I know the topic of completely flat routes has been raised before, but I’m raising it again as I still think it would be useful having spoken to many cyclist friends about it.
Many physios warn against the dangers of using ERG mode for interval sessions and workouts on Zwift due to the load and strain it puts on your knees, when the power suddenly ramps up and your knees have to work hard to keep up with the ERG generated power. More and more I am hearing that it’s generally better for your joints to generate your own intervals using gears - i.e. without ERG mode.
The problem is there is not a COMPLETELY FLAT route in zwift that would allow you to do this. I have tried all of them and even the ones that look pretty flat have 1-2% undulations running through them that make it impossible to hold intervals successfully and you end up messing uo your VO2max or whatever you’re doing because you’re messing around with your gears trying to hold the desired power.
Please can the topic of a completely flat route that’s just 0% from start to finish be considered again?
All you need to do is go into settings and move the Trainer Difficulty setting all the way to the left. When you do that, there are no incline changes sent to the trainer. You could do that on Alpe du Zwift and it will feel flat.
Thanks Paul - I didn’t know that! Great to know there’s a workaround for this, however it means I have to reset this every time I want to switch between workouts and general riding in Zwift. Bit of a faff but not the end of the world.
I still think it would be nice to have a decent length fully flat route though. There’s hundreds of others, one more wouldn’t hurt right?
I’m not opposed to that, I’m just not interested in it personally even though I often set Trainer Difficulty to zero, and the reason is I don’t want the same scenery on every ride because it’s boring. I rather doubt they will do it but if they do that’s fine with me. Hopefully the workaround lets you accomplish your goals without an indefinite wait for something that might never come.
Trainer Difficulty can be adjusted in the middle of a ride as well, you can change it any time.
do you have a garmin or wahoo head unit (or other comparable brand)? The power pedals can communicate with that device and you can usually run workouts from them (without using ERG mode)
Yeah I do - so I just use the trainer with power pedals and head unit and use gears to increase/decrease power. Never even considered that tbh - thanks!
While it’s not exactly a flat ‘route’, doesn’t doing the workout in incline mode, and turning the incline all the way down, effectively emulate a flat route? Sort of similar to turning the TD to 0, except that you won’t just coast down hills.