Hi All I’m new to ZWIFT have the Cycleops H2 and I have been riding for a few years.
Did my first workout this morning and did the Emily’s short 30 min workout but it got so hard in places that it was impossible to turn the pedals on the small cog on front and large on rear!
It felt like the wheel was slipping due to the amount of power I was having to put through the pedals.
I gave up half way through.
I’ve calibrated the trainer twice with Rouvy.
I even altered the in workout difficulty by the max 10%.
However I seem to recall a setting during the original account setup, don’t know if it was in ZWIFT or Rouvy, that asked me the type of rider I am and the number of hours training I do per week and wondering if I need to reduce this but can’t for the life of me find this setting again??
Any help would be appreciated as I’m now 2 days into my trail and can’t use it…
It sounds like your ftp may be set too high. What do you have it set at? You can find it by clicking on the pencil edit icon by your name in the pause menu. The workouts are calibrated to that number. Lowering your ftp will lower your target watts in the workouts. Change that value to a wattage that you feel like you could hold for an extended period of time.
Second checking the FTP. I don’t do many workouts so take this with a grain of salt but I have heard of getting into a death spiral during a workout. If your cadence drops then Zwift increases the resistance to maintain constant power which, if you drop the cadence again, leads to another increase in resistance and so on and so forth.
Yes, the death spiral is a thing. I use the small front ring and mid cassette in ERG mode, which I think helps keep it from happening. The trainer can only apply so much braking so I’m unlikely to get overwhelmed. Also I pick up my cadence a few seconds before a high wattage interval starts.
I changed the FTP down to around 200 and everything was running fine and thought it was sorted until around the last 7-8 mins and all of a sudden the resistance went through the roof again and tried to reduce it on the companion app to - 10% but wouldn’t reduce and then the Bluetooth cut out AGAIN (DID IT YESTERDAY MORNING AS WELL) had to get off bike repair the trainer then got back on then a few mins later it lost connection again and had to get off again.
To be honest I was getting a better workout with my dumb trainer… I’ve not got around 4 days left of this trial and I won’t be renewing based on my current experiences which is a shame because when it was running fine this morning I was really enjoying it
i used to run into a similar issue. my misundertanding was that the really high watt segments in emily’s are intended to be sprints. you shouldn’t go into them at a cadence of 70-90rpm, you should really crank up your cadence just before hand, maybe as high as 110rpm, then try to hold that very high cadence through the difficult part.
if you go in and don’t change your cadence, you’ll definitely get into a death spiral. if you rev up a lot before hand, it’ll still be hard, but you should be able to muscle through it.
This sounds like the ERG mode Death Spiral / Black Hole to me. Be sure to keep your cadence up – 80 RPM minimum at all times.
Also recommend that you calibrate your trainer with the manufacturer’s software (if that’s available - I’m not familiar with CycleOps). My Wahoo trainer does not like the spindown calibration within Zwift.
I had better luck with Ant+ than bluetooth. No idea why, but big difference. Proximity may be an issue too. It may help to go to zwiftalizer dot com and upload your log file to get a better feel for the BT connectivity.
I use ANT only to connect to my HP laptop. Every time I log in I reconnect each device (cadence, wahoo kicker, wahoo climber and heart rate monitor to the ANT. Every time I’ve had a problem it is because Bluetooth failed during a ride. Zwift should add an equipment failure button, or at least routine, that saves your progress and allows you to continue after correcting the connection problem. Once a Bluetooth disconnect like yours occurs there is no coming back. You can save and close the app and start all over again. This is infuriating during a long training ride or a route that you are earning extra points towards.
I am experienced the same issue. I don’t have this problem on Trainerroad. For some reason on Zwift during a workout or ride the resistance increases significantly. The effort becomes automatically much harder even on a simple ride. My current FTP is 240. During a ride it’s hard to hold 150w on a flat. There is alot of resistance on my wahoo snap 2. Been using Zwift and the Snap 2 for a year now with no issues. But over the last 2 months it has become an issue.
