[COMPLETED] - Please allow creating structured HR workouts

[Alex]

Super cool!!! Right now the only way to control time is to turn on auto extend in our settings and just stop pedalling when you are done We are working on improvements to our timing issues now and as soon as that is done we will work in allowing custom HR workouts.

It’s not Zwifts fault of the vanity FTP but I would agree like Ratz that very few of us can do our FTP for 1 hour based on ramp tests or even 20 minute tests.

So FTP based on the tests we all do is fairly useful from a training intensity standpoint for Zone 3/4 intervals as well as monitoring progress but it does not indicate what it is supposed to which is our theoretical best 40-60 minute average power. I would say some guys doing 20 minute FTP tests that are aerobically very strong can but this is the minority. So all this said I think your current FTP is fine as this is likely the same baseline that everyone is using. Also it helps you understand when you are improving although average power in Z2 HR is a better indicator of progress in what really matters. So due to the reduced stress Coach Andrea and I believe a ramp test is best. If you consistently go to 98% of your max it won’t be very painful but will give you the number you use.

I am not a serious cyclist (with my boys on MTB mostly and trainer in the winter) but my FTP in ramp test is usually about 230 but I actually set my FTP to 190-200 because I know it is so wrong. I don’t do long rides and I have a bit more of a sprinter/MTB type of profile. But still just seeing progress from 230 and having a standardized strategy for setting FTP for training is good enough.

[Ratz]

Sorry other thread ate my free time. I’ll come back to this one; I want to talk about variability in training level HR still needs structure, and to make the case that heart rate as not a “late indicator” and how to monitor what heart rate is telling you.

in the mean time; consider this. FTP is based on power strain guages; Power is a Digital measure of power input; it measure NOTHING about system load or human strain.

Computers are digital so yes of course we wrote software to process digital signals as square off wave forms, looking at you mr power meter.

HR is analog is a curved sign wave; it’s hard to deal with on a computer so let’s just ignore it because not doing so is hard.

A stick shift car with an RPM gauge is analog; you don’t don’t shift gears when you hit 6000 rpms you listen to the engine and you plan your shift before you get their because you see the trajectories.

The secret to HR predictions is rolling averages and predictive slops and vector velocities. It’s really not that hard of math and we already use it for cardiac drift and decoupling post ride analysis… Alex’s brain is spinning now I hope.

[Alex]

I don’t like you you or your vector velocities… It does all make sense though. For next revision I am hoping for something simpler. We did simple now and people are happy. Now creating HR intervals V1 I am hoping simple works too but I realize that it will work better for some athletes than others.

[Ratz]

:chuckle:

I’m a big fan of iterative design; simple is always the best place to start. Blame my theoretic math background.

Ok, so back to HR as an indicator. The argument against HR training since the advent of the power meter is that HR is too slow of a measure of effort because of the lag. So they discard it.

The part that gets lost is that HR is a feedback measurement of stress on the system. So it’s an excellent way to scale a workout approach for the total life stress on the athlete’s procedure; when the goal is to develop the aerobic engine. It’s essential to stay in that scope; we do aerobic training to grow the aerobic engine and the applicability is to that class of workouts. If the engine is busy dealing with other things like Mental Stress, Heat Management, Food Digestion, Sleep deprivation, and Illness battling then it has less capacity to devote to getting stronger. For other types of training HRV is the field to watch as a way to analyze cardiac patterns for planning. They have a lot of work to do in that field but I suspect they will surprise use over time.

So you want to do an aerobic workout today and continue to build your base. You could just ride alow at a steady state and let the software do it’s think and keep right oh the nut. That’s going to work; and if you have the discipline to vary you pattern you can get some good results but facts are when the rides get’s to be 45min+ your mind is going to check out so we need structure.

