Kids biking with low wattage on Zwift

Bugs and Support
1

Dear Zwift Team,

my little son Martin is excited to bike on Zwift. He loves to ride in virtual worlds.

He is 8 years old, 22kg on weight and pushes approximately 50Watts.

We’ve noticed that it works quite well in flat areas, but when he is supposed to bike uphill, the bike almost stops or it takes very long to climb even small hills.
This unnecessarily frustrates him quite a bit. Do you have any suggestions for bike / user settings or selecting tracks in order to make this a little bit easier? Is there any special treatments on kids accounts in order to make that easier?

Thanks,

Martin and Michael

2

2.27 W/kg should be fine for a reasonable speed uphill. Do you have his weight set correctly in Zwift ?

If so (others please correct me if I’m wrong) you might be falling foul of the fact that Zwift uses a minimum weight of 45 kg when calculating W/kg.

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4

Hello Martin (and Michael).

Tangentially related, there’s a discussion on adaptive athletes that might have some useful ideas: Amputee, Disability, Under 1 w/kg group rides out there?

There are group rides that have “rubber-banding” enabled to keep people of differing power levels together - that might be an idea.

Further, there are secondary apps that can be used to alter the data for people like kids and adaptive athletes, to allow them to keep up. They’re discussed in that thread, and here’s a direct link: https://www.patreon.com/posts/ftp-to-boost-or-43281802

5

Thanks, for your answer. Yes we‘ve set it to his weight. We used my account but he has an own kids account now. Maybe it hasn’t got this limit of 45kg on the kids accounts. It would at least be a plan.

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6

Note: the minimum weight was removed a few years ago.

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