or three out of 10 efforts, and this is a whole bunch of physiological goodness happening here, but it's also a great place to do very easy, warm up, very easy, cool down, and a little bit of recovery here. As we go up and we start to become a little more demanding on the body, we move into zone two. Zone two is your easy endurance effort. This is your go all day pace. We call this conversational because there is a little bit of pressure as you're running or riding or rowing or whatever it might be, but it's at an effort that is sustainable for a long period of time. You are conversational at this effort, 345, out of 10 as an effort here, you should be able to lead the conversation here, just as I am doing in today's show zone three is controlled discomfort. We sometimes call this strong, but not breathless. And there's a shift that occurs here. Zone three is quite often the place that at the lower end of it you're racing Ironman effort, for you triathletes out there, for the upper end of it, you're starting to race towards at least half Ironman, if not Olympic distance effort. So zone three is a strong but controlled effort. It starts to get claustrophobic. You can do it for a long period of time, but it is demanding here. How do you know when you're in this effort? Well, you do have your metrics as a gage, but in terms of perceived effort, it's about a six out of 10 effort moving and creeping to a seven out of 10, and the litmus for you is you can continue on a conversation, but goodness me, you really, really hope that you're just having to provide short, controlled answers and you're not leading the conversation. And so if I was recording this show right now I could do it at zone two. I really wouldn't want to do it in zone three. That's what zone three is, six or seven out of 10 effort. Zone four. This is your physiological tipping point. This is your maximal steady state. This is where your threshold, your functional threshold, power, etc, is happening. And this is a very strong effort, claustrophobia is the word here, and theoretically it's right at that tipping point, just under Act, and just a little bit above where you can hit homeostasis, where you're producing blood lactate and combusting blood lactate. So. At a similar level. This is sustainable, physiologically, up to an hour, very, very demanding to do that. It's about an eight out of 10 effort, and this is one where, for the first time, in order to successfully execute this, all of your energy, all of your focus, must go into the effort, and that's really important. You can speak, but it's one to two word answers, short, demanding, very strong. This is where presence becomes critical, and that's it, but it is sustainable over time. And then zone five is really everything north of that. And of course, there are very different types of zone five. There are some zone five efforts in which you can execute for two, three, even four minutes. But physiologically, you're above the place of steady state. So in other words, while you're holding zone five, the cost goes up and up and up and up and up. The heart rate cannot plateau. It will keep building to max, as does the physiological cost. So this is just hard, and it goes all the way up to sprints. This is where people start getting into even more zones. We don't worry about it. There is a range in zone five. Just know it's above your maximal steady state. Absolutely all of your attention, all of your focus, all of your vigor, goes into zone five efforts. That's the range. And so over the course of time, if you understand the purpose of the session and what success looks like, and you start to build awareness. And then across all of those intensities, zone 12345,
Matt Dixon 26:39
you do quite a bit of it without looking at your metrics, your data, your output, and you go by feel, still capturing afterwards, you can start to get feedback in the skill. Now this occurs for swimmers. A lot swimmers tend to have an incredibly good rate of perceived effort, and there's a real reason for this. If you think about an elite swimmer that swam for many years, they're swimming in a controlled environment. Let's just say that they train in a 25 yard or 25 meter swimming pool. And swimmers don't swim with watches. They don't swim with form goggles. They swim with a speedo, para goggles, sometimes a cap, that's it. But what they have on the wall out on the pool side is a pace clock. That's a sweep hand going around, and that pace clock is giving them feedback after the effort. So they might swim 100 at a certain effort, let's just say a seven out of 10 effort, and they're swimming by design, by feel. They're building self awareness. They are pacing by feel. But once they finish their 100, and they finish, and they put their hand on the wall, they look up and they get feedback. Okay, what was that? So they're doing the action by feel, then they get feedback. If they go 20 times 100 there's 20 opportunities that they're dialing in pace. Now imagine if you do 2100s where the first five of them are at a six out of 10, the next five, seven out of 10, the next five, eight out of 10, the next five at nine out of 10. Every one of them executed by feel, every one of them with feedback. At the end these five, I swam at a 112 per 100 then I increased it a little bit, and I swam at a 109 the next five a little bit stronger, and I swam at a 107 the last five, it was very strong, and I was at a 105 fantastic. I'm building self awareness that is an internal compass. And interestingly, when you take most swimmers, if you put them on a rowing ergometer, if you took them out running, even though it's not their own preferred modality, they've got pretty good sense of self awareness. They have developed this tool and skill, and it's powerful. It's really, really powerful. And so I hope you start to see the marriage that we want to go here. You practice it across the swim, the bike, the run in swimming, don't look at your watch every single turn. Don't check for validation as you're swimming. Don't always swim with your form goggles. Use breathing, your rhythm, your stroke, your timing, to guide your effort. Ditch the watch. Use the pace clock on your bike. Blend a ton of power targets through every zone, zone two, zone three, zone four, even up to zone five. And do it by feel. Make sure that you avoid on the bite, particularly when you're on the trainer, avoid ERG mode. Erg mode is the killer of perceived effort. I know you might like it because it's simple and it's easy to use. I've got a structured bite where. Cup that I put into the computer, it controls my trainer, and all I have to do is show up and pedal my legs, and the resistance changes based on your different intervals that you've built for yourself. The problem with that is you're losing the opportunity to develop this skill, and so instead, really blend specific intervals that you're chasing your metrics and output with what we labeled blind intervals, intervals where we remove the dials and we go by feel, start to use that, and then long and then running. Well, that is just your RPE playground, because in running, you are always going to be faced with some form of terrain, you're going to have different wind. You're going to have different environments outside, if the sun's out, if it's cloudy, if it's raining, if it's cold, if it's hot, if it's humid, etc. And you're also going to, because it's weight bearing, be really aware of the mechanical load that starts to occur, the fatigue that starts to creep up as you go on to longer durations. I really love long runs as a litmus. Quite often we'll do 75 minute runs with athletes, and they may or may not include walk breaks, but we ask them to go round a familiar loop and run by perceived effort. And we say, just run at a seven out of 10 effort. And so that's a pretty strong effort, a good zone three effort, maybe up a zone three, and they finish it.