Examples:

(a) Create a workout of 3 Repeats 8 minutes at HR MAF threshold, 8 minutes at HR MAF floor
Repeat said working every other day growing the intervals to 10, 12 …18, 22 minutes each. The body will reach by learning to do the Higher intervals at a lower bpm, and this will happen over 1-2 weeks. If you don’t provide the high-low variability you don’t get growth you just get the ability to do the max, and it only improves slowly much more slowly

(b) Same intervals but the lower power ones are high cadence. Spin 100 on the low power, Spin 70 rpm on the high power ones; maintain a locked-down HR in a 5bpm range at the ceiling. Teach the body to make high power slowly without HR loading, Teach the body to have quick legs at a lower heartbeat. In execution you want really know what’s going to be high power and low power and it’s fun to watch the pattern. Sometime weird stuff happens

© Stair steps reverse tractor pulls. 4 ramp steps; start at 90rpm, then 80rpm then 70rpm then 60rpm. RPM is the instruction to the rider; the stairs move the bpm up from floor to just under ceiling if 4 equal parts. You actually don’t know where the power will go because you can’t predict how the athlete will respond.

(d) Heat training; 1 interval with fans blowing on you one interval with them off. repeat. (I can recommend $8 remotes for turning fans on and off.

(e) Little ring + Big ring erg trainer inertia drills; alternate 20 minute intervals in a big gear and a little gear. Teach the muscle to do the micro-adjustments maintaining the power/cadence when the inertia is low. This develops a better climbing ability in the aerobic zone

Ok so from the simple standpoint; we still build these workouts just like power profile one; the editor can even be the same… But power isn’t the target output; it’s the target Input into the system. Target input is where we hope to get to over recurring training so we do want that power target entered. We need some extra fields in the workout builder per segment (warning I have not used the workout builder yet, that’s this weekend so I actually do not know how it works now Since workout builders are all basically the same I’m making assumptions)… The fields are (1) user with text instructions. (2) Mode toggle HR target min max. or MAF Mode (3) In target mode you just enter state % low and high% and work of Athletes stated Max HR Threshold from the old schools of thought. (4) In MAF mode you enter your floor offset and ceiling offset for that interval. Rang for each is 1-20. These two numbers are used for BPMFloor = (MAF_ET - FLOOR) and (BPMCeiling = MAF_EF - Ceiling). And these provide the Range you expect this interval restricted to by the software.

For MAF-style aerobic workouts, for now, just prompt the user at the start of the ride for their MAF_ET value (Offer the last one used) and then calculate the values from the workout target relative to that input… For traditional HR just pull that from the athlete profile.

In the future, it would be great if the app could in the athlete profile calculate the MAF_ET based on Age and a few questions ask in the profile. At the start of the ride as if user if they have been sick in the last 3 days if they answer yes scale all the values down by 5.

In the future at the end of the work out we measure compliance; we had a target power input relative to FTP; what percentage are we undershooting that power; would tell use when we have reach maximum aerobic levels and need to move to the next phase of training.

[Ratz]

@dthrog00

If I try to hold 159 watts for an hour I’m going to end up fatigued. Has Zwift given me a “vanity FTP”? I could go through and do a true 30 or 60 minute FTP effort, but those tests make you suffer and I’m not really motivated enough to want to go through that right now. I just want to build up my aerobic base

Without an aerobic training base (and based on your description that’s probably the case) Zwift is giving you your Anaerobic Critical Power; and it’s probably overstated as their test doesn’t have the best aerobic clearing function. Google “Hunter Allen power profile test” build that in some workout editor and take it. For example build in Training Peaks and ride it in Zwift if it gives you a better higher FTP take that value. If you get no impact and it ranks as just a workout, then your FTP is probably 10-20% overstanding your Anaerobic Critical Power

[Alex]

@Ratz So I am going to process the information above regarding intervals more but I get the core idea and being such a Maffetone fan a MAF workout editor resonates with me, not sure how many people would use this. Just need to give this more thought. But to change the focus a little and back to our algorithm and my favorite subject vector velocities

So our current algorithm currently slowly adjusts power to reach your target HR and related power, this does a few things, it

1. Allows for a single algorithm
2. Provides a ramp for a longer warmup
3. Does not do crazy stuff like quickly jump to hard power trying to reach HR targets

This produces a very sin wave looking result in both HR and power. My thinking is that HR intervals should look very similar to power intervals in that you are shooting for square wave looking power intervals but obviously HR intervals will have ramps to them.

