My favourite Peleton instructor is Cody Rigsby.
He’s usually my go-to instructor because he chats away about random shit when you’re in his classes and takes your mind off the effort you’re putting into the ride.
A couple of my clients, however, have got me into a series of programmes called Power Zone rides, where you work for several weeks on improving your performance through testing yourself on Week One to find your Power Zones (which show up as pretty boxes on the screen that you stay within), and working through a clearly defined programme of endurance and power focused rides to improve your fitness.
You test yourself again at the end of the programme to measure how far you’ve raised your Power Zones, (meaning the pretty boxes become harder to stay in initially) and you start the process again.
At the end of every Peleton ride, you get a summary of your stats for the ride, including how many other people have taken that same class, and how you rank within that entire group.
Before discovering Power Zones, I only did Cody’s classes. I always come in the top third of people who do his classes, and it made me feel pretty good, actually!
I felt proud that I was keeping up with a lot of people younger than me.
Nothing wrong with a bit of self congratulation every now and again!
However, when I started doing the Power Zones classes, I realised I was hitting around the halfway mark in terms of my overall ranking.
To begin with, I felt a bit dispirited. I liked being in the top third, and I wondered what I was doing wrong.
Maybe I wasn’t working as hard because the instructors weren’t sassy enough.
Maybe I was ill.
Maybe old age had crept up on me in the night and I was suddenly weaker than I used to be.
Of course, after a couple of sessions it dawned on me that it wasn’t me who had gotten weaker, in fact the Power Zones training was making me stronger every day, but I was simply comparing myself to a different group of people.
My best guess is that the people who regularly tune into Cody aren’t as serious about their cycling game as the ones who sign up for programmes like Power Zones.
Cody bonds with his groups by talking about how he loves drinking Mimosas and eating donuts.
He probably appeals to a different demographic from those who are serious about their fitness gains, and I’m one of the few who are pedalling away in the Venn diagram overlap.
So, I no longer feel dispirited that I don’t compare as well to guys in the Power Zones group, in fact I’m happy to be there, because it’s pushing me to work my way up to the top third of that group.
It’s the physical equivalent of the famous quote (who no-one’s sure to attribute to), “If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room”
But, I won’t spend all my time doing Power Zone workouts because I’ll miss Cody too much.