How often do you stop riding during indoor workout?

I am not a fan that AI FTP is so sensitive to stopping workouts. I stop almost every workout. Whether it is I dropped an earbud/towel, need to refill water, grab phone charger, give my bottom a break, get a phone call, intensity, etc., I stop nearly every ride. I am wondering if I am in the norm or not.

How often do you stop during an indoor workout?

  • Never
  • Rarely (couple times a month)
  • Often (once a week)
  • Most workouts
  • Every workout

0 voters

However, I would say I stop due to intensity less than 10% of the time. So when you stop, is it most likely due to:

  • Intensity
  • Other

0 voters

I normally stop during rest intervals to use the bathroom. If I stop during an interval it’s because it’s too hard. I don’t think your future AI ftp will be knocked down for rest periods.

13 Likes

never for reasons other than I failed.

11 Likes

Proper preparation means not having to stop a workout.

I use loudspeakers for sound so there are no earbuds to drop
I have spare bottle and foods on a shelf I can reach from the bike during my workouts
Always plug my device into a charger before I start a workout
Used wired connections where possible to avoid dropouts i.e. for getting sound to my speakers and visuals to my big screen.
Toilet break before I start, If i need to stop for a pee during a 2hr workout (max I’m prepared to do indoors) I’m drinking too much or not got enough salt in my bottles.
The phone can wait. I don’t work in critical industry that means I have to answer out of hour calls.

25 Likes

tend to agree. my ear buds have over the ear hooks. I have literally 5-6 bottles filled around me. Always have 2-3 towels depending on duration. phone charger permanently on the stand. standing intervals to maintain comfort. For zwift centuries, I don’t mind a break at the 100km mark or something, but for an hour or two, I don’t expect to stop.

3 Likes

Most rides, but predominantly because a warm up makes me need to go to the toilet - it’s probably psychosomatic, but five minutes in to a lot of rides i want to pee, even I’m also feeling slightly dehydrated.

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I don’t ever stop an indoor workout unless I abandon it. If I abandon I usually try again in evening or next day depending on scheduling. Abandon it usually means I’m not hitting the on intervals as not sufficiently recovered etc and need more rest before attempting it again.

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The majority of workouts probably, but never during work intervalls, and never for longer than 2min at most. I’d stop outdoors because of lights, traffic etc, so can’t see why you shouldn’t stop indoors.

8 Likes

Never (unless I’m quitting early ;-). It bugs the crap out of me even stopping for a few seconds to pick up a dropped towel. In an entire year of indoor rides I might get off and back on the bike during a workout 3 times or so.

I very rarely ride super long indoors though. If I’m going over 2 hours I might stop to refill bottles. But even that would only happen because I messed up my planning.

It’s not that I am Mr. tough guy, rather, experience has taught me that my odds of getting back on the bike if I get off mid workout are low. A man has to know his weaknesses :slight_smile:

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Usually the only reason I stop is if my kids are about to burn the house down. :laughing:

12 Likes

Depends how long the indoor ride is, and if I need to get off the bike for any reason it’s not an issue. Not that I consider this however you led with it - my ā€œAI FTPā€ isn’t TR, and my eFTP/mFTP isn’t affected by stops.

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  • I assume you are actually talking about AT (Adaptive Training) since that is directly connected to workouts and the surveys at the end of them? Just trying to make sure we are discussing the related TR feature mentioned here.

  • Presumably you are getting some sort of struggle or fail flagged from your frequent stops?

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Ive jumped on the trainer a few times only to notice I’ve forgotten something, I might jump of to get that. But ordinarily I don’t plan on stopping.

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I stop for bio breaks once in a while. Always on the recovery interval. The only times I can think of that I’ve stopped in the middle of something intense was during Disaster, or when I failed.

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I stop for tissues (happened yesterday… damn colds seem to last forever lately), moving my ANT plug to a slightly better spot to make the connection better for TR (nothing worse than it dropping at the end of a vo2 effort and not going back down to recovery effort right away), picking up dropped bottles, and rarely the intensity. I also giggle at the instructions to pedal backwards or skip intervals. I think my app will pause the workout and pick right up where I left off.

  • That is setting and device related.

  • If you turn this setting off, it will continue to run the workout even if you coast or backpedal. That is what the workout text is relating to.

  • So it’s worth a test in the other setting if you are aiming to try something different. But keep in mind the new need to manually hit the Pause if/when desired with this set to Off.

9 Likes

Thank you very much!

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That’s exactly what I do, and thus Adaptive doesn’t say I’m pausing. I’ll use the feedback to tell it if I have paused too much for reasons that aren’t me just randomly stopping.

2 Likes

If I stop during a ā€˜hard’ workout (sweet spot or above) its because of failure to complete an interval. This hasn’t happened in the past six months - maybe a handful of times a year I do intervals that push me to failure. I’ve certainly just jinxed myself into failing something this coming week

I do, pretty consistently, stop during ā€˜easy’ workouts (endurance or tempo) to use the bathroom. In the picture below you can see the slight HR drop from when I paused and resumed. I was off the bike maybe 2-3 minutes total at around the 3:30 mark. This has never, to my knowledge, impacted my progressions in the TR ecosystem, and it certainly doesn’t impact the actual physical adaptations I’m going for in workouts like this

ETA: I don’t like the pause functionality - so I actually go to the device screen in the desktop app - which functionally pauses the workout. When I come back I can start pedaling and the trainer gets to the desired power after 4-5 seconds and then I can go back to the workout page and it automatically resumes

If I do a mini-pause, it’s during a rest interval or endurance ride.

It’s one of two things usually:

  1. Fan adjustment: Right now it’s too cold to start with the fan on
  2. Entertainment adjustment: i.e. if a YouTube video is really boring… :grin: I try to curate my YT queue before starting a workout and that helps.

I didn’t notice these little breaks affected anything. Are they affecting AT? I try to be quick on these mini-pauses and they don’t seem to trigger the survey at the end saying: ā€œWhy didn’t you finish your workoutā€, which I would expect would affect AT.

Very rarely, I fail a workout due to feeling bad/workout being too hard - then I’ll just end it early. In that case, I do get the ā€œWhy didn’t you finishā€ survey. But that never seems to happen now with AI FTP detection! Also, at the moment I’m just using ā€œTrain Nowā€ rather than a focused plan.

1 Like