My theme song for Erg mode is Nirvana’s cover of Oh Me (Unplugged) 
Nirvana - Oh Me (Live On MTV Unplugged, 1993 / Unedited) - YouTube all about the lyrics on that song choice.
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I use both - resistance and erg, depending workout, my mood, etc. It seems to me that when I am in erg mode, I self select a slightly lower cadence compared to resistence mode, especially when fatigued. Said another way, for a Z2 workout I may avg 90 ish in resistance mode and find my sweet spot in erg mode between 80 and 85. Not sure why that is, or if it is good or bad. Seems not great over the long term if this was true for others and all they did is erg mode. Mostly just wondering if others have noticed a similar tendency.
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Good/Bad is a tricky question, but I suggest people typically apply cadence ranges (and averages) that they expect to use for their intended events. As ever, it’s good to work on that range and potentially broaden it to help if/when you hit edge case uses.
Related to cadence and tendency to differ between modes, gearing is a key consideration.
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If you are using the same exact gearing between modes, and getting that “feel” difference… it might mean one thing.
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If you are using notably different gearing between modes, you have at least two variables at play with the trainer mode but also flywheel speed.
Hence the reason I mentioned it in the case above. I believe at least some of the differences reported between these modes can be linked to gearing differences. For those users that closely match gearing, there does remain what I expect are some potential feel differences between modes too.
Overall, even though ERG mode can generally allow a rider to use any cadence they apply, I still think it is useful and important for riders to check that routinely in the workout and adjust as needed. That drift you mention seems common when people just sit and ride without considering their needs or the potential change as fatigue and such mount in a workout.
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Today was a day that erg either kept me accountable or blew up my workout. Eichorn +2, one of my favorites, is 2 x 20 at 94%. I finished it but the last five minutes of the second interval was a doozy. My HR was a good bit over 90% of max - too high for sweet spot for sure. I’ve done the same workout at the same wattage recently without as much effort. My stubbornness and insistence on not touching the resistance made me finish a workout that turned out to be harder than I dialed up. If I’d been on resistance mode, I definitely would have ended up reducing my output to stay more in zone, which is more than likely a good thing, but on the other hand I can just take an extra rest day and consider this a pretty tough threshold session. 
I do almost every workout in ERG mode and as long as you don’t treat the % number like something set in stone, there’s not much wrong with it imho.
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I also use ERG pretty much all the time but never reduce the target if struggling, but might crash and burn on the odd occasion as a result.
Does the Workout Survey in TR give some leeway if you have dropped the target, or do you get the “it looks like you struggled” message as soon as you reduce the target by as little as 1%?
Hot take. Advocates for resistance mode just want to show off how smooth they can hit power targets in workouts.
See Jonathan’s latest workout.
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Yes. I was doing Clouds Rest today and dropped to 95% on erg and did not get the failed survey. I’m assuming that there is some % allowed per type of workout that is not considered a “struggle/not pass”.
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I had an Erg mode fail this morning on Chicoma -5. Like most fails it was more of a user fail than a tool fail. Early on, RPE, HR and basic common sense was telling me the effort was too hard. I persisted. I wasn’t recovering after the efforts and I started to get above threshold RPE feelings and my HR was way too high for a supposed SS workout. I still persisted, duh. Finally at the 40 minute mark I entered the death spiral and ground to a halt. Only then did I do smart thing and come out of erg and limp through the rest with what little I had left.
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Interesting that you still got the pl credit. I wonder how close you have to get? Eg you do the whole workout at 95%?
I expected not to after rating All Out and Too Intense. No more SS’s in my next block so it doesn’t really matter.
One major advantage of erg mode - when my glasses steam up and I can barely read the screen, I just need to pedal! 
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I did half of my over/under workout (Castle Peaks) with Zwift controlling the trainer, but felt I spent way too much mental power trying to do a decent job of following the workout and swapped back to ERG to finish. I could see using this method working better for a steady state workout, but with moving targets it’s a miss.
Nice job powering through this one! 
in the 
!
Not every day is your best day, and switching to resistance like you did, or sticking to ERG and dropping the % of the workout (my personal approach), is another way to ease up on the gas to successfully complete the workout.
If you had more Sweet Spot sessions coming up, AT would’ve made adjustments based on this workout, but still recognizes that you hit a majority of the goals in terms of PL credit.
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I’ve only had one failed workout and even though I couldn’t complete the last interval I still got credit on PL. I think that makes sense considering that I did do a significant amount of work before being unable to complete it.
How do you not complete a workout yet only mark it Hard?
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I’m curious to learn more about that as well. Seems 5-All Out would be a given, or 4-Very Hard at the least.
Surely it would trigger the fail survey rather than how it felt?
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Yeah, that is a great point. Not sure what happened above?
Hey Chad, can you please elaborate on the relationship between gear selection and RPE using ERG?. Thanks 