The Indoor Riding/ Zwift/ TrainerRoad etc. Thread

anything recommended to start with ? my zwift year code went *somewhere* because I day-dreamed and typed the wrong email in so now waiting for support to respond(30hrs and counting) but looking at the workouts etc, recall there being a GCN workout plan but that is gone now.
 
I don't know if it's still on there. It was under a section called 30 minutes or less, or something.

There's a 20 or 30 minute workout that's called 'ATs/Overs'. Always a good use of time.
 
grudas said:
anything recommended to start with ? my zwift year code went *somewhere* because I day-dreamed and typed the wrong email in so now waiting for support to respond(30hrs and counting) but looking at the workouts etc, recall there being a GCN workout plan but that is gone now.
Click to expand...
After following a calibration instructions for the turbo, I'd start with either the standard ramp test, or even ramp test lite if you are pretty sure your 5min power is under ~225W. Pick a route that will take ~20mins if you want to do approx one lap during the test, so ~8Km+ on a flat course, or something longer/hillier that you might need to complete to get the badge bonus after the test is complete.

To gain XP and level up quickly for relatively decent racing frames and wheels, look for late join options, mostly on group rides and workouts. Late join works until 30mins after the pen started, so can give you easy badges on sub 15Km routes, or help you on way to completing longer courses.

For racing especially, grab the Shimano 50 wheels that are ~34,600 drops.

Frame wise, the Parlee ESX is ok for a starter at ~150,000, but the sooner you can buy the Bridgestone Anchor 9 (as short term benefit); the Scott Addict (great all-rounder for ~660,000); or the new Canyon Aeroad 2024 for ~1.1 million drops the better.

If you do a load of late join route badges, you can roughly buy one frame upgrade and the Shimano 50 wheels, to still have enough drops to buy the Addict for 660,000 at level 17 (50,000 drops award per level-up).

But you will often be disadvantaged to some degree in races until you reach approx level 25+, those with the Tron or those level 39+ with the DT Swiss Disc wheels have a major advantage on many routes... I keep saying races should put all on same virtual equipment for fairness.

zwiftinsider.com

Zwift Shopping Guide: What To Buy from the Drop Shop at Each Level

Know where to spend those hard-earned Drops!
zwiftinsider.com zwiftinsider.com
 
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Do you still need to join one of the Zwift challenges manually? If you do, join the Everest challenge when you start as you need something like 50,000m climbing to unlock the Tron bike.
 
UTmaniac said:
After following a calibration instructions for the turbo, I'd start with either the standard ramp test, or even ramp test lite if you are pretty sure your 5min power is under ~225W. Pick a route that will take ~20mins if you want to do approx one lap during the test, so ~8Km+ on a flat course, or something longer/hillier that you might need to complete to get the badge bonus after the test is complete.

To gain XP and level up quickly for relatively decent racing frames and wheels, look for late join options, mostly on group rides and workouts. Late join works until 30mins after the pen started, so can give you easy badges on sub 15Km routes, or help you on way to completing longer courses.

For racing especially, grab the Shimano 50 wheels that are ~34,600 drops.

Frame wise, the Parlee ESX is ok for a starter at ~150,000, but the sooner you can buy the Bridgestone Anchor 9 (as short term benefit); the Scott Addict (great all-rounder for ~660,000); or the new Canyon Aeroad 2024 for ~1.1 million drops the better.

If you do a load of late join route badges, you can roughly buy one frame upgrade and the Shimano 50 wheels, to still have enough drops to buy the Addict for 660,000 at level 17 (50,000 drops award per level-up).

But you will often be disadvantaged to some degree in races until you reach approx level 25+, those with the Tron or those level 39+ with the DT Swiss Disc wheels have a major advantage on many routes... I keep saying races should put all on same virtual equipment for fairness.

zwiftinsider.com

Zwift Shopping Guide: What To Buy from the Drop Shop at Each Level

Know where to spend those hard-earned Drops!
zwiftinsider.com zwiftinsider.com
Click to expand...
Good post. That shopping list is gold. They should get rid of the Tron bike imo. When you look at the numbers very few bikes will beat it. It looks dumb too.

