Advice - How to use zwift for my goal

General Discussion
1

Hey All,

Not to make this too long, let me try and get to the point. 10 years prior I did quite a bit of training and riding and was nothing special with 260 watt ftp, got the stuff out of storage with my computrainer and I rode for a 2-3 months now and I would say I am at 175 watts based upon outdoors and zwift.

I decided when I turn 60 next year I will do a duathlon, it was my goal prior to my injury. I want to put this on the bucket list. I was never a runner so I started to do 5ks, my 2nd one coming up. Right now I do …

M - Bike morning - 50-100TSS
Weights - upper body, limited
Run threadmill

Tues - Off or Bike - TSS 50

Wednesday - Bike morning - 50-100TSS
Sled or Rower or something gets heart rate up but no weights
Run threadmill

Thursday - Off Morning
Weights - Usually belt squats
Run threadmill

Friday - Off or Bike TSS 50

Saturday - Bike - TSS 100 - 150

Sunday - Bike - TSS 150-200

I am thinking of changing one bike day to a run on weekend but not sure yet maybe outdoors. As you can see I am big on TSS or something like that on strava.

I am not really that interested in the game playing of zwift and maybe will be a route once in a while but mostly do the workouts and I wanted to know which workouts or routes you think best. And do you think worth to do any race or group ride?

Actually today I did the TT effort workout and have to say that hurt, 185 for 6 minute bursts and I went into my drops to get used to that as well.

I am going to buy a kickr core in the hope near future but while annoyong the computrainer seems ok. For some reasons on weekday mornings I always loose connection less I turn off my blue tooth and use a route I used in the past but on other days seems to work fine. Very strange but as long as it works eventually.

Thank you for reading and wonder if this is right place to post but if not sorry and LMK where to post it.

2

You have a really big training load planned, so if you can afford to work with a coach that’s my first recommendation. I doubt you’ll be able to sustain that program without varying it in some weeks. Some Zwift training plans are decent but they are not tailored to your goals, what you have been doing, and are difficult to adapt to your multi-sport ambitions.

I suspect that replacing your trainer will result in a significant reset in your expectations about your power so you may as well expect that or get the trainer ASAP so you have some consistency in your power numbers. Or if you have a power meter on your bike that could also provide that visibility.

3

I’d say with an FTP of 200 or less many of the efforts in zwift’s workouts seem flawed.

They seem to have scaled the recovery intervals between ‘efforts’ at 80w which feels ridiculously low. When they have 5m at 80w it’s just annoying. My trainer can barely get that low in resistance.

And, at the other end of the scale, if it has 20s efforts, it’ll put them around 230w-250w or so. Which again seems ridiculously low. As an adult male I can easily do seated 500w efforts for 30s - that really isn’t an ability that goes away as your FTP drops through lack of cycling stimulus . Similarly for the low end it might scale a bit with FTP but not in a such a strictly linear way.

The problem being if you do workouts like that you’re not really going to trigger adaptations.

Riding with the robopacers seems a reasonable way of doing a ride at an intensity without getting too bored.

e.g maybe you’re in z2 at one of the D racers. If you want to do a higher intensity and see how long you can hang on, join a C or B. Join the world, do a warmup for a bit and then teleport to the faster ones. The teleport feature means you can do an interval, drop off the back to recover, teleport back again and repeat. Similarly you can teleport from D to C and so on and vary intensity that way. I tend to do most of the sprints on the way around, but not really sprinting, seated big bean efforts and there’s another feature with your best / last times sitting on the starting line that you can chase.

I’d suggest entering races would be the best training zwift has. I think you need to pick a time when there’s a fair number of entrants at your level, and find a group in the race you can sit in but it’s pushing you out of feeling comfortable. Mostly though they will push hard, especially up any climbs. The trick is to avoid getting dropped and then it turning into just a ride where you drop back to riding at a comfortable level.

As to what exactly a workout should look like - the answer is probably “as close as you can to whatever a duathalon ride looks like”

4

Hi Paul,

I will be replacing the trainer soon. Just got free up a few bucks and will buy direct refurbish. They seem small too so may be able to take around.

I did not think there would be a perfect program but I figured there would be some good workouts like TT ones to address the TT aspect of the duathlon. For myself getting a coach not sure worth it cause I only want to finish and I am so detrain on cycling and never really ran so anything will work. When I hit a plateau and I want to keep doing it I will consider it. Right now not worth it, like the trainer, I have to earn it by showing I am using it fairly often.

5

Another way to get training advice is from a club - either a local outdoor bike club or a Zwift club. In my club (Rhino Racing) we have some very knowledgeable people and I don’t think that’s rare. Our club is open to anyone interested in racing team events at any level, and we do TTT events every Thursday. Most of our club races UK weekday evenings so if that suits your schedule it might be an option.

