Zone 2 on a turbo trainer…

And he kept looking back

Wait – how do you look behind you in Zwift? Are you saying that if you choose the rear view your avatar looks back?

LOL he was outside 🙂

view 7 and 8 i think are reverse cameras on Zwift though.

Hey do what you want- I was out in the fresh air enjoying the Berkshire scenery 😉
Dr ISM even says bolting some intensity to the end of a Z2 is fine.

A Fred is like a non-roadie. Just a bloke on a bike. He even had a peaked helmet on 😉

“Fred” is a derisive term used by “serious” road cyclists to describe other cyclists who do not conform to serious road cyclists’ norms with regard to dress and equipment, and appear amateurish to them. The term is generally reserved for men, while the rare female Fred is sometimes called a “Doris.”

Seeing as this is the current active Zwift / training thread… @robbo1234biking is there likely to be an STW Zwift racing series after Xmas? Not too soon mind, I’m in Gran Canaria for the first week of Jan ;o)

I used to keep a peak on my helmet whilst otherwise dressed in full roadie compliant gear, just to mess with anyone who might notice; but then my new road-specific Oakleys wouldn’t fit on it with the peak so it had to go.

🤣🤣

I did the Ghent Wevelgem in baggies and a DH jersey.

He’ll start a thread soon saying he overtook a roadie

There are many videos on youtube of cyclists overtaking pros up climbs in the winter months when the pros are on their z2 training blocks. I think even durran rider overtook Froome up some climb, and I can’t but help suspect even that is a reasonable achievement, peak Froomes z2 with his size and weight would smash my z5.

I did the Ghent Wevelgem in baggies and a DH jersey.

…and the wrong tyres😉

I did 90mins on the turbo at the weekend in Z2.
It was ok from a boredom point of view. Could probably managed another 30 mins without too much bother but the day was ticking along.

Still surprised by how much effort it actually is, in the legs.

Racing tonight doing the Makuri double header – won’t be too much Z2 going on there!

Weighed myself this morning to make sure I was still “correct” within Zwift. Spot on 74kgs so pleased to see there’s been no drift upwards and no need for adjustment 🤣

I’m racing tonight too in very much not zone 2. Not sure if I should hang on for some finish points or go all.out for one of the sprints.

molgrips were you doing the Makuri races?
I raced at 1910 & 1930.

Finished 12th in both which I was pleased with.
7km & 5km was pretty full on as there was no time to ease.

7km I could play at all day

The 5km one I hated with a passion.

I did them the other day as Robbo was playing.

He won race 2 beating me by about an hour

weeksy

7km I could play at all day

The 5km one I hated with a passion.

I don’t see the difference to be honest. Work to a power you can maintain for the given duration. Change gears to allow for the gradient and stay in your zone. It doesn’t really matter if you are going up hill or not in Zwift.
You can always reduce the realism slicer to reduce the feeling of the slope.

Ha! But then I don’t really do tactics in the races. I’m crap at drafting & if I’m in a group where everyone is being cagey & trying to draft, then I just push on which means I have no energy at the finish line for a sprint.

I tried to get away in the finale of a 7km race the other day- not the smartest move 🤣 Held on for a 🥈 in B though 🎉
460w for the last minute.

I don’t see the difference to be honest.

Thing is… that’s not how it works though. I had to do 264w in race 1 to finish in the bunch sprint. In race 2, the front 2 riders did 330+w for the overall race.. big big difference. Even if i’d managed 264w in race 2, that would have not put me in the top 50%

so back to Z2 on a trainer, I’m relatively new to trainer use and am a few months into Wattbike ownership.

I do a few pace partner rides a week and a social closed group ride midweek with some riding mates. Generally all relatively sedate which suits my age/fitness/health.

I want to be doing Z2 stuff for the majority, and then will add in a few bigger/faster effort rides, within the constraints of a dodgy ticker than requires me to keep away from threshold, so I’ll never be racing etc.

Keen for tips on how to best achieve this on Zwift – am I best setting up some custom Z2 workouts, or are there some useful ones in the menus? I usually pick pace partner rides that set me at around 1.6w/kg which does the job. And, currently I am using Airpod pro’s/iPhone/Zwift companion, with my iPad running Zwift itself, and listening to the background Zwift commentary, which is ok, but I wonder if I’d find the hour more engaging with Spotify !

I think pace partners and group rides are great.

You could set long intervals at a chosen wattage using workout creator and ride erg if you want to zone out.

Route ticking is fun too- you’ll likely end up riding a little longer than you planned in order to finish the route badge you’ve started.

I like podcasts for z2 and music for HIIT.

I get my workouts from Trainerday.com, send them direct to TrainingPeaks and pick them up in Zwift – needs a premium TP account.

You can also send to Intervals.icu or Garmin though I’m not sure how you would then pick that up in Zwift without going through the folders on a PC, maybe someone here can help.

thanks, I find the pace partner rides give a bit of variety that helps pass the time and easy enough to keep in zone if using gears rather than erg, will try with some Spotify sounds tonight methinks.

Keen for tips on how to best achieve this on Zwift – am I best setting up some custom Z2 workouts, or are there some useful ones in the menus?

