I feel it’s bad everywhere, not just the Ramp Test.
Think of it like this:
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Driving your car, you are using the throttle to set your speed.
- More throttle = more speed
- Less throttle = Less speed
- Easy right?
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Consider your speedometer that tells you how fast you are going. If you have a target speed, you can adjust your throttle as needed to deal with changes in the road, wind and such, to hold that target speed.
- If that speedo refreshes quickly, so you see the impact of your power nearly immediately, you can adjust your throttle input to hold that speed.
- However, if that speedo uses a rolling average (what smoothing does), it “damps” the impact of changes from being seen. It can hide small jumps up or down and give a more “stable” looking value.
- This can lead to less erratic adjustments from the driver with the throttle, which is a good thing in general.
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The problem comes with that smoothing is too “aggressive” in that is hides way to much variation that actually exists. So back to cycling on a trainer.
- You can change your cadence, which immediately changes the power, very quickly with ups and downs. All those variations alter the power that is actually being presented to your body.
- With the massive Wahoo ERG smoothing, it lies to you and hides the actual variation you are making. So you may think that you are dead steady, nailing power, when in reality, you are all over the board.
- We’ve seen this in countless threads as people either turn that feature off, or end up using some other power device that lacks the crazy smoothing.
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In the sense of any workout, you may be allowing your cadence to fluctuate more than desired, and not holding steady power. I see this as bad, not necessarily because you aren’t holding steady cadence, but because you aren’t aware of it.
- People still tend to watch power in ERG more than they should and neglect cadence. The Wahoo setting makes this all the more likely, because it hides what should be a sign of an issue (more accurate display of fluctuating power).
- That real variation is something that should be reviewed and considered with respect to the rider and their training. It’s not common that constant swings in cadence are desired, at least from a training perspective.