More power needed to keep up with rest of the blob/no draft?

Hi All,

Since a while a have a strange issue with Zwift, I have to deliver more power than the rest of the blob to keep up.
Most of the time I do D group ride’s from 1.8 to 2.2 w/Kg.
My length is 182 cm and my weight is 75 kg, both are entered correct in my zwift profile.
In Zwift I ride on a Scott addict RC, so no TT bike.
On the flats i need to do about 0.3 - 0.5 W/Kg more to stay up in the middle of the blob.
Downhill when the riders around me are doing 1.8 - 2.2 W/kg id need to do + 3.3 w/Kg to keep up.

According to zwift power I should be riding C rides (2,79 W/kg) but when I join a C ride 2.5 - 2.8 I can’t even keep up.

My setup is :

  • Tacx Neo 2T (firmware 0.0.38)
  • Apple TV 4K - Model A1842 (32 GB) (TVOs 15.1.1)
  • Zwift version 1.19.2

Tacx is connected to Apple TV with bluetooth.

These are my Zwift settings :

Are there others having this issue?
Any suggestions on how to solve this?

Looking at w/kg on a flat road won’t tell you much. You need to look at power numbers. also 0.3 is not that much since you are light.

It take a bit of time to learn how to surf the blob, over time you will learn how to ride with the least amount of power and still stay in the pack.

The flat is not the biggest problem.

It is downhill, that i need to do more than 1.5 w/kg to keep up.
You would expect that downhill would feel lighter than uphill, but that isn’t true for me.

the same is true about w/kg on the downhill. on a downhill gravity work for the heavy riders so the w/kg will look even more skewed.

But it should not if you have a ride leader of 66 kg or less

What event was that. That way we can compare the power number.

In today’s SZR Endurance Ride - 100 km (04/12/2021 08:00 - Belgian time)

I looked at that one but there was a few leaders and sweepers.

Can you tell me what you exactly need, so i can make sure i have the correct things for the next ride?

This is an interesting observation. Have you tried different trainer difficulty settings in the zwift menu? Maybe try it at 50% and see if there is a difference.

Can give it a try.

But from everything I read from it, it should not make any difference.

For the uphill it would change the frequency of shifting if i’m correct.
For downhill the Tacx Neo 2t will only give 50% of the downhill assistance if i’m correct.

Zwift also halves the downhill gradient, so a -4 will feel like a -2 at 100% trainer difficulty and a -1 at 50%

Check Zwiftalizer (website) and analyse your logfile is there. Zwift is buggy when your machine doesn’t run smoothly as then it might not recognize other riders being there and thus doesn’t provide you draft. Should be visible in low fps with the analyzer.

Problem is I can’t access the logfiles it’s an Apple TV.

swap bike to a TT frame then swap back to a road bike, see if that fixes it

Today I did two changes.

Like Ben proposed, first switched to a TT bike and the back to my Scott Addict RC.

And set the trainer difficulty to 50%.

During the two rides I did today I had no problems following the blob during the descents.

But the riding uphill was way less realistic a incline of 6% feels like a small bump in the road and there is no need to shift.

That is a real bummer for me, I know you still have to put out the watts to get up to incline.

But you lose the realism of biking.

Maybe if someone off the Zwift developers team watch these forums it could be an idea to use different trainer difficulty’s for uphill and downhill?

Just my 2 cents.

i have to change gear for a 1% incline @ 50% XD
multiple times for 6%

something sounds bodged with ur trainer cos it costs way more than mine and has way higher max. resistance. or maybe that’s part of the problem - cos 6% is nothing compared to ur trainers max of 25%. dno. :confused:

p.s. they alrdy do use different difficulties for uphill and downhill, downhill is only 50% of the stated gradient (so u dont spin out at high % difficulty cos resistance goes too ez).

I know they do it different uphill and downhill.

What i meant was make it user controllable for both uphill and downhill.

So i could choose 100% difficulty uphill and 50% downhill

Have you by any chance been using ERG in Zwift recently? Zwift always worked correctly for me until I applied ERG. Afterwards it seemed as if that setting continued to work partially. I weigh 88kg-90kg (195-200 pounds) and have to pedal hard uphill. However, after using ERG, the feeling of slopes no longer matched. Sometimes I had to pedal harder downhill than uphill. In the Fuego flats there are a few gentle slopes and it felt that they were moved and popped up where the flat was supposed to be. That lasted for several days and I had already tried in all sorts of ways to remedy it. It eventually disappeared for no apparent reason.

No I haven’t been using EGR mode for months now.

But with the changing of the Trainer difficulty to 50% it got a lot better for me, at least for the last 4 rides.

Today I will do two more and see what they give