@iainc It’s easy enough to create a workout using something like Zwiftworkout Rather than just create say, one hour long block, its better to vary the blocks every 5-10 minutes or so but all within Zone 2 range (55-75% of FTP is quite broad). If you can cope with sweetspot workouts I would recommend chucking one in now and then to alleviate the boredom whilst achieving the same aim.

I use Z2 workouts but 2 hours in probably the max I can manage. Motivation is burning off all the crap you eat at this time of year – there’s nothing more depressing that having to adjust your weight upwards on Zwift and see you avatar get slower up those hills:)

^^^ many thanks

weeksy

Thing is… that’s not how it works though. I had to do 264w in race 1 to finish in the bunch sprint. In race 2, the front 2 riders did 330+w for the overall race.. big big difference. Even if i’d managed 264w in race 2, that would have not put me in the top 50%

Interesting. You must have had quite a mixed bunch with you.

I ended up 12th in both races with avg of 240w in the first race and 227w in the second. Felt like I worked harder in the second so bit weird that power was lower, but I think the first one took it out of me.

Nice & crisp day today with very little wind so I might try to get out this evening for some steady Z2 work.

molgrips were you doing the Makuri races?

I did the WTRL race, 37km, averaged 278W. Came about 10th in the second bunch which meant about 50th or so out of 74!

Was that in B ?

Yes B.

Right FTP question as you lot seem clued up.
Strava power curve tells me it’s 288w which seems a tad high to me, it seems to be just me peak 20 min power so I would have thought it was roughly 95% of that? Last year I did a 20min test and 95% of that was 271.
Now as a committed non trainer I couldn’t really give a monkey’s tbh but when I do races on RGT you can see the power bar of other riders changing from green, to yellow to red based I presume on FTP so if mine is way out I am giving false info to other racers which seems a bit unfair

For context did a 1hr 20 race last night at 260 average and did a race last week for 50mins at 270.

A final question what even is weighted average I tried reading what Strava said and it made no sense, it always seems a little higher.

GCN discussed FTP last month, sadly weeks before Professor Louis Passfield died…

Louis’ video seeing how long he can hold his “FTP” for…

Something around 270 seems reasonable for you as a rough ballpark, depending on how much you drop in the 35-50min range.

Strava’s “weighted average” is their version of Normalised Power, often a little lower than NP.

Yeah as above 👍🏻

NP/WP are a made up number but designed to illustrate how much work you did during an on/off type ride as a steady state equivalent. The fact you don’t actually burn the NP amount of kcals during a ride illustrates how it is a little optimistic perhaps.

Coggan suggested half a dozen ways to calculate your FTP here

the seven deadly sins….

…er, ways of determining your functional threshold power (roughly in order of increasing certainty):

1) from inspection of a ride file.
2) from power distribution profile from multiple rides.
3) from blood lactate measurements (better or worse, depending on how it is done).
4) based on normalized power from a hard ~1 h race.
5) using critical power testing and analysis.
6) from the power that you can routinely generate during long intervals done in training.
7) from the average power during a ~1 h TT (the best predictor of performance is performance itself).

Note the key words “hard”, “routinely”, and “average” in methods 4, 6 and 7…”

It’s also describing an all-out effort so any estimate is likely to seem slightly scarily high. (Just because you can’t do it for 40-70 mins now, doesn’t mean you couldn’t with training, even if the number doesn’t go up).

The GCN video doesn’t show FTP is flawed, even though they never actually say it isn’t. FTP is the maximum you can hold for an hour. That’s it. FACT. What IS flawed is the method or methods adopted to find it – as in crosshair’s post above.

Of course how important it is to you depends on what you are going to do with it and what sort of cycling you do. For me as a slow, old recreational cyclist interested mainly in endurance, approximate is probably good enough. For a pro rider, more accurate is probably a good idea. Though at the end of the day it’s the same tool for both of us – to enable a sensible training regime to be set up to allow us to perform to our best in our chosen discipline and hopefully improve (though at my age improve should perhaps be replaced by decline slowly).

I think it is flawed to use a percentage of FTP as an indictor of the physiological state that z2 training should be in.

I think a lot of the traditional training plans over the past few years since power measurement became common, have been about raising FTP (and colourful graphs to keep it mentally stimulating). But that stretches your FTP headline figure away from your real z2 figure. Whereas training z2 compresses the range of z2 towards your headline FTP. So just basing training zones as a percentage of FTP is flawed, and we need other ways to help guide the levels we need to train at.

As I said twice already above “FTP for vanity, aerobic threshold for sanity” as it’s actually a far better measure of your useable fitness.

I tend to just use the intervals.icu estimate of my FTP these days or NP from our 1h10ish chaingang’s but I can’t remember the last time I targeted a “% of ftp based” interval to train to. I’m either going all out in a race or riding endurance.

