A while back when I first heard about sticky watts I thought I’d test it out to see what happens. At that time it didn’t seem to work with my Stages crank based power meter. If there was any advantage it looks like I lost that advantage due to the 3 second averaging. But, after reading Zwift Insider’s recent article on sticky watts I thought I’d have another look. This time though, I changed the watts display in Zwift from 3 sec average to instant.
After a few minutes of tinkering I had soon worked out a technique to get consistent sticky watts and I was able to do a 2 minute stretch of sticky watts.
Loading the Zwift fit file into Golden Cheetah I had an average of 315 watts for those 2 minutes while the same 2 minutes recorded to my Garmin 530 (I simultaneously record the power meter output to the Garmin) had an average of only 208 watts.
The scary thing is how easy it was to do. I probably couldn’t ride like that for a whole race but it would be so easy to use sticky watts up a short hill or maybe if you found yourself getting dropped. I think I will just set the watts display back to 3 sec average to avoid the temptation.
It would be nice if Zwift could do something about this though. Maybe if Zwift detects someone dropping to zero watts every 3 or 4 seconds they could assume that they aren’t having random dropouts but they were deliberately trying to game the system.
well back in the good ol Zwiftpower days if anyone got caught doing this in a podium spot they would get absolutely RAILED on the forums for it, not so sure about now 
but yea it’s very obvious to see when someone is doing it in the post-race data, and is currently up to event organisers to manage / administer sancitons for.
Very annoying when you see someone exploiting this.
Annoying, you say? This (see below) rode away and stayed away from our Cat C Zwift Games field this morning.
They were a minute slower up the Volcano than I was, presumably because they had to revert to a conventional pedalling technique and the climb was basically their lowest power for the whole ride.
Even had the nerve to put a gold trophy on their Strava.
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I wonder if any of these sticky watts examples are actually someone on a rowing machine with Zwift.
Reason I mention this is that Zwift is suggested as a compatible app from the concept 2 website: Indoor rowing apps, bike racing apps | Concept2 Performance Monitor
And I would think if someone was using a rower with Zwift it would look like some (not all) of the cases that are shared as sticky watts.
I’ve never tried to use Zwift with a rower, so not actually sure if the power curve does come out to look like these or not.
I’ll leave the sticky watts speculation to others, however this is a rider who was apparently B last year and now is B again. When allowed to race in D they took that opportunity, so not exactly a classy actor.
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Had a concept2, it only worked for running with painsled,… Unless something else has been released.
