Hello! I’m completely new to this app and cycling in general. Long story short: I am wholly untrained, I took the TD Ramp test and it gave up and told me to try again with a higher FTP. I suspect something is off with my setup (Kickr Core).
Some more background and info: I am working in front of a computer all day, and I need to get some weekly exercise. I tried running and it wasn’t quite for me, so I recently bought a ZWIFT RIDE (with Kickr) thinking I would try indoor cycling.
I found I was not too interested in the MMO/Gaming aspect of Zwift itself, so I thought I would try a simpler app for just guiding me through some exercises, and TrainerDay seemed like an easy alternative.
I don’t quite understand all the numbers, but my understanding is that finding my own “FTP” is a good start, so I thought I would begin with the TD Ramp Test.
At the start, my pedals would sort of “fall” in front of me, like I was cycling in way too low of a gear. So I raised the number at the bottom to 110% to get some more resistance. In the end, I couldn’t quite finish the whole session, my legs gave up at 220 something, but it felt weird to have this test telling me “sorry, set your FTP to 225 and run it again”. In the end, it set my FTP at 185.
Since the FTP is just a personal “score”, I understand I can just re-run this test a couple of times, and it would likely stabilize. But I’m wondering if there is some setup I should be doing? Especially since my pedals were “falling” in front of me leading to very jerky pedalling. Can I change gear somehow, and if so, what gear should I be running?
I apologize for the lengthy post, I appreciate all the help I can get!
Hi there, more than happy to help. FTP is just an approximate estimate of how much power you could do for 40 to 60 minutes. The main purpose is that all workouts are scaled to your FTP to make them the appropriate intensity for the goal of the workout. Generally, things that are below about 70% usually feel easy to maybe easy moderate. So if you do a workout, you can kind of guess your FTP just by the intensity, how it feels. So if you do something at 70% and it feels like you could probably do it for an hour, I mean, once you’re used to writing for an hour without much effort, then your FTP is probably reasonable.
But yeah, just try 185 and just, you can send us a link to any workout you do and tell us how it felt. And we’ll tell you if the FTP is reasonably close or if 185 is reasonably close. But if you got to 220, then it should be.
Generally, your bike should be in kind of a middle range gear. I don’t know what kind of gears you have set up. That could be the small gear in front and closer towards the smaller gear in the back or the big gear in the front and closer towards a bigger gear in the back. But you shouldn’t feel anything falling. If you’re doing approximately, let’s just say 70% or anywhere from 70 to 100, it should feel smooth unless you’re getting extremely tired and something’s feeling weird.
You can always post a YouTube video or something if you want to have us help you troubleshoot. I hope that answers your questions. Yeah, I’m not really a Zwift user myself, and so that’s and most of us here are not. Well, some of us are.
Regarding all the other numbers, I wouldn’t worry too much about it. It’s just the percentage of FTP that you’re currently targeting, which is the actual FTP/current power. I wouldn’t worry about all those little numbers. Over time, you can start to pick them up, but they’re not important at this time. Obviously, duration matters.
Thanks for the quick answers! Alright, I’ll try it out with an FTP at 185, hopefully that adds enough resistance to keep the pedals from falling as well.
As for the Zwift Cog gears, it looks like they are “virtual” only, which seems to mean that it’s only the zwift app that adjusts the trainer resistance to simulate gears. It doesn’t look like I can adjust anything outside of Zwift.
I also have a Zwift Ride. First thing i have done back then was downloading the Wahoo App to update my KickrCore. After that i did the spin down in the Wahoo App. For TrainerDay workouts you don’t need the controllers of Zwift. Only connect the KickrCore to TD via Bluetooth and thats all you need. I never turned on the Controllers, just by accident.
With this i never had the situation of pedals falling down i always have some kind of minimum resistance maybe around 70 Watts no matter if TD app is already open/connected.