Hi,
I just set up a new Climb.
A friend of mine who has one said, "Make sure you unlock it and set your trainer difficulty to 100. Default is about 50."
Oooookay.
So I did that, but I wonder…
I’m not exactly the strongest rider here (50+ y.o. woman with a Zwift FTP of ~2.1 w/kg.) who rides to burn off the booze and cookies. I have no dreams of racing (back of the pack triathlete here).
Is there a technical reason I need to set the trainer to 100% or is he yanking my chain? I know the math of it, with grades. Honesty, if it goes up only 1.5% for a 3% climb, I’m not crying about that - at least until I get familiar with it.
if i keep the trainer at 100%, vs the default it had been before (50%ish), should I do another FTP test to reset my baseline? Does Zwift somehow account for that in its algorithms? Is there any correlation between the two? It certainly seemed harder during a short shake down ride i did.
Thanks! Happy New Year!
No need to set your Kickr to 100%.
This has been an exhaustively debated subject, but the overall opinion is that the difficulty setting is similar to a virtual cassette. Set it at 50%, and you’ve got an effectively larger cassette.
I’ll likely get evicerated by some for this, but for all intents & purposes that’s what it is.
If you leave it at 100% you’ll shift more, and likely run out of gears on steep climbs like the Radio Tower.
What you absolutely should do though (if you set the difficulty to 50%) is double your wheelbase dimension in the Wahoo app. This way, the Climb will raise your front wheel to match the grade. Otherwise, it’ll only raise it to 50% (or whatever difficulty setting) you specify.
I’m at level 44, use a Kickr18 & Climb, and have been at 50% since I started.