6

I agree with a couple of your assessments even with only doing a few weeks of workouts. The breaks in between the efforts are too long and too low, build up too long as well and 20-30s efforts at 250 is silly at best.

Can you create your own in zwift?

I am thinking of doing a race once I feel my ftp gets to around 200. Right now not sure really worth it other than blowing up too early but on some of my workouts I have somehow got in the middle of a group and did pretty well but not sure if even though I was in the middle of the group were my numbers actually enough to do that? I am doing my watts based upon my workout not the group?

Other pet peeves is that I am not a big fan of the game-ify aspect and wonder they have races with no badges.

And I lived in NYC in the past and there courses are nothing like CP at all. I was doing it and I was pretty much rolling at 15 miles which also is my issue as I am not used to not pedaling when on a trainer, it is something I have to unlearn.

I know I am going on here but I watch Ryan Condor(sp??) but his position would never work in any race or even outdoors as he is falling all over the place but is yet a Class C rider?

Also the game tends you to basically stay as uprights as you can and just mash the pedals but for me I need to get into the drops if I am trying to do a TT which of course I can do in the game but that style of mashing the pedaling does nothing for you outdoors if using this as training for outdoors.

-John

7

Yes, you can create your own workouts in zwift.

There is trainer difficulty setting in zwift that changes how gradients feel (without affecting your virtual speed)

By default it’s on 0.5, which effectively halves the gradients up and down. Putting it up to 100% difficulty - which should imitate real life - you might find the gradients feel more rolling and you’d certainly expect to do more gear changes. Of course how steep the gradient can feel is down to your trainer’s max resistance as well.

Some people dial trainer difficulty right down to zero and just set the resistance they want to feel with their bike’s gears. Others feel the opposite and that it should be on 100% - for a while it was quite a contentious topic.

As for sitting on the bike, yep zwift tries to take your height + weight into account but it cannot and doesn’t take into account how you’re actually sat so, sure you can sit upright or whatever else.

8

"By default it’s on 0.5, which effectively halves the gradients up and down. Putting it up to 100% difficulty - which should imitate real life - you might find the gradients feel more rolling and you’d certainly expect to do more gear changes. Of course how steep the gradient can feel is down to your trainer’s max resistance as well. "

Why would they give you this option at all? Does that mean in a race this is in effect as well? So some may have different settings?

I am looking into the workouts now. Thanks for the info.

9

Well I’m guessing somewhat now, but a decade ago there were a lot of wheel on trainers and many of them do not behave well if the trainer created a lot of resistance. The wheel would slip if you stood up to pedal against a high resistance.

It was not particularly easy back then to know when the road was about to go up, so you’d get stuck because a lot of resistance would just ramp up and you can’t change gear on a road bike easily if you left it too late - which perhaps also why, if you stop they remove resistance and erg mode removes resistance if you stop - because otherwise you could end up in what was termed a ‘spiral of death’ where the resistance would just lock the pedals from turning (unless Chris Hoy is visiting)

And you had some pretty steep gradients in zwift perhaps that didn’t suit people who would put bikes with big gearing on - I can’t imagine many Florida cyclists are set up for climbing for example.

And it’s like you say in your earlier posts you’re not used to sitting on a trainer riding it like outdoors, coasting etc. Most people used trainers with a fixed resistance spinning for a bit.

So I think they erred towards adding an option that meant you’d get the resistance changes but damped down so you wouldn’t need to be changing a ton of gears back and forth and you’d run into less issues if your bike had bigger gearing or your trainer was a wheel on.

Anyone else who wanted to feel the hills could just change the slider back up.

Now it’s less of a thing, perhaps. Although they’ve really only very recently added the hud that shows you the gradient of the road ahead - I think that means you can preempt gear changes like you do IRL and use rolling terrain well. Before that, perhaps you could if you knew the route well enough.

Virtual gearing does make using 100% trainer difficulty more viable than it was too because it has a really wide gear range. Perhaps most of us now have direct drive trainers that work better and generally don’t slip if you stand up and push the pedal hard.

Many races do allow this - although I believe races can restrict the trainer difficulty setting? (i.e force 100% or force a range)

Note that it makes no difference to how fast you are. You can’t slide it down to 0% and ride like the road is flat in a race or anywhere else. If you do 100w then your avatar will climb the 6% virtual gradient at a crawl, even if you’re feeling no resistance on the trainer or the full resistance. It’s like if you’re doing a workout and its in ERG mode, if you do route that’s a climb you’ll see your avatar barely moves on the cooldown bits.

