Does TrainerRoad have a stabilizer? The wattage is fixed at certain numbers and varies very little

Equipment
1

I train outdoors on a road bike with Favero pedals, a power meter, and a Garmin 520 Plus GPS, but I’m wondering why the power output barely varies. I don’t know if TrainerRoad is stabilizing it or if something is wrong.
When I upload a workout from the app to my GPS, during the exercise, for example, if I have to ride for 10 minutes at 140-180 watts, it stays at a certain value, like 170 watts, and varies very little: 169-170-171-170-169-170-171. It stays like that for the entire 10 minutes, fluctuating within those numbers. But if I switch to my own screen, the power output varies: 180-160-150-180-175 watts… meaning it’s using the 3-second interval I’ve set.

I tried changing the app options and set the power to 3 seconds in TrainerRoad, but it’s still the same. It seems to stabilize at a certain number and doesn’t change. I don’t know if this is intentional to avoid focusing so much on the numbers, or if it’s measuring incorrectly

2

@I.M probably your GPS unit is smoothing the data & TR just gets the smoothed data. That’s why changing the TrainerRoad setting doesn’t make a difference. Your GPS is maybe set to 30s smoothing? Check the setting there.

3

Its been talked about before I think. TR reports power Lap despite your head unit capturing power more frequently, as a kinda a work around I’ve set up a custom page for outdoor workouts.

Feature request - 3s power on Garmin default workout page - TrainerRoad Software - TrainerRoad

Creating a Custom Garmin Screen – TrainerRoad

4 Likes
4

From what I can see, the workouts on TrainerRoad are based on Average Power (While Pedaling) (I think that’s the English term) and not on instantaneous power or 3s, 5s, 10s…