Garmin = max of 50 workout steps, will you enhance your ramp to step logic? 7 Votes in original post

[Tymon]

Shared by Alex
UPDATED: WE IMPROVED OUR CONVERTER SO THIS IS LESS OF A PROBLEM NOW!!! But it would still be nice to control step length (see lower reply and request)

Right now we have some code that converts ramps to steps since Garmin and TrainingPeaks do not support ramps. On workouts with a lot of steps please reduce the number of steps so that more workouts will not get the message “Sorry, Garmin supports a max of 50 steps in a workout.”

Discussion

Technophobe’s reply:
If automagically calculating the ramp downsample factor to ensure the total number of steps for an entire workout is less that 50 for Garmin export, then perhaps a user-configurable value would suffice. This could be an absolute count of steps/ramp or perhaps a desired duration/step.

eg. Maybe I only want ramps to have 3 steps, or maybe I want each step in the ramp to be at most 1 minute long.

It seems that the existing code uses some type of duration/step…seems like 30s per step. Perhaps exposing that value in the export dialog could be a way to work around the Garmin limitation without needing to completely re-create ramps in the workout editor.

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Speaking of the workout editor, can we specify this desired step duration in the spreadsheet / text description? Eg.
Current description for a smooth ramp:
5′ @ 65% to 25% (60 rpm)

Describe a 5 minute ramp with 1 minute steps:
5′ @ 65% to 25% [1′] (60 rpm)

Describe a 5 minute ramp with 3 total steps during the ramp:
5′ @ 65% to 25% [3] (60 rpm)

Alex’s reply:
Both of these should probably be a new feature request, but for now I will answer the second one and think about the first one.
If you select to “Cadence and Interval” you can put the ramp in the FTP field 50-80 and put in the type field [1′ steps] for example but it looks a bit different from what you suggested see below

[1′ steps] – 5′ @ 50% to 80% (60 rpm)

Not sure if that helps you.

Technophobe’s reply:
Thanks for the follow-up…I realize that my second point was unclear.

I expected that the “text description” of the workout is some kind of Domain Specific Language for the workout editor and is something which could be used to import workouts into trainerday.com

Thank you for the suggestion about using the Type field, but my intent was brainstorming how the the workout editor / text description could specify a ramp with step sizes in one row.

I’m specifically thinking of the GoldenCheetah Workout editor “quick code” format:

Alex’s reply:
Oh, now I understand It is a single request. The problem I am struggling with is adding this to the page not the technical how to implement. I personally like entering things in ramps but like to ride in steps, so I am like you, having the perfect # of steps would be ideal. Our logic now is “magic” based, it tries to figure out a reasonable # of steps based on the size and steepness of the ramp. Most users don’t care that much about this so I don’t want to add anything that could possibly make it seem more complex and adding more columns to the grid both is complex and feels more complex, not to mention we have limited space. I could build a separate tool that is a ramp to steps converter. Really a person could do this themselves using EXCEL and paste it into the TD editor, not ideal but can be done. I will keep thinking about this.

[Alex]

Yes, now that we have mostly solved the 50-step problem with Garmin it seems this would be nice ot revisit. It’s nice to do even amounts of time on steps. But our workout creator is so much faster than other that I guess you can use some of that time you saved an manually create ramps… Just say’n… I still would like to do this in the future. I like the idea but might be too much complexity.

[Tymon]

Shared by Alex

I had someone request this. Right now we have magic that converts ramps to steps. If it is a 10-minute ramp some people would like to make that 10 1-minute steps, rather than the random step lengths we do now.

Discussion

Mostafamossaad’s reply:
Hello,
This would also mean that the “increments” would be equal? The total number of minutes/The total number of steps? Or would you give control over the % of increments as well?

Alex’s reply:
I would say if you want control over the length and the increment % then it would be just as easy and more easily flexible to create the steps manually. I know many of our users build formulas in Excel or even just manually in Excel to create perfect workouts and then copy and paste them into our workout creator. The other option is if you have some common step patterns just create a template workout that you can start as your base.
Update:
I am having another thought on this feature that maybe we could just improve our logic, and if a user selects a common length interval, like 30s, 1m or any full minutes. We always create fixed length ramps. Meaning if you say 10 minutes, it does either 30s or 1m intervals depending on the steepness of the ramp. It’s not as flexible as fully user controlled but would still really improve the ramp to steps experience. Maybe the user could just say select “big or small steps.”

I just created a quick workout example, that having to select the settings for every ramp is painful.

Trainer Day

Having the system just do it the way you want rather that have to adjust it every time seems better the problem is I just don’t know how all users think about this. I think just 2-options would be good for me, always try to keep it standard interval lengths.

[Alex]

This last post is merged from a second request but it is basically the same.