But that was part of the contentiousness really there are tons of youtube videos trying to explain what trainer difficulty actually did and what it didn’t do. As well as people who still argued it made it easier and shouldn’t be allowed)

10
11

This is mainly for folks with their real bikes on a trainer which might have gearing totally unsuitable for some of the routes on Zwift, for example, the radio tower climb wouldn’t be great with 53/39 chainring combination, nor would Alpe du Zwift.

At minimum they’d have to use a different cassette, but then sometimes big cassettes like 11-32 need different rear derailleurs, so this trainer difficulty avoids those problems.

1 Like
12

I am one of those guys at this point with a bike on the trainer. But like M_Fi said which kinda confuses me is zwift is not ERG. I have done ERG with computrainers for an embarrassing number of hours with 3x20s forever but zwift is not ERG cause it if I understand the difference in ERG mode ie set at 300 but I am not putting out 180, the load generator will increase the load to get me to 300 at the lower cadence or basically I die (sometimes literally).

While in zwift mode the load generator is trying to instead emulate the gradient of the road so it does not take into account my speed/cadence so the power output is all over the place but now how does it decide two riders both doing 300 watts, but one at a low cadence but one has a high cadence who is going faster? My understanding it is all about the watts/kg but is that really the right way taking wind resistance out of the equation?

Also now to go to that setting, there is a HUGE DIFFERENCE between doing 300 watts on a flat compared to do 300 watts on a hill. Very different systems are being used and required IMHO. I have done both outdoors and very different so IMHO this should be gone now.

13

If the two riders are both doing 300W, why does the cadence matter?

Cadence has no relevance on its own to your speed, just like outdoors - what matters is the power you produce. The gearing affects what cadence you need to generate a certain power under a certain resistance load.

1 Like
14

Your speed both on the flat and on a climb is determined by your power output, taking into account factors such as your weight and your wind resistance. Your weight of course comes into the equation much more on a climb.

15

Ok I checked the math and yes two riders producing 300 watts at 85 rpm or 110 rpm will be doing the same speed if all other variable are equal but how about the systems of your body being used/trained?

The setting allows that change for a person who is better on flats to switch a hill to a flat.

16

It doesn’t really make you any faster, you still go about the same speed, just that you aren’t struggling away at 40rpm and killing your knees.

I know some racers prefer to use low trainer difficulty, I suppose they don’t want to change gears or they supposedly get some benefit going downhill, I don’t know - I’m not into racing on Zwift.

17

It makes the effort more steady. I find it’s less taxing and lets me focus more on other things. It also allows me to do easy rides on all terrain which is less boring than riding horrible routes like Tempus Fugit. I can see mountains while doing a zone 2 ride at a reasonable cadence. Zwift Academy race with it forced to 100% was doable but certainly a lot more shifting. I’ve never cared about anyone’s opinion about my game settings and I’m sure that setting is not going anywhere. If a race organizer wants to request a minimum value they are free to do that (like 30% min in club ladder now).

18

Everyone is different as to what cadence feels most comfortable. Grinding at a low cadence on a hill is typically going to be anaerobic whereas higher cadence is more aerobic.

But the same power gets you up the hill, no matter the cadence, since power on a clilmb is mainly about the force needed to get your weight up the hill. It might be that you can’t sustain the same power at a lower cadence that you could as a higher cadence, but this depends on the individual.

19

I understand my cadence issue was incorrect but my bigger point is that especially in a race the type of system you are using anaerobic or aerobic makes a big difference, this is why races favor different riders and some are sprinters, KOM or TT type individuals. Some guys have much higher than averages numbers at 1 - 8 min while others excel at longer intervals. I just think this is a setting that kinda negates the need to make a course but enough of beating that dead horse. I mean this is an honor system, do not own one but maybe people are even using e-bikes as well. Not sure you can hook one up to a kickr.

Any yesterday by not my actual choosing I did a race, Happy Friday or something, I thought it was a group ride and no clue how to approach it and my dongle lost connection but once the race started was fine. I was blown out at the start but that is fine, I turned it into an hour long FTP test and my number according to zwift was 181 and had some PRs at other intervals as well.

My weight has always been an issue cause I really do not like going below 185lbs as I did so much weight training and do not want to loose too much mass. Given that zwift is really all about watts per kg with knowing how to draft and using the tokens effectively not sure I will ever do that well anyway but will be good for my goal of a duathlon next year. The one thing I never really trained were the 1-8 minute intervals in the past as people always said build engine and fill in later. I never got to filling in. 260 was suppose to be fine enough but all the crits I did was usually blown off first couple of loops.

First lets see if we can get back to 260 and in between loose some weight and maybe find the sweet spot between weight and output. Also as I am on the verge of just getting the kickr core anyway as I seem to have a bit of the bug again.