I'd add to keep mixing up the routes to gain XP quick as you can. Register for the Tour in 2 weeks, double XP. https://zwiftinsider.com/tow-2024/
Do the new "Oh Hill No" route in Watopia early on. It's short so pretty quick xp plus its designed as an FTP test and has a couple of hundred metres of climbing towards the tron challenge, then gets some free freewheeling kms after so ticks all boxes. Remember on the long downhills to keep turning the pedals over, minimal watts is all you need to keep the sweat drop points ticking over. If you stop pedalling the counter stops too.
 
Having fallen back in… ‘friendship’ with Zwift over the last few weeks, I’ve just ordered the Ride frame to go with my existing Kickr Core.

Having not been overly enamoured with the Zwift workouts and having got a bit bored of Watopia in general, I’ve been using TrainerRoad for the past couple of years and let my sub lapse. Been seeing great progression outdoors but have come out of the indoor season the last two years feeling ‘flat’. Thinking about it, it’s probably a blend of not being able to do threshold and vo2 at the level I can from a mental perspective (nothing to concentrate on but pain) and a lack of decent z2 base due to not wanting to take the bike off the trainer then wash before it goes back on.

So with some man maths, thinking if I got the Zwift Ride I’ll be able to uncouple my gravel bike for some decent base mileage when possible, go back to staring at Zwift even if doing TR workouts controlling the resistance and benefit from some of the new fangled virtual shifting for Racing as, even with the same cassette, the indexing was always slightly out. Latter is the interesting one for me as whilst the social scene was busy before, seems to have exploded.
 
wonko said:
Well done :). As the quote goes, "it never gets easier, you just go faster"
If you sweat like I do you'll end up with a big waterproof floor mat, several towels and a stupidly powerful fan.
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seem to be sweating more than I do on road for sure but not that much, I got a cheap £5.99 car boot floor mat from lidl on Monday so that is sitting under the bike to catch anything, it's in my mancave so the whole place gets quite cool just need to point the AC towards me and get some cool air blowing in that direction. Only other thing I'd like to do is raise the TV a little bit so it's higher up(20cm or so)

current setup looks like this :



the tv sat unused on the stand since we moved the house a couple years back so good to use it again for something. The whole room is way from house(garden office) so perfect for me crying in tbe background and not bothering the wife with sweat, noise etc.

I got some cheap shimano spd knock offs on amazon for £20 to go on the bike too so those are working fine for now.

my current focus is to just keep moving really, I'll try to get out as much as I can outside but current routine is :

monday - gym/lifting
tuesday - 30 min or so on bike(zwift or road depending on weather)
wednesday - gym/lifting
thursday - bike
friday - gym or day-off
saturday - gym or day off
sunday - bike

so all in, 3 bike rides 3 gym days which may be difficult to keep up but I accept that I will miss some days once in a while. This is a "goal" more like rather than "I must do this"

the idea is that I keep up my weight lifting - which I have been doing for over a decade now and get back into cycling so I'm a bit fitter and have more legs left in the summer when weather is nice as I do actually enjoy going out and getting some fresh air etc.
 
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UTmaniac said:
After following a calibration instructions for the turbo, I'd start with either the standard ramp test, or even ramp test lite if you are pretty sure your 5min power is under ~225W. Pick a route that will take ~20mins if you want to do approx one lap during the test, so ~8Km+ on a flat course, or something longer/hillier that you might need to complete to get the badge bonus after the test is complete.

To gain XP and level up quickly for relatively decent racing frames and wheels, look for late join options, mostly on group rides and workouts. Late join works until 30mins after the pen started, so can give you easy badges on sub 15Km routes, or help you on way to completing longer courses.

For racing especially, grab the Shimano 50 wheels that are ~34,600 drops.

Frame wise, the Parlee ESX is ok for a starter at ~150,000, but the sooner you can buy the Bridgestone Anchor 9 (as short term benefit); the Scott Addict (great all-rounder for ~660,000); or the new Canyon Aeroad 2024 for ~1.1 million drops the better.

If you do a load of late join route badges, you can roughly buy one frame upgrade and the Shimano 50 wheels, to still have enough drops to buy the Addict for 660,000 at level 17 (50,000 drops award per level-up).