Matt Dixon 30:30
And at the end, I want them to look at their heart rate that they averaged over the run, looked at their pace, how long it took them to get around, or what that associated pace was, and get an understanding how did that feel. Then a week later, we might go back and do that exact same session again. And I said, I don't want you to try and beat your time. Okay, this isn't a time trial, but I want you to go and do exactly the same loop at about a seven out of 10 effort. But this time, I'm going to have you do some walk breaks, and I'm going to have you walk 20 seconds every fifth minute or so. Just go through let's see what the speed penalty is. And quite often, those athletes will run around that track, that little course that they've designed for themselves, they've integrated walk breaks, and they'll finish, and they'll think, I wonder how much slower I went their perceived effort. They say that actually felt easier with the walk breaks. That's the common suggestion that they get, the feedback that they get for themselves. But then they get a surprise when they look at it. Goodness me, I didn't actually go any slower for total time. In fact, I went around faster, including my walk breaks. And that starts to build awareness of pacing. It starts to build confidence to integrate a tool that helps people run faster, the vast majority of athletes to run faster, which is smart, strategic walk breaks, and so it's a really valuable process to go through. Finally, reflect every single session that you do as you're looking to develop the skill, just ask yourself a simple question, was my perception of effort matching? What the data set? What were the gaps that I had there? And that's really important. There's one more thing to this, and that's that the truth is that your perception of fatigue quite often doesn't match your physiological abilities. And so as you build self awareness, you start to gain an understanding of what your body can do if you're willing to get uncomfortable, and you're building that awareness, and then you come back and go again, you'll be surprised sometimes at what the body delivers you. We have a very similar situation when we get athletes on training camps, and they wake up day three or day four, and you look at the face and it's exhausted, and they say, I'm tired. They've got a perception of fatigue quite often. I say, good. Now, be open to it. Don't make it a self fulfilling prophecy. See what the provide body provides you. And we go and give them some very challenging intervals, and you know what happens? Nine times out of 10, their body responds. It steps up to the task, and it goes beyond what their perception of effort was. But if they were just looking at data, if they were just looking at their whoop score or their oura ring and they were asking, am I ready to train hard? The data will suggest No, but the body often responds. So getting in your inner compass and testing it also not always. Just backing off when you're tired is a really important nuanced addition, that's how you sharpen the tool. Here's the kicker. Here, folks,
Matt Dixon 34:47
rate of perceived effort or RPE, it doesn't just live in your triathlon or endurance sports training. In fact, it's really important in life, managing and understanding your energy, your ability. To focus your bandwidth. It's all perceptual. When you understand your internal signals. You can start to manage you can manage stress better. You can communicate your needs. You can avoid burnout. You can take strategic recovery. You can maybe start to get an understanding of I'm really tired here. Why? Maybe it's hydration. Maybe I need a 20 minute nap so that I can perform later, later in the day, etc. So whether you're in the office or you're traveling time zones, your ability to feel effort and respond, not react, respond wisely, is ultimately the thing that's going to drive sustainable high performance. So here's my challenge for you this week. Here's what I want you to do. I want you to pick a workout, and I want you to warm up, go through, perhaps you choose a bike trainer session or a run, whatever it might be, and I want you to warm up. I want to go through, and once you get into it, 10 or 15 minutes in, I want you to do the rest of it, almost all by feel, no screens, no watch, just you and your body, and you go through and you can capture the data, because that's where you get the quantifiable feedback, like the story of the swimmers. And afterwards, I want you to rate your effort. Then what I want you to do is check the data and reflect how close were you? What did you learn? If you do this on a single session this week, I think it will be interesting for you. It might highlight some things. And then over the next week, do it on a couple of sessions. You don't need to ditch the data. I'm not talking about throwing your GPS watches down on the floor, but you equally, don't want to be ruled by it. Train the skill of feel, build your internal compass. That is what ultimately leads to freedom on race day. That's how the world class athletes race, all of them, they race by instinct. They make great decisions, but they can't make the right decisions if they don't have the internal compass, if they don't have control in their life and sport. Thanks so much for listening. We'll see you next time. Take care, guys. Thanks so much for joining and thank you for listening. I hope that you enjoyed the new format. You can never miss an episode by simply subscribing. Head to the Purple Patch channel of YouTube, and you will find it there. And you could subscribe, of course, I'd like to ask you if you will subscribe. Also Share It With Your Friends, and it's really helpful if you leave a nice, positive review in the comments. Now, any questions that you have let me know, feel free to add a comment, and I will try my best to respond and support you on your performance journey. And in fact, as we commence this video podcast experience, if you have any feedback at all, as mentioned earlier in the show, we would love your help in helping us to improve, simply email us at info@purplepatchfitness.com, or leave it in the comments of the show at the Purple Patch page, and we will get you dialed in. We'd love constructive feedback. We are in a growth mindset, as we like to call it, and so feel free to share with your friends. But as I said, Let's build this together. Let's make it something special. It's really fun. We're really trying hard to make it a special experience, and we want to welcome you into the Purple Patch community with that. I hope you have a great week. Stay healthy, have fun, keep smiling, doing whatever you do, take care.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Purple Patch, human performance, tri squad, one to one coaching, personalized path, athletic potential, rate of perceived effort, RPE, self awareness, training smarter, fatigue management, data overload, perceived effort, endurance sports, training zones