Yeah. That power curve is nonsense. It looks like it’s interpolating at best and/or estimating at worst.
If you can hit >1500W at 75kg with no spin up at all, you’d have nfl player levels of explosive power. Does that sound right to you? Sadly a lot of exercise bikes claim to be accurate but are really rubbish.
The flip side is that on a proper power meter your endurance could be a lot better.
I used a technogym model once (not on zwift). It reported lower power for sure. But I didn’t try sprinting!
And what are your IRL racing results? This kind of power in the sprints is near what a masters national champion I sometimes ride with could do. He was capable to do 1500w peak power, but not at 5 seconds.
Vendors will of course tell you their products are gold standard, but do you trust them? Maybe borrow a known accurate smart trainer from someone else or look for some trustworthy power pedals. I use a set of those as a secondary power source to verify the primary power source is still accurate.
This sounds like you know the bike is probably inaccurate. For some levels of racing you do need dual power sources / recording. How is virtual racing on dubious equipment going to help you in a real life race? You need accurate power in order to train properly.
Your 5 min power at your weight should be much higher than 300w, so too your 20 minute power. Folks lighter than you are doing 300w at 10 minutes.
How man Nm did you torque them to when installing, and did you calibrate the pedals after install?
Ok,
First a quick side note: Matthew, I know it may be hard to read some of the comments in this thread; you’ve spent a decent chunk of change on a nice piece of equipment. Please understand that we are not trying to attack you or questioning your honesty. You’ve asked for our help, and in the world of Zwift racing, the first thing anyone is going to ask is about your setup and validity of your power data. If Zwift isn’t getting good, accurate data, any tips we give you on the black art of racing won’t have much impact on your results. It’s like talking car racing lines when your car uses a different, random assortment of street and race tires at each race. Until you fix the underlying issue, higher level refinements don’t matter.
Have a couple of more thoughts on this.
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I checked out the webpage for the Group Cycle and it’s a classic spin bike with only 155mm cranks, and manual resistance setting, ie the knob on the frame, with limited settings. Since Zwift isn’t controlling the resistance, this begins to explain why your power numbers are so flat. Unless you are manually increasing the resistance when going up a hill, you aren’t increasing your power output like the rest of us, so you get dropped.
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Reading the technical spec’s, I’m not quite sure a +/- 2% power accuracy statement is correct. The website says the power regulation system is +/- 2% accurate, that doesn’t necessarily mean the power reported to Zwift is that accurate. Also, there is no max power rating listed for the bike. So, these 3s long 1500w spikes may be “sensor glitch” where you are spiking the power over what the system can handle either in transition (accelerating too fast) or peak reading (you’ve pegged the meter). This again begins to explain why your sprints are so short in Zwift. When you sprint, do you spin out (pedals don’t offer any resistance) after a couple of sec’s? Is that why they are so short? Also, when you are sprinting in these races, are you changing the resistance before you start the sprint?
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Good to know you tried to validate your power numbers with your friends bike. Until we know which pedals were used and see the power trace, can only raise the caveat proven by DC rainmaker and GPLama, there are accurate pedals out there and not accurate pedals. Again, go out and do a 15s full out sprint to see what your sustained power is and post the power trace.
Again, we are here to help if we can.
Cheers
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I get what people are saying
In real life on the road or on a track with a bike it is very very hard to get past 1000 watts because you need to control the bike while doing it.
But with a stationary bike, you don’t need to balance the bike and just need to focus on outputting the power to the pedals.
On a stationary bike, it is much easier to put in more watts compared to outdoor riding.
I’m sprinting for 5 to 10 secs I stop sprinting around 10 seconds mark.
May be I have find way not to drop from the pack and which could be my main problem and not watts itself.
What were the power meter pedals? And how were they installed as per the question earlier.
75kg and more than 1500w is still a very large amount of power and you’d expect someone with that ability to already have done significant amounts of riding / training or at least some athletic ability from some other sport.
I believe most people say the opposite - they can produce better peak power outside because the bike can move. I think you kinda know if you’re capable of getting over 1500W peak power because it is a lot! And the fact that it is instantly going to max is weird too. Ultimately jus have fun (and another poster is right re: hitting the hills harder to stay with the pack), but be prepared to be challenged or even DQd if you enter any community races.
Actually Matthew, I don’t think anyone has brought up bike handling in their responses to your question, I know I’m not thinking about it.
To reiterate, no one here thinks you are lying about your power numbers, given our collective experience, we have questions about how accurately the bike is reporting data to you. And as I stated, I’m sure it’s hard to hear / understand that a very nice spin bike that you paid over a 1000 pounds for isn’t playing well with Zwift.
So, you’ve got a couple of things causing issues. The bike has super short cranks which artificially increases your cadence for a given power output vs anyone else. The bike is considered a “dumb” trainer because Zwift can’t control the resistance, and you have no way of “changing gears” which also limits power output. All you have is the ability to manually change your flywheel resistance. Remember, the power that Zwift sees is a combination of gear x cadence x force from pedals (which is directly impacted by crank length), it then compares that against overall game resistance (weight, drag, incline resistance, rolling resistance, etc) and then figures out a bike speed. So, your setup is definitely going to make it hard to race effectively. The only way you have to vary your power output is changing your cadence or manually adjusting the resistance.
So, I will leave you with my original suggestion, do whatever you can to stay with the lead pack, surf the wheels and save energy. Just know that people racing in Cat B take things pretty seriously and a lot of the racing series at that level require dual power recording to be included in the official results. And, sorry to say, you’re setup will continue to raise a lot of eyebrows without a 2nd power source for verification.
Cheers
The only way to resolve the uncertainty that people see in this discussion would be to dual-record one activity with both the trainer and power meter reporting power and share the results for review. At this point we are all just speculating that it could be this or that issue.
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