I workout with my phone out of reach and I don’t feel like the workouts spend enough time warming up. Before I get on my bike I’ll start the timer on a workout, add 5 minutes of warm up time, pause the workout, rewind it, and then climb onto my bike and start pedaling to start the workout again.
Today, I got distracted and left the workout paused for 20 minutes before I was able to get back on my bike. I started the workout and completed it without any other pauses.
My workout level dropped significantly even though the only pause in my workout was before the workout had even really begun.
I’ve seen people on this forum saying that TrainerRoad accounts for the placement of pauses when scoring workouts. While that might be true it’s obvious that the current system is insufficient
Why should a pause of any length at the very beginning of a workout cause the workout level to decrease? Maybe I’m missing something here but that doesn’t make any sense to me. It’s frustrating enough that there’s no way to extend the warmup period on a workout before it’s started. Being penalized for doing so takes the frustration to a whole new level.
I’m not sure this has been completely confirmed, its been noted/requested to weigh them different, specifically at the start for things like pausing to calibrate, but there hasn’t been anything official to say this is being done. Pausing during an interval vs a recovery period does seem to be different but that makes sense in that the work changed.
That being said, it doesn’t entirely matter, its looking at the work you did and using that to pick the next workout, the assigned level at the end is mostly irrelevant and the AI is not looking at that to select your next one.
I would say in this case it definitely highlights some issues with the pauses impact on scoring and how they are being factored in, even if it doesn’t really matter.
Why not just put a timer on your phone or watch? But anyways… From what has been stated in a few podcasts and replies I have seen workout levels don’t matter. It’s just a human ranking system. I wouldn’t worry about it personally, but if it bothers you maybe find another way to measure the 5 minutes?
Putting a timer on my phone would mean starting the timer, getting onto my bike, doing the warm up with no way to measure power, getting off my bike, stopping the timer, starting the workout and getting back on my bike. That just seems like a really clunky way to do it and I’d rather just go straight from my warmup into the workout without having