That’s not how sticky watts works.
Sticky watts is Zwift maintaining the last received signal for 3 seconds. Zwift doesn’t know if your cadence is zero or not because the power meter is not sending a signal. A perfectly executed case of sticky watts will never transmit zero watts or zero cadence and Zwift would never see a zero cadence signal.
In that case, if Zwift isn’t receiving a signal from the power meter (and perceives it as a potential connectivity issue), it should autonatically throttle back the last held power value instead of automatically holding it constant. That way, there would be absolutely no advantage to using sticky watts.
In practical terms if “you’re” a user of sticky watts, how do you abruptly get your power meter to read zero to trigger the cheat?..you suddently stop pedalling (cadence to zero); that’s how people use it, I believe?.
As far as I know it’s only possible with certain pedals
Don’t know about all pedals but it’s certainly as issue with two of the more/most popular ones (Favero Assiomas and Garmin Vectors, see: Sticky Watts: Why They Exist, and How They Affect the Zwift Experience | Zwift Insider).
DQ is one part of the job.
But it still lets rider destroy race
I’ve seen traces where the cadence drops to zero rapidly but the power stays flat.
FWIW, my trainer does the exact opposite - the power drops to zero but the cadence stays constant for a couple of seconds when I abruptly stop pedalling.
Same on my Neo when i tried to replicate bursting the cadence was a lot flatter than my pedal technique
That’s odd considering that the Neo has an actual cadence sensor and not (like the vast majority of other trainers) a pretend sensor that’s just a cadence estimate based on power fluctuations.
It maybe still does some smoothing. As we all know most trainer manufacturers and cadence devices probably did not account for riders using such strange pedalling techniques.
It’s been a while i’ll give it a another test as I only tested it briefly on a single ride to see what it looked liked
I get a reported drop in cadence whenever I change gear - even to a lower gear - for a second or two. That’s with a Zumo. I think that’s just down to the way that cadence is “sensed” in some trainers. I’d expect it to be more accurate with more expensive equipment though.
As regards the subject of this thread, I think these anomalies all show how difficult it would be to have some sort of auto-DQ based on power/cadence
And the proof of this is if you take all those guys having this “pedalling technique” indoor, when they are outdoor they pedal like you and me, without the microbursting. Which shows that they obviously have an intention by adapting their pedalling technique to zwift.
I’ve actually ridden with a guy who pedals a bit like that IRL. Not to that apparent extreme though. It makes drafting him exceedingly difficult as I have to keep feathering the brakes. I’ve pointed it out to him but he does it subconsciously so forgets after a while.
Amén! What more can you say!!!
this doesn’t really prove much but it might be interesting. i encountered a guy doing it recently, normally i don’t notice it but it was hard to miss him because the field was very small… overall the pace was not high because everyone knows how libby hill AP races go, but he really started going ham (10wkg+ spikes) around the time i circled both our graphs. this was at a point where other people in the race began launching attacks which we had to respond to because of the small field size and his HR barely changes whereas mine increases quite a lot by comparison in response to the increased pace. his graph is the top, mine is the bottom
minor hrm issues at the very beginning and end of my graph. i apologise on behalf of wahoo and their sh*tty products
His HR barely changes other than those drop-outs which coincide with the spiky power line. Now, that could be coincidence, it could be that his HRM wasn’t well fitted and bounced around, or it could indicate some other issue regarding data transmission.
it’s hard to really tell much from hr data in general, and him having hr dropouts kind of muddies the water even more too. but he was chatting in game just fine at 160+bpm for the entire race… and then when the pace went up, my own avg hr for the circled segment duration went from like 140 to to about 180… his went up by maybe 3 or 4 bpm
i can definitely say on my part that responding to those efforts was a PITA physically, at least
That’s weird…it seems like too much of a coincidence to me (but, then again, I’m the sceptical-type 
). If these aren’t HR glitches, I wonder what he’s up to?
The original neo has a pretend cadence sensor as you put it, the neo 2 has the real cadence sensor, but that isn’t always accurate either. I had a neo and the cadence was generally accurate unless I was standing, now I have a neo 2 and I have a MTB on it and I due to the longer wheel base the pedal doesn’t fully pass the sensor so I get tons of inaccurate readings, it quite often says I’m cruising along at 20rpm!
I would just that he has a crappy HR sensor. If you look at all other plots like this you see the rider HR goes up like crazy.
Doesn’t that graph show what it would look like if a rider gets out of the saddle to push up Libby Hill?
I saw a recently posted pic of a rider in a Trainer Road workout and the on screen narrative stated Now stand up and cadence will decrease but power will increase x 30 secs. (I paraphrased because I couldn’t remember exactly).
I have Assioma pedals and this whole discussion makes me feel like a cheater if I get out of the saddle.
Freq, IRL, when I’m in a pace line and need to stretch, I shift to a higher gear and stand up and pedal slowly.
I assume my power is about the same cause I hold my place.
I also perform my over/under workouts seated and standing because y do MTB a lot and I’m out of the saddle a lot on a MTB.