So that said, the most simplistic model for the first version is that you just have an HR conversion factor to power that you use when initiate an interval change so 75% HR = 70% power for example, we have this conversion now and users can customize it now. So right at the interval change we go from say 60% power immediately to 70% but then once the change occurs we probably wait 30 seconds or so and then do faster micro adjustments than our current algorithm (now every 30 seconds maybe every 10 seconds). Additionally after a minute into the interval or so we could slow down the changes again although I am not sure that is necessary.

That is likely the easiest solution, the more complex version is likely closer to what you were thinking, having an adaptive model based on vector velocities that predicts the right power based on the HR vectors. I have never looked closely at this, I know these vectors are different for different individuals but I don’t know how much they vary within a workout or a season. I know as an individual goes from being out of shape to in shape this can change a fair amount at least their heart rate recovery improves.

Love to hear your thoughts and if you have any better or simpler V1 implementations. I think for now we would just allow creating HR workouts based on % of max HR in our workout editor.

[RogerP]

My view on this is that I would use the HR workouts to target z3 intervals with z2 or z1 recovery. I wouldn’t need it to be particularly square wave, but it would be an aerobic workout, just playing around the zones. As I’ve previously mentioned, a lightly more aggressive adjustment would be helpful compared to the current warmup implementation (which works really well as a warm up or steady state workout) but not critical. It works fairly well as an interval based workout when I play around with the target HR during the workout. Rather than gold-plate it, I’d prefer that it was just possible to target HR during a workout, like I can target slope or power, using the current implementation. It’s still miles better than anything else out there.

[Alex]

Cool, yes, we will allow interval creation and at the minimum improve it a little to handle these power changes. What you are looking for should satisfy the needs of most people that desire HR workouts.

[dthrog00]

I’m not sure what the definition of having an aerobic base is. I ride about 70 miles/week combined between outside and inside and the outside rides are typically around 2 hours.

I think I could do a 1-hr inside ride at ~ 68% max HR and be able to do it daily. This works out to about 1/3 into zone 2 power. My comment was related to the new high end of Z2 power, I don’t think I’d be able to do that 1-hr every day without getting fatigued.

I agree the FTP is probably too high. I think for now I’m just going to continue combining the outside riding and 68% of HR max ride insides on week nights. If I do that then the FTP doesn’t really matter, the app/trainer will ask for power as required,

I appreciate your inputs.

Dave

[Alex]

I think Ratz can defined this better the I can, but it includes being very good at burning fat for fuel. I believe you should be able to go out on a 3 hour @ Zone 2 HR ride FASTED and not eat anything. A little hunger but over all feeling fine and having energy.

The other indicator is if you have no heart rate decoupling or drift on a 1 hour @ below upper limit zone 2 ride (your AeT, not actually “zone 2”). Another way of testing is spend a month or ideally 2 at very strict below AeT training and watch your power to HR improve over that time. Finally Ratz suggestion above is you should be able to do sweet spot power for an hour or more relatively easily (I have never heard that but it makes sense to me). So you said 68% is easy. Can you do 85% of FTP power for an hour relatively easily? Again, I am trusting him on this one.

My strongest aerobic period I was a runner and I just started a new one now from all these discussions but doing it on a rowing machine

Normal training will not give you this. Once you have experienced it, you know it is something different. Maffetone’s big book (or most of his books) are a great source for understanding it better.

[dthrog00]

Thanks. I’m a keto athlete actually since January 2022 so my body is quite good at burning fat. I know this is very uncommon in the cycling world, but it works much better for my lifestyle. I’m not a racer either, I ride for enjoyment.

Thanks for the support, I’ll keep at it.

Dave

[Alex]

Yep, you are good at burning fat. You don’t need to be a racer to benefit from this stuff. I just do it for fun too and never been a racer. I am just a bit obsessed with learning and have some very interesting friends with some top knowledge that help me when I have questions. Really the biggest benefit of zone 2 training is the significant health value and the low stress / high benefit.

This video Peter Attia (likely the top or at least a top expert in the world on longevity) talks to one of the top cycling coaches in the world about Zone 2.

Zone 2 Training: Dose, Frequency, and Duration | Iñigo San-Millán, Ph.D. & Peter Attia, M.D.

