This was my screen last week. Nothing really special and as most of the year I was ‘Fresh’.
I went on vacation Sunday and did a bikeride Monday and on checking it was :
In one ride from fresh to productive. Hardly anything a 41km ride at 20km/h would do I thought. But it got even weirder when I finished my ride yesterday.
Sure it was 93km but to go to overreaching in two days … I dont get it.
And now comes the fun. Those two days were on an Ebike. I uploaded them to Strava as such and there was no power send from bike to computer since my bike doesnt have a powermeter. I record just the speed and rpm on my old Wahoo Bolt.
Both days I used setting number 2 on my bike which means it tops off at 20km/h and I have to do some pedalling myself. So cruising through the countryside of France on a ebike gets me from fresh to overeaching in two days ?
According to the support article it’s based on the last 7 days vs the last 6 weeks, so could be that you had some big activities drop out of that baseline calculation.
It’s all in relation to the current training score.
On image 1 the training score is 29. Image 2 shows an activity with 41 stress points (SP) increasing the training score to 32. Thats within some status limit set by Zwift. That gives you the status Productive.
Image 3 shows a new activity with 93 stress points. Thats three times the training score of 32 and because of that rapid large increase in training load the status is set to Overreaching. The new training score has increased to 38.
The question is why did the ride get such a high score of 93 if it was a leisure ride with an ebike. Since no power was recorded the next best thing to use to calculate load is using heart rate. If no heart rate either was recorded my guess is Zwift uses the speed times duration to calculate the load. On an ebike you will reach higher speeds with less effort so the resulting calculated stress points will be inflated.
Either ebike rides should be excluded or there should be an option to manually correct the stress points for the activity.
My mistake. The answer still stands. 93 km ride is a big increase from the previous days 41 km and without power and heart rate, Zwift may calculate an inflated number of stress points.
I am curious as to whether these were actually recorded has e-bike rides on the Bolt itself, or just changed to that in Strava (since Zwift pulls from Wahoo and Garmin, not Strava). If it was recorded as e-bike on the Bolt, I wonder if there is an issue with Zwift not differentiating between the different types of bike rides, to exclude e-bikes. (Though I would think this might have been brought up previously if it were.)
I’m not sure you can even do that? I think they are all just recorded as “cycling” on wahoo computers and you can’t change them to road, gravel, MTB, ebike, etc… until after?
Correction, you can record differnt types of rides if you configure new “profiles” in the app for your specific device, elemnt, roam, etc..
I cant seem to find it. And the moment I stop my activity and open the app it synchronises and gets send to Zwift.
Did another 60km today and score went up to 42, still overreaching.
Keep finding it weird that an activity without any power and no heartrate pulls your score up so much when in reality I didnt even left zone 1 due to it being an Ebike.
I had one I used on Zwift sometimes before all the hud upgrades. But since that still uses the old wahoo app I cant find profiles anywhere and cant set which bike I use.
Well I can, but thats after the ride when it is already in the hands of Zwift.
Not that it is a real problem, since I hardly look at the training score, but was curious how Zwift calculates it when doing practicly nothing on an ebike.
If you have now done three days riding only on an E-bike then you can carry out simple maths to see if there is a correlation between SP and ride time.
Change your Fitness Trends Weekly Goal to SP and screenshot.
Change your Fitness Trends Weekly Goal to Time and screenshot.
Divide the SP by time in minutes for each day. Is one minute worth the same each day?
Looks like Zwift is using RPE level 5 at 60 SP per hour.
Sort of suggested within this ZwiftInsider article on the subject.
This is all under a Running section but I would think if riding has no Power or HR they would do the same.
“ For Runners
Zwift uses industry-standard algorithms to compute SP for runs:
If your run includes heart rate data, this is used to calculate the SP for that activity based on the hrTSS formula.
If an outdoor run lacks heart rate data, Zwift uses the RPE (Rate of Perceived Exertion) from that activity as synced from Garmin or Wahoo to estimate SP using the method shown here.
For Zwift activities without heart rate data, SP is calculated with a default RPE of 5 using the method shown here.”
Bought a new Bolt 3 today since I ran into some problems navigating with the Bolt 1 when I was in france last week. Yes I got lost .
So the Bolt 1 is going back to my Zwift bike and set on 30s, 1min, 3min and 5min powers.
So did a test ride with the Bolt 3 this afternoon. I could set it with a new profile as an Ebike so I dont have to manually after each ride, but Zwift did put me straight back into Overreaching after the ride. Due to the travels home I had dropped to Productive but after a 51km ride this afternoon shot me up to Overreaching again …
No I dont anymore. I just could not get my head around how that worked.
But in the end it is not a big deal. I dont look at it that much, but I am kinda curious how things work and want to learn how they work.
And Zwift telling me I am overreaching after a few hours doing 50 watts max on an ebike triggered that.
Yeah, it just sounds like without HR or power, they seem to treat an ebike ride as any other ride. I mean without any data they don’t know how much e-assist you have I suppose, but seems they could make some improvements here.
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