Implementation of W' Balance

It would be a nice feature to implement the W’ and W’ balance as a post workout or even a in workout information. This metric refers to the “matches” we have.
Information can be found in here:
W’ and W’ Balance overview
Or here for scientific info :
Equations regarding W’ and W’ balance

The in workout request might be against the keep it simple philosophy, but the post workout analysis tool would be a nice add on.

BTW, all info are taken from the implementation in Golden Cheetah.

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Thanks for sharing your recommendation!

At this time, we are not planning to adopt W’ into TrainerRoad due to its complication and relatively young age as a metric, however, as coaches continue to use this metric and it becomes more and more proven, we may consider utilizing it in the future :+1:

I also wanted to chime in and say that there has not yet been a proven model for the reconstitution of W’ and current research suggests that reconstitution time varies by individual and by the frequency/magnitude/duration of the events that deplete it also affect the recovery rate.

Until such a time that it’s solved, WBal is not something I’d recommend using for any training guidance or analysis.

I’ll try to find the research paper I read the other week about this and link it here.

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building on what @stevemz said, having used Xert for a year I found W’ to be vaguely interesting post-ride - sometimes helped me understand if I stopped a hard effort for mental or physical reasons. During a ride (Xert data field on Garmin) it wasn’t that helpful as it sometimes gave me an excuse to give up early.

It would be great if you could find your paper. Since I love numbers, I like to look at these things and try to make them correlate to real experience.

I’m guessing you have Golden Cheetah, if not try it out and here is an example of W’ for a TR workout.

I have it, I love it, I’m using it.
I don’t really need a post workout graph within TR, but I would like to have it live while training with TR.

For now, when I go under 0 (W’bal), it means I went really deep and I probably need to re-evalute my ftp (or maybe my W’ ?).

One example, although not the specific paper I had in mind: Accuracy of W' Recovery Kinetics in High Performance Cyclists-Modeling Intermittent Work Capacity - PubMed

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I’ve seen and looked at this on Golden Cheetah, and while it’s interesting, I just can’t see a valuable use for it in review or real-time. It strikes me a lot like L/R balance: yeah, there’s some information there, but there’s really nothing you can practically do with it to be faster or race better. It’s kind of like live TSS, too. If you’re racing by trying to accumulate 100 TSS over the entire course, you’re limiting what you may be physiologically capable of because of a mathematical model that has little to do with actual physiology.

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I’ve seen negative W’ in Golden Cheetah, but the same ride in Xertonline will not go negative. Haven’t bothered to figure out why.

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