But you will often be disadvantaged to some degree in races until you reach approx level 25+, those with the Tron or those level 39+ with the DT Swiss Disc wheels have a major advantage on many routes... I keep saying races should put all on same virtual equipment for fairness.

zwiftinsider.com

Zwift Shopping Guide: What To Buy from the Drop Shop at Each Level

Know where to spend those hard-earned Drops!
zwiftinsider.com zwiftinsider.com
Click to expand...
just to add, great info! much appreciated. I need to figure out the whole system..

zwift still being completely useless and not responding to support tickets so I'm stuck with "Free" account after paying for a year
 
wonko said:
This ZI page has a nice scatter chart https://zwiftinsider.com/tron-vs-top-performers/ - the Tron is a great all-rounder but not the best for flat or climbing routes.
Can you imagine the uproar if Zwift got rid of it?
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Yep, seen that. Looks like the new Aeroad is the best all round on there to me, depending on wheel set up. Although very few courses are like the Alpe or Tempus. I still feel an aero set up is going to be better for most people but it would depend on the rider. I haven't raced for a while but I'm top end of Cat C, big power outputs but higher than average bodyweight so in my mind anything with over 500m elevation I'd be best with more of a climbing set up as keeping up with the front pack on the flats isn't an issue for me.
The zwift insider tests are great but they are baselined by a 75kg rider at a constant 300w. This means that if you aren't putting out 4wkg for the entire race (which I'd assume most of us aren't) then the margin between the frames is more than ZI say.

The Zwifter bikes site is a good one if anyone hasn't seen it. You can input your ftp and BW. You can filter out certain wheels and frames if you don't want to use them, it gives me the disc wheels for most routes and I don't feel I can rock a rear disc. :D

ZwifterBikes

Calculate the best bike in Zwift for any route based on your level, drops, weight and power. Compare bikes side by side with detailed splits. Based on ZwiftInsider test data. Developed by Thor Gabrielsen
zwifterbikes.web.app zwifterbikes.web.app

The tron is coming out top for me on most of the routes I like to race on (sub 30km), some by more than a second. I'm usually beaten by less than that so maybe I should start using one! Should still get rid of it though, although I'm sure someone will come along shortly and be upset at that.

fez said:
You take that back! The tron bike is excellent and shows you are clearly a chad.
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Oh hello :p
 
as far as calibration goes, I did the "spindown" on wahoo app, I keep seeing people talk about getting you estimated FTP right. What is the correct way to do it? presume run an FTP test on zwift, where does the power figure go then?

I left all the other wahoo settings as is, so power smoothing disabled etc. Anything I should change/enable?

edit, did the ramp ftp test, that hurt.

average of 180ish so if I can get to 200 or so by end of year I'd be happy. I initially estimated mine to be around 140 since the last time I cycled properly was in 2017. That's around 2.1w/kg at my current weight of 88/90(fluctuates quite a bit)
 
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grudas said:
presume run an FTP test on zwift, where does the power figure go then?
Click to expand...

FTP is a bit like BMI where people love to endlessly debate how accurate it is and how its obviously complete junk because a small fraction of people are misrepresented by it. Fundamentally I have found that if I do the Zwift ramp test, all the other workouts that are based off the FTP that it gives you are in the right ballpark for the stress they are trying to achieve.
 
grudas said:
as far as calibration goes, I did the "spindown" on wahoo app, I keep seeing people talk about getting you estimated FTP right. What is the correct way to do it? presume run an FTP test on zwift, where does the power figure go then?

I left all the other wahoo settings as is, so power smoothing disabled etc. Anything I should change/enable?

edit, did the ramp ftp test, that hurt.

average of 180ish so if I can get to 200 or so by end of year I'd be happy. I initially estimated mine to be around 140 since the last time I cycled properly was in 2017. That's around 2.1w/kg at my current weight of 88/90(fluctuates quite a bit)
Click to expand...
The figure given by the ramp test should have automatically been placed in your settings.

Your actual ability may be higher right now, but because you are new to using a turbo indoors, you aren't acclimatised to the heat and lack of air movement compared to outdoors. Consequently, your heart rate for a given power output towards the threshold end of the scale, will be higher compared to outdoors.

With some regular workouts at approx zone 4+ and/or races, with a decent fan or two and a bidon or two of liquid per session, you should find you will acclimatise within a month.
 
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