Goal setting - better options?

Feature Requests
1

Hi all, I am very new to indoor biking/Zwift, having been riding for about 4 weeks now. I have completely fallen in love with my bike and with Zwift. I am an “amateur” rider - just trying to enjoy exercising (“playing”?), gain general fitness, and perhaps beat a few self-imposed goals.

I fear having my head cut off by placing feature request(s) on here with such little experience so please be gentle - I apologise if these are already possible in Zwift somewhere and I just haven’t found the right settings yet! I just felt that some of them are quite basic functionality that in theory should be achievable by the Zwift team with the data that is already available, and for relatively little effort versus creating a new world it might enhance user experience somewhat? Below are a few suggestions from a newbie:

Energy burned as calories/kJ rather than “pizza slices”. Pizzas can be different sizes and whilst I get that pizza slices is equivalent to a number of calories, distance isn’t reported in terms of laps of Ascot Racecourse or elevation gain in terms of height of stacked Lego bricks, so I wondered if there is a way to report total burned calories at the main menu/home screen?

Better options for goal setting. Zwift allows us to set goals of distance and time per month or week but these feel very limited given the massive choice of workouts/ride types/etc. Surely setting goals based on distance or time can potentially be meaningless when considering how different the elevation gains can be between rides? I wondered if perhaps there could be the option to set an energy based goal (i.e. I will burn xxx calories per week) so that long flat rides and short, hilly rides can contribute sensibly to the goal. I thought it might also be good to have the ability to set route-based goals with a target time (i.e. I will complete the Tempus Fugit route in xx minutes). Or how about “I will complete routes with a total combined difficulty of xx points”, as each route appears to be given a “difficulty rating” in the main menu?

Permanent retention of route/KOM PBs. My understanding is that Zwift saves our personal best efforts for routes/KOMs/sprints etc for 90 days and then they are removed (?). I am steadily working my way through all routes on the zwift route list, but I fear that by the time I get back around to the beginning of the list to try beating some of my earliest efforts - in a hopefully fitter state - my previous best will have been deleted as it will take more than 90 days to get through the list! I wondered what the technical barrier is to storing them indefinitely as the holo-replay is such a great feature and it seems a shame to lose previous bests, just because one hasn’t ridden a particular route in 90 days whilst enjoying other routes/workouts?

2

Hi Paul,

Welcome to the forum and glad you’re enjoying Swift and all that it offers. To answer your points.

Don’t get too involved in calorie counting or watching. Everybody burns at a different rate dependent on body type, heat etc… pizza slices is a fun way at looking at it. There’s no exact science to it.

If you use the companion app then it tells you how many estimated calories you’re burnt during an activity so you can keep a record that way.

Again the companion app has a leaderboard section which although doesn’t show you completed times per route it does show you all your times for kom’ s & sprints.
If you save your activity with the route name them it’ll show you your overall activity time which you can use to compare the next time you do it. Admittedly you’ll have to find the activity in the list but you could manually make a spreadsheet covering which route you did in which day to make it easier?

3

I’d personally still like to have a goal bar for distance (altitude?) climbed.

1 Like
4

If you do a forum search for “goals” you will find many feature requests about it. Click the Vote button at the top of the ones you like and leave a comment there. The goals feature has not really been developed much at all and has many limitations as you have noticed. You’re kind of on your own for goal setting.

For PBs and calorie counting, the options in Zwift are quite limited but if you connect your account to a third party site like Strava or TrainingPeaks you can make up for the lack of in-game features.

5

I found the leaderboards to be a real mess, you have to go into world then a route then you can see the segments, unless you know the specific segment you are after and what route it is on you are searching around trying to to figure out which segment is on what route e.g. I know epic kom is on the big loop so i have to go into leaderboards - click watopia - click big loop - click the segment and then it lists them by several months grouped together then have to look in that sub group to find the time it doesn’t even show fastest time to slowest, it’s just a mess

zwiftpower has the better way of doing it just listing the segments in the world without any fluff, if that was implemented into the CA rather than how it currently is it would be far more user friendly and easier to use

1 Like
6

I think it’s fair to say it’s a work in progress Rich.