I’m kind of conflicted on when to save my ride - with subsequent upload to Strava.
First, I’m not THAT concerned with performance (and publicly broadcasting it on Strava) but I DO like to put my best foot forward so curious on what others do.
I have been saving/uploading only after I’ve cooled down and was ready to actually end my ride. As I’ve gotten (a very little bit) involved in racing (such as it is) and really pushing my limits, it occurred to me that I was kind of under reporting my big efforts by including the long cooldown times. My cool downs are somewhat arbitrary so it’s not always X% of the overall ride which makes comparing efforts on Strava difficult.
The downside of saving right after the finish is that I have to go through the steps to get back in the game to do a cooldown ride and it’s kind of disruptive - the trainer goes through a brief period of heavy resistance before it re-connects. I like to actually get in the game for cool down so I can see my HR and power and regulate the resistance.
Not sure if this is an unpopular opinion or not, but I find warmups are very important and cooldowns are irrelevant - not harmful, but it’s just a bit of zone 1 time on the bike. When time is limited, deleting the cooldown time and adding it to the warmup time is my preferred approach. Dylan Johnson confirms my preconceived bias so it must be true.
I tend to save my ride after I complete the next mile for max XP.
Freq after a Race, I wont complete the mile and I will save ride as soon as Puking Danger has passed.
Warmup and spin down calibrations are always included on ride/race date even though they are performed during a free ride warm up (10-20 min).
I start the bike computer at that point for dual recording.
I just upload the entire ride along with any cooldown, though I don’t usually do much of a cooldown regardless - just finish off the km, usually. I do use strava, but I use intervals.icu to compare efforts. They do a good job of showing best 5 min/20min, ride eFTP etc. You can also select any segment of the ride to see how it compares to past rides etc. So no need to segment an effort into multiple rides IMO.
I don’t separate pieces of my IRL workouts in any way, and I do warmup and cooldown there too. So I just save Zwift workouts when I’m all done. But full disclosure, I don’t care about Strava and really only have an account for record keeping (“When did I do that one ride?”) I am not bothered in any way if someone (friend or stranger) is looking at my online fitness profile and categorizing me by FTP
This is the correct answer. Screenshot the results and then if it really concerns you, go into the Strava description to create the narrative you are looking to convey. I know the science says cooldowns don’t matter, but mentally and from a cardiovascular perspective, I find Zone 1 for 2-5 minutes super helpful for my immediate recovery. Placebo, maybe, but if it works it works.
Intervals.icu also has a setting for their analysis pages where you can tell the app to ignore a pre-set number of minutes before and after a ride. Later on, you can toggle this (if needed), so that might help?
You could just do a normal cool down after your race and having taken the screenshot of the results.
Then after it’s been uploaded to Strava, you hit the 3 dots top right, go to crop activity and take the cool down off the ride.
You want to spend about 10-15min easy spinning in small chainring after your hard rides.
Later on, don’t just stop either - keep moving about, walking around, but don’t get tempted to just stop on the lounge, or you end up with heavy legs. Using a foam roller can be helpful too.
From a couple of my old coaches, it was especially important on the days I was doing low cadence intervals. If I neglected that, I was stuffed the next day. That was 10 years ago. Now that I’m so much older, it’s even more important.
If I do a hard IRL 120km ride Saturday morning, I’ve got to keep moving in the afternoon otherwise Sunday morning I’ll have very sore legs.
Another coach I know who has been in the game even longer working with lots of elite cyclists has the same approach. He’s well known and respected in Australia in the IRL racing community and seen lots of fads come and go.
I wouldn’t want to talk you out of doing whatever works for you. Coaching is rife with mythology and practices that have no basis in the science of sport. If I were doing Tiny Races (big no to that) I certainly would not stop moving my legs but if I’m riding tomorrow I don’t bother and haven’t seen any evidence that I should.
Cool down however you want. Tagging on a long cool-down does not impact power analysis or best efforts. If you were to do a pretty chill race with a sprint and then tag on a 40-minute threshold effort, though, you might create some silliness on the curve.
Dual recordings can also be trimmed to just the event if needed.
I am not great at catching the pop up so I tend to jump worlds after an event. If I have a system it would be; z1/2 or joining coco + ideally doing some high rpm drills at low resistance.
I don’t cooldown for how I feel tomorrow, I cool down for how I feel in an hour. Without some kind of cooldown, if I just go grab a shower, start cooking dinner, or do something where I’m generally not moving, I’ll stiffen up a bit if I go right from a hard workout.
I doubt it would do much harm even taking 5 minutes from most parts of many workouts. If it’s 5 minutes of 30sec intervals, yeah. But if you take 1 minute off a 7 min threshold block, a minute off the following recovery, etc, the majority of people aren’t going to notice any dropoff in benefit. Pointy-end people will, but not most folks (like me )
And in terms of injury prevention, last data I heard (granted 10 or so years ago), a warmup doesn’t do much for that. It’s still good for maximizing intervals and such, but a lot of people think ‘warm up or injury’ and the data wasn’t showing that.
Yeah, that’s exactly the thing that happens to me. It all too easy in the afternoon to do the “oh, I’m tired, I’ll have a nap” but then when you wake up and get up - you pay the price (or at least I do).
The old coaches I know obviously don’t have social media or youtube accounts so it’s easy to write off their ways as old wise-tales or not based on science, but these folks have been working around elite road and track cyclists for ages and ages, they’ve got years of experience and they know, they’ve seen everything before.
One of my old coaches would have me go and ride 45 minutes at night on the local cycleway (which is flat) after I’d got home from a hard training session. I’d have something quick to eat then go out and ride in the small chain ring, low effort. It worked well.
Because it was all off-road I could do that easily without worries. That was in the days before Zwift was a big thing. I think it didn’t even exist then.
Warmups do still have injury prevention purposes but also getting you ready for full on efforts. You would want to gradually warm up and not just go belting some huge effort from cold.
But there are also different kinds of stretching people do now as well. Go look at your local professional football team, for me I’ve got one of the Australian NRL teams right near me and you see what they are doing for warmups. Lots of good ideas - they work great.
If I’m going straight into another ride i’ll just go to a nice round number of km and stop.
If I’m done for the day, I’ll do the above, and cruise around doing some down-regulatory breathing until my HR is well below 100bpm and I’m feeling nice and relaxed.
Just because it feels good. Feeling good > vanity.
I agree, it’s primarily about performance. Personally I get knee pain if I go full gas completely cold, but no pain if I pedal lightly for a few minutes first. I don’t think of that as injury prevention but some might see it that way. I think of it as making the old body ready to go.
They can read the studies without a YouTube video breaking those studies down for athletes. The video description has links to all of the studies being discussed. If the science didn’t matter we’d all still be training from the Eddy B book, because he had years of experience, right?
By the way, I think the feature that the OP would really benefit from is a lap button so the effort could be segmented from the cooldown, if a cooldown is desired.
Maybe not all trainers can do this, but I can save the ride, which then returns me to the home screen, and I just keep pedaling away to cool down for a few minutes or so. Of course I’m not riding in the Zwift game then, so there are no miles being counted, but I don’t care about this.
Done when I am done but usually I do my workouts on the AdZ and I coast/easy spin down for the extra 260XP if it weren’t for the XP I’d be done, no matter how hard the session
