Open any ride file next to a friend’s and the temptation is instant: whose average power was higher, who climbed faster, who held the front. It feels like information. It’s mostly noise.
Speed is relative. Your fast isn’t anyone else’s. The same 250 watts that has one rider soft-pedaling has another gasping at their limit, because effort only means something against your own threshold, not against a leaderboard.
Intensity is a ratio, not a number
A watt is a watt, but its cost to you depends on where your threshold sits. That’s why OSO never grades your session against a population table. It reads the effort relative to your own critical power or threshold pace, so a “hard” day is hard for you, and an easy day is genuinely easy, no matter what anyone else rode.
Two athletes, one number
Picture two riders both averaging 220 W for an hour:
- For the one whose threshold is 210 W, that hour was a brutal, over-threshold grind.
- For the one at 300 W, it was a comfortable endurance spin.
Same number on the screen. Completely different training stimulus. Judge them by the raw watts and you’ll misread both.
Watts per kilo doesn’t rescue it
The usual fix is to divide by body mass and call it even. That helps on a long climb, where gravity really is the thing you’re paying, and it helps almost nowhere else. On the flat you’re paying air, which scales closer to frontal area than to mass, so the 58 kg climber who looks untouchable on w/kg gets quietly shelled on a windy road by someone with worse numbers. In a sprint, absolute watts win. Over four hours, whoever fades least wins, and no ratio on either athlete’s profile says anything about that.
Normalizing by mass swaps one universal yardstick for a slightly better universal yardstick. It’s still trying to answer “who is stronger” when the useful question is “how hard was that, for me, today.”
Heart rate is the worse version of the same mistake
Percent of max heart rate feels more personal because your max is yours. It isn’t more personal in the way that matters. When Iannetta and colleagues tested 100 trained women and men, threshold landed anywhere from 60% to 90% of maximum heart rate depending on the athlete. Two riders following the same “75% of max” instruction are doing genuinely different workouts: one is riding easy, one is riding over threshold, and both believe they followed the plan.
The percentage is a shared vocabulary describing unshared physiology. That’s fine for talking. It’s not fine for prescribing.
What relative actually looks like
Once you drop the comparison, a small set of honest questions replaces it.
- Where did this effort sit against your own critical power, not a chart?
- How long could you have held it, given where your curve actually is right now?
- Did the easy portion stay easy, or did it drift into the place that costs you Thursday?
- Is the number moving relative to your own past, which is the only trend line that belongs to you?
None of those need anyone else’s file to answer, which is the point. They’re also the questions that change what you do next, and “he averaged 30 watts more than me” is not.
The exception worth keeping
There is one honest use for other people’s numbers, and it’s competitive rather than physiological. If you race the same events as someone, their file tells you what the race demanded and how it was won: where the selection happened, how long the decisive effort was, what it took to still be there at the end. That’s course intelligence, and it’s useful.
What it still can’t tell you is how to train. The race demand is external and shared. The cost of meeting it is internal and yours.
What to do with it
Stop comparing your numbers to other people’s and start comparing them to yesterday’s you. Keep your threshold current, because a stale threshold turns every zone downstream of it into fiction. Let the easy days be genuinely easy and make the hard days genuinely hard for your engine.
That’s the whole game, and it’s the one OSO is built to measure. Every session is graded against your own critical power, so “hard” is a fact about you rather than a comparison you lost.
Sources
- Iannetta D, Inglis EC, Mattu AT, et al. A critical evaluation of current methods for exercise prescription in women and men. Med Sci Sports Exerc. 2020;52(2):466-473.
- Poole DC, Burnley M, Vanhatalo A, Rossiter HB, Jones AM. Critical power: an important fatigue threshold in exercise physiology. Med Sci Sports Exerc. 2016;48(11):2320-2334.