I Train Naked - Like Full Monty Naked - And Maybe You Should Too.
Updated: Sep 4
Yes. I train naked. Like Full Monty Naked
No watch. No power meter. No heart-rate strap. No pace alerts buzzing at my wrist every three minutes. No screen telling me whether I'm having a productive workout.
Just me, the workout and the uncomfortable realization that I actually have to pay attention to what my body is telling me.
What did you think I meant?
Put your shorts back on. I'm talking about training naked from technology. And every once in a while, I think every triathlete should try it.
Somewhere Along The Way, We Forgot How To Feel
Triathlon has become wonderfully measurable. We can measure watts, heart rate, pace, cadence, vertical oscillation, ground-contact time, stroke rate, sleep, recovery, HRV and probably seventeen other things I haven't checked since breakfast.
That's not necessarily bad. I use technology. I coach athletes who use technology. Power meters, GPS watches and heart-rate monitors can all be valuable tools.
But there's an important distinction: your device can measure your training. It cannot experience the training for you.
Sometimes athletes become so focused on hitting the correct number that they stop noticing what's happening underneath it. A run prescribed at a certain pace suddenly becomes a failure because the watch says you're twelve seconds slow — even though it's 90°F/32°C, you're running uphill and your legs are carrying fatigue from yesterday's ride.
Or the opposite happens. The numbers look fantastic, so you keep pushing even though your body has been quietly telling you for the last forty minutes that today isn't the day.
That's where training naked becomes useful. Take the electronics away and you're left with one of the oldest training tools ever invented. You.
Meet RPE: The Technology You Were Born With
Rate of Perceived Exertion — RPE — is simply a way of describing how hard an effort feels. No charging cable required.
RPE 1–2: The Naked Stroll — extremely easy, recovery territory. You could hold a conversation, contemplate dinner and probably solve a minor family dispute without stopping.
RPE 3–4: The Barely Dressed Endurance Zone — comfortable aerobic training, no drama. A surprising amount of endurance training belongs somewhere around here.
RPE 5–6: Things Are Getting Interesting — purpose behind the effort, conversation gets shorter. Steady endurance and some tempo work live here.
RPE 7–8: The Clothes Are Definitely Off — uncomfortable, not desperate. Threshold work, harder intervals, race-specific efforts.
RPE 9: Please Don't Ask Me a Question — sustainable for a limited time only; anyone trying to chat with you has misread the situation.
RPE 10: Full Monty — everything you've got. There is no RPE 11. If you finish an RPE 10 interval and immediately announce you could've gone harder, congratulations — you've discovered RPE 9.
Here's Where Training Naked Gets Interesting
Try an experiment. On one of your familiar easy runs, use no data. Leave the watch at home. Don't chase pace. Don't chase heart rate. Run at what you genuinely believe is an easy aerobic effort.
Pay attention to your breathing. Your stride. Your shoulders. How heavily your feet are landing. Whether the effort creeps upward as the session goes on. Then manually log your run.
Some athletes discover they know their bodies much better than they thought. Others discover something more uncomfortable: they've been letting the watch decide what "easy" feels like.
That's worth knowing — because your body doesn't know that today's workout says 8:45 pace. It knows stress, heat, sleep, fatigue, fueling, hills, recovery, and how much work you've already absorbed. RPE gives all of those things a vote.
But There's a Catch
This is where I ruin all the naked fun. RPE is very good at answering: how hard am I working right now? It is terrible at answering: what should I be doing today?
Those are completely different questions. Your body can tell you that you're working at RPE 6. It cannot tell you whether today's workout should contain 20 minutes at RPE 6, or 60 — or whether you should be riding, swimming, or recovering instead — or whether that hard run makes sense three days after another hard run — or whether you're doing enough training to be ready for your race.
That's programming. And this is where many self-coached triathletes accidentally confuse training by feel with making it up as they go along. They're not the same thing.
Naked Doesn't Mean Blind
You can train without obsessing over numbers and still follow a highly structured training plan. In fact, that's one of the best combinations.
The plan answers what you're doing today, why, how long, and where it fits in the bigger picture. RPE answers how that effort should actually feel. Now you've separated two decisions athletes often mix together — the plan provides the structure, your body provides the feedback. Technology becomes what it should have been all along: a tool. Not the coach.
Want to know whether your current training is actually enough?
You can have beautiful charts, improving watts and a Garmin full of green numbers and still wonder if you're actually ready for your race. That's why we built the Andiamo²® Triathlon Race Readiness Assessment — it looks past one workout and evaluates where you stand across swim, bike, run, consistency, recovery, and race prep. The goal isn't another metric to obsess over. It's finding the gaps.
Take the Triathlon Race Readiness Assessment
Then there's the question everybody secretly wants answered: how fast could I actually go?
Once you've built some fitness, your recent swim, bike and run performances can tell you something useful about race day. Use current performance to get a realistic projection rather than picking a finish time because it sounds good.
You can find these tools — and the rest of the free Andiamo²® calculators — on the Triathlon Training Calculators page.
So Should You Throw Away Your Garmin?
No. That would be silly. And expensive.
Use your Garmin. Use your power meter. Use heart rate. Use pace. Use whatever information makes you a better athlete. Just don't surrender your ability to recognize effort without them.
Every so often, cover the screen. Leave the computer at home. Go run by feel. Ride by feel. Swim by feel. Learn what easy actually feels like. Learn what sustainable discomfort feels like. Learn the difference between "I don't feel like doing this" and "my body is telling me something important." That's information no device can completely replace.
But Don't Confuse Freedom With Guessing
This is probably the most important part of training naked. You don't need technology to tell you how to train — but you do need a reason for the training you're doing. That's the difference between training freely and training randomly.
Andiamo²® triathlon training plans give you that structure: what to do, when to do it, how hard it should feel, and how today's session fits into the larger progression toward race day.
You can train using heart rate. You can train using power. You can train using pace. And yes — you can train naked. The technology is optional. The structure isn't.
Stop wondering whether you're doing the right training.
Choose your race distance, experience level and available training time and find the plan that fits where you actually are — not where an algorithm thinks you should be. One price. Every level. Just $6 per week. Lifetime access. Direct email coach support. - Find My Triathlon Training Plan
And if you're still not sure which plan fits? Use the Race Readiness Assessment first. We'll let you get dressed before you buy anything.
Thanks for reading!
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