All the methods of *calculating* it are flawed for someone. To the extent that Trainerroad have just rolled out Automatic FTP defection to all users today saying this:

AI FTP Detection is 38% less likely to overestimate your FTP vs. the 20-Minute Test
AI FTP Detection is 75% less likely to underestimate your FTP vs. the 20-Minute Test
AI FTP Detection is 40% less likely to underestimate your FTP vs. the Ramp Test

I have to say- the worst FTP estimate I ever had was from the 20min test. Despite doing the 5 minute depletion interval properly during warm up- I reckon I still had a massive anaerobic contribution as the next two weeks of interval training at that number dug me a massive hole.
The ramp test seems slightly under for me.

GCN discussed FTP last month,

Interesting section there.

I’ve tried 20MP tests and have a pretty good idea of what I PE level can hold at a given time/fitness, only went back to those methods this autumn for first time in 4 years. FTP means zero to me as I don’t train on power but the concept of max sustainable pace or lactate threshold seems simple – you can feel it and time your tolerance to an effort level. What I can grimace through for 20 mins is just below what I can hold for a series of 5 mins intervals, but I rarely do it for 20 mins, only if I’m feeling trained and fresh (haven’t for this round of ‘training’ / year).
But to hold 5% lower than that level for 60 mins? Unlikely for me. I’ve only ever tried all-out for 60mins outdoors and though HR outdoors is lumpy, over regular 60 min all-out rides I consistently averaged about 9% below my 20 min threshold level. Can’t see me holding only 5% below indoors or out. So though I’m not race-trained kind of fit, I had wondered about this ‘5% below 20MP’ thing.

What was interesting about Louis Passfield’s comments in that GCN vid was that the actual power output in training may not be so vital once you’re at approx the right level, it’s the recovery response that you’re after. Seems sensible. If your HIIT efforts are honest and for the right duration and you rest afterwards you’ll get faster however you track data or output, HRM / PM etc

the seven deadly sins….

…er, ways of determining your functional threshold power (roughly in order of increasing certainty):

1) from inspection of a ride file.
2) from power distribution profile from multiple rides.
3) from blood lactate measurements (better or worse, depending on how it is done).
4) based on normalized power from a hard ~1 h race.
5) using critical power testing and analysis.
6) from the power that you can routinely generate during long intervals done in training.
7) from the average power during a ~1 h TT (the best predictor of performance is performance itself).

Note the key words “hard”, “routinely”, and “average” in methods 4, 6 and 7…”

RE #6, how long is considered a long interval here?

the seven deadly sins….

…er, ways of determining your functional threshold power (roughly in order of increasing certainty):

1) from inspection of a ride file.
2) from power distribution profile from multiple rides.
3) from blood lactate measurements (better or worse, depending on how it is done).
4) based on normalized power from a hard ~1 h race.
5) using critical power testing and analysis.
6) from the power that you can routinely generate during long intervals done in training.
7) from the average power during a ~1 h TT (the best predictor of performance is performance itself).

Note the key words “hard”, “routinely”, and “average” in methods 4, 6 and 7…”

8) AI FTP detection

No more ftp tests! Was pushed out to the TR userbase today – sat on my aris appreciating the 5W ftp increase here.

FTP Testing is a Thing of the Past: Introducing AI FTP Detection

ETA see crosshair already mentioned this above. It intuitively seems like this should be feasible, and will become so in the future, but all will depend on their methods so time will tell.

@Jameso

Quite… 🤣

The longer the better I presume. But I guess as long as they are maximal, you can predict it from a power duration curve.

I think that list is from 2004 so no doubt “from an algorithm based prediction” would be on there now.

I’ve been using modelled FTP from Intervals.icu and WKO5, both correlate quite well (they use the same data afterall) and are very close to my 95% of 20 minutes which I occasionally do to verify them.

So I’m pretty confident I’m in the right area, however there is no way I could hold it for an hour – evidenced by my TTE which rarely gets north of 40 minutes.

So I’m pretty confident I’m in the right area, however there is no way I could hold it for an hour

Surely if you can’t hold it for an hour it’s not your FTP?

Just done a variety of group rides to get me over the 3hrs of Z1/2 today.

I have to say- they would be soooo much easier if they used “double draft” (like in most races now: which is technically ‘real’ draft because regular Zwfit draft is actually half draft 🤣).

I find on the ones that are advertised as the pace you are after- you end up having to surge way too much at times to hold the group at places where your particular w/kg is different to the rest. But if you go to an easier one then the pace on the flat is sometime a little too slow.

I guess for that kind of precision- riding alone would be better.

The ride I was on would have taken me to 3h45 but I’m still tired from last weekend so I decided to stop and try and get another good dose of Z2 medicine tomorrow instead.

@slowoldman
There’s lots of interviews with Dr Coggan explaining how ftp isn’t an exact hour. It’s a power you can hold in a quasi steady state of around 40-70mins 👍🏻
There’s a huge genetic/fibre type variety as to how long you can hold it.

As I say- it’s quite possible to train how long you CAN hold it (Time to Exhaustion) but that wouldn’t necessarily result in your ftp going up if that makes sense.

Lots of people plateau their ftp relatively quickly but after another couple of years training find they can not only hold it for longer but could also do say 6 or 8x 20 mins at that power over the course of a long race/ride. Ie repeatability has gotten better too. FTP is another proxy for a physiological state. (Hence the F for functional).