Categorization and "Maximum Efforts"

Racing
1

It says, “minimum pace group is calculated from your maximum efforts”. So, do only races count towards your average?.. How about group rides where you’re riding hard (or not). I’ve seen some people say, only the rides on ZwiftPower are used in the calculation whether race or ride.

Somehow, with only a couple of 2.7 average races, I got bumped to “C”. I’m 74 and those efforts are rare and getting rarer!! Riding on the tail end of the C’s isn’t all that fun! :wink: I keep looking at my averages in Zwift activities but they don’t seem to move.

So… how does Zwift determine when you’re producing “maximum efforts” and what exactly does it count?

2

ALL RIDE’s and workout.

2 Likes
3

every ride, as long as it’s over 2km, or 2 minutes, i can’t remember which, or if it’s either/or. i don’t know if efforts done in an event start pen count, but if your character is moving, it counts

certain efforts might be discarded in very specific circumstances, but not by accident

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4

This is how it used to be before category enforcement but people keep parroting the old info.

If you want to see the numbers Zwift is using, look at the Fitness info on my.zwift.com and compare your numbers to this document:

https://support.zwift.com/en_us/pace-group-category-enforcement-rkhtvQuqT

The denominator of the W/kg calculation is also affected by some averaging. It’s not based on your current weight.

1 Like
5

Hello everyone, Thank you for your active participation in providing support. It’s Juan here from Zwift. As it has been already mentioned, Every ride you take on Zwift, whether you save the ride or not, contributes to the power data we use to determine your available pace groups.

Additionally, I would like to share with you the best practices.

  1. The more activities you do with regular maximum effort, the more accurate the values will be.
  2. Do not forget to keep your trainer firmware updated and calibrated to get accurate power readings.
  3. Set correctly your height and weight, please avoid constant changes.

I hope the information provided by our community members and by me has been useful to you.

1 Like
6

Paul, looks like I’m on the hairy edge of zFTP. >= 2.625, I’m 2.649. zMAP is >= 3.2 and I’m 3.077 there. The odd thing is I’ve been looking at them quite a while but they haven’t changed from zFTP 204 and zMAP 237. Maybe I’ll gain some weight! :wink:

7

Increasing your weight won’t do anything until > 90 days past the PR. If you go do a 5 minute max effort your zFTP will probably go down. It’s hard to say if you’ll shift categories based on that, but you may as well feed the algorithm your best possible efforts and let it decide.

3 Likes