[Army14]

I do not fast, no keto, I do eat carbs. Can I train my body to burn fat during the week, using zone 2 as described here, and use carbs on my longer Weekend rides or is one or the other?

[Alex]

In general I would say yes, but each person is unique so nothing is guaranteed. You can slowly move in that direction and train your body to use more fat for fuel by trying to ride more fasted and breaking your fast with nuts or other fat sources after an hour or so into your rides. In general just try to ease your body into using fat, don’t completely discomfort yourself Just try delaying carbs.

Using carbs on weekends for fuel should not halt your aerobic building process but you might want to try to delay the use of carbs as you get more fat adapted but I would say do what is comfortable and take small steps in this direction. Now that said if you are going out on a fast, hard or extra long ride with your buddies, I would eat in the way that you know that works for you for now.

I would say establishing a pattern of regular z2 pure workouts and watching your average power go up and experimenting. Once you are fully fat adapted you will see you just don’t need the carbs (especially sugar based) energy but getting to that place takes time. Higher intensity usually requires some carbs but keto people seem to be able to do without.

[Ratz]

You can do both. My partner is a runner and a biker. We are rebuilding her aerobic from scratch right now. The diet is meditranian, breakfast by 8am lunch done by 12:30pm ride by 5:45pm dinner after the ride no food between end of lunch and end of ride. 3 days a week zone two, hard stuff on the weekend, never back to back extreme hard 2 days in a row. alway one 3 day time window per 10 days where those 3 days are limited Z2. usually in the form of Z2,restday,z2

lastly on indoor training lot and lots of fans, try and train cool to cold if you are a carb machine that will give more head rom for carb delivery in stead of cooling.

[Ratz]

@dthrog00

Thanks. I’m a keto athlete actually since January 2022 so my body is quite good at burning fat. I know

You are a prime candidate for the following,

4 weeks Z2 base build, 4-5 workouts per week ride however on the weekends. if training z2 hurts ease up on weekends

then 6 weeks polarize
2 day of threshold power interval on trainer, 60min,
two z2 of 60m inside or outside.
two long 2.5 hour rides outside

[Ratz]

@Alex

I think Ratz can defined this better the I can, but it includes being very good at burning fat for fuel. I believe you should be able to go out on a 3 hour @ Zone 2 HR ride FASTED and not eat anything. A little hunger but over all feeling fine and having energy.

Calling me Bob will be fine and less weird; ratz is just a internet moniker that’s been around since well the internet started. Sort of ties all the dumb stuff I have done together.

@Alex

Can you do 85% of FTP power for an hour relatively easily? Again, I am trusting him on this one.

Let me define why I said that.

86% of FTP is the start of the sweet spot, and sweet spot carries the ludicrous notion that it’s the go-all-day pace. Literally defined as the pass a domestique can ride all day.

It completely ignores the muscle endurance required to do that and the load that puts on the system. For the pro sure for the rest of well not so much. So It’s one of those chuckle terms. The problem comes when people run with it as an immutable fact and start defining entire training strategies with that as the foundation and making everything about training in that zone for the sake of time savings.

It’s my assertion and that of the Attia (great video btw everyone needs to watch twice) and a lot of others suddenly it seems (I’m cool with that) is that it only works if you train the spectrum and if you use limited spectrum then Threhold+Endurance >= Sweetspot. 2 is greater than 1.

To a fully trained athlete, the Floor of Sweet spot is below the middle point of TEMPO if it’s not, then it can’t be the all-day pace that is easy to recover from but push you just a little to get stronger.

So MAF_Basis (180-age) as an approximation on statistical averages on large groups of people as a predictor of Z2 upper limit then means that MAF_Basis *1.05 (5% increase I believe I put 5bpm before which doesn’t scale with age, my bad it was really late) puts you in the Endurance range. If your endurance HR range floor; is aligned with our Sweet Spot floor; then you will be able to go out and do your FTP for 1 hour and you can do it 9 out of 10 times… If they aren’t aligned, you MIGHT be able to do it 1 out of 10 tries.

