Target Watts in my workouts seems off by a small amount

[Stephen1974]

Hi

First off TrainerDay is totally amazing - I’ve just switched from an old version of Rouvy (called workouts) I’d used for 10 years that they abruptly discontinued as they want to focus on gamification of cycling rather than training and I wish I’d found you years ago! - subscribed straight away and love what you’ve created and this community!

It’s all very intuitive and I’ve got fully up an running with my own workout library taking shape again (the workout creator is a thing of beauty BTW!) but I think I’ve noticed a (very minor but irrationally annoying) issue I wanted to mention.

I build my workouts based on absolute watts (rather than % FTP) as I want to progressively build the intensity/duration over a block adding a few watts or minutes to intervals manually so when executing the workout I am aware of what watts each interval should be. However I’ve noticed that the target is often a few watts off (up or down) e.g. workout set to 140w and target will be 139 or 240 will be 244). I’ve not explored this but wonder if it’s because you are doing some sort of %FTP conversion somewhere and there is a rounding error?

As I say it is nothing in the general scheme of things and can be fixed in the moment but it would be even better if the target was the number I’d set.

keep up the awesome work!

[Alex]

Hi Stephen, I monitor the FB group for Rouvy and if my memory serves me well, I almost think I remember you complaining there about them cancelling workouts app. If that was not you then never-mind I always want to tell people “come to TrainerDay.” But since it is a Rouvy forum I control myself …

Anyway you are right we do conversion from watts to % of FTP. So if you change your FTP your watts will change but, if you enter 140 and don’t change your FTP then it should be 140, it sounds like we have a precision problem. I thought we had that all fixed. If you can tell me your FTP and if it really is 140 that is the problem we can test that and get it fixed so at least if you don’t change your FTP the watts will be what you entered.

Very happy to have you here

[Stephen1974]

Hey, thanks for the fast reply and apologies for the slow response!

So my FTP is set to 275 and I guess it could be a rounding thing somewhere as I’ve noticed that in the workout you maybe take the absolute watt figure I enter (e.g. 100) convert it to a % of my FTP (36%) (at least in the text description although correctly 36.4% in the overlay) then potentially use that to set my target watts when running the workout? (36% of 275=99w not the 100w it should be).

This is a lame and lazy bit of testing on my part but here’s some screen shots that might help you track it down

- workout interval set to 240w shows as target 239w

As I said in the original post it’s minor so don’t put it too high on your backlog

[Stephen1974]

As another thought I wonder if you built the % FTP version of the workout tool first and then added the absolute watts version on after and to make it easier to build you convert the absolute watts to a percentage?

I can totally understand if you did but it has the downside (in my opinion) of changing the absolute watts workout when you change you FTP. This is not the behaviour you’d expect as you constructed the workout in watts not in % FTP.

I get the value of automatically changing workouts based on your FTP (and might move to that way of doing it) but if I say I want 240w and not 87% of current FTP I’d prefer the workout to stay at 240w when I change FTP - otherwise the two workout builder types are basically exactly the same just with slightly different input mechanisms.

[Alex]

Yes you got it exactly right. Meaning the whole system is built on FTP% from the beginning and adding specific watts would require a bunch of work. I also fully understand your desire for the watts to stay the same. I guess the other thing we could do is lock the FTP to the workout “strict watts mode” as you are not the first to wish it would stay. For sharing it ls also not ideal. But let me think. At the minimum better notification that this is how it works would help.

[Stephen1974]

Cool. Thanks.

On the target values when running the workout not always exactly matching the values set in the panned workout I’ll leave that to you to prioritise as you see fit.

And thanks again for building and running such an excellent tool - it’s fully up there with all the others and for me - a week or so in- is actually better in many many ways plus it’s extraordinary value for money and I’d happily pay more (in theory )

[Alex]

Yes, it should not take too long to fix this 99/100 issue. And thanks so much. Happy your are happy. Yeah our plan is really to keep our price the same or very close but in the future add additional products that will be higher priced.