Ok, so these are not proven facts. They are correlations of zones that are giving us heuristics to analyze discrete athletes with generalizations that describe your fitness. Power tells us what you can do this instant, HR predicts what you can do x minutes from now. HR is cool because if you are sick no way you can put out Sweet Spot at MAF_Basis + 5%, and the HR data if you are paying attention, will be like, Man give it up today; you need to go home and Rest… and as your coach, I’d be like yeah got home and eat and sleep we’ll try again in 2 days when you are healed. (assuming that athlete is warmed up etc etc before interrupting the data)

Adding in a concept I ommitted: For power training we are starting to see Power Adjusted for Altitude. It’s not universally accepted nor is the formula agreed to. I find that interesting; yet we haven’t done Heat Adjust FTP even though with have years more data on the impact of Heat on HR load… if we assume HR is unreliable then of course why consider that. Mean while if we assume that for each 5 degree increase you loose XXX oxygen capacity to HR functioning as a heat removal pump; then we should be able to scale power targets for a race profile. Imagine what something like best bike splits could do with that if we actually considered it a valuable park of the data lake… I suspect it’s coming just like the 32mm tires many of us want so many years ago for rolling resistance.

[potsiea1]

I think i have just stumbled on a thread that might be very useful as i look to reinvent my training given that i had a heart attack just over 3 weeks ago.

I have not found any content to date that is useful to guide me through my recovery with respect to resuming training safely. I’ve been looking hard for tools and approaches for HR based training rather than utlising my historical approach of TR power based training.

I think this might be the first useful material i have found, so thanks @ratz for your contribution and @Alex for the development of the HR based workout mode!

[Ratz]

@Alex

This produces a very sin wave looking result in both HR and power. My thinking is that HR intervals should look very similar to power intervals in that you are shooting for square wave looking power intervals but obviously HR intervals will have ramps to them.

Ramps make more sense to me as well; I’ve always preferred 1 minute ramps or 10sec step for endurance work interval changes. Square Bang Bang changes make sense for Power workouts, but I think we don’t think in ramps is because TP doesn’t have them

@Alex

so 75% HR = 70% power for example, we have this conversion now and users can customize it now.

From a build out standpoint; I’d suggest if possible add 3 data fields to the user profile. MAF Target (user entered), MAF_PT, NumberOfEvents both update live during rides.
Everytime the system detects an HR Current value > MAF_Targert (where Current HR is a smoothed, raw, or rolling 5second average which ever you have on hand) you do the following update using the power Level that cause the target to be hit.

MAF_PT = ((MAF_PT * NumberOfEvents) + PowerLevelValueAtTrigger)/NumberOfEvents+1)
NumberofEvents = NumberOfEvents + 1

That give you a floating life time average power level that causes HR’s over target. That figure can then be used to base your starting point on for the next ride; and it gives you a warning track that will tell us that if you get within 5 bpm of this MAF_PT then the rate of change down to prevent a problem should be 2x…(or you switch to 10 sec vs 30 sec step until you distance yourself from that power level) That’s probably the only missing piece from your v1 thoughts. Adding this gives you the pressure release value. If it’s too high, It will keep triggering and it will normalize; if it’s too low it wont’ do anything until it’s too high again self correcting. No sure about the over correction that might creep in causing an artificial ceiling…

Granted that will likely need reset logic to allow for growth probably toss it every 16-20 days and start from scratch; it’s temp solution but probably solid for 6+ months of other development.

That keeps you in the simple model for a lot longer freeing you to work on the workout editor… before getting all predictive; until we build some work outs we don’t know what the vectors look like. I’m not sure if the model should be based on Position, Displacement and average velocity from physics or if classic Time series decomposition would be better. 6.2 Moving averages | Forecasting: Principles and Practice (2nd ed) . This weekend is the first chance for me to play with the current HR function (couldn’t find it last time) and model some workout in the workout builder. Get some of that injected in my Head and seeing what a v1 does will probably point the way to the math approach that might work best. In the end I think we are trying to do rapid line fitting with avoidance of a local maximum.

[Alex]

Yes, I know a guy that had heart surgery at about 70 and he does a lot of HR based training and winning races at 73/74. This is definitely the safer way to train and can provide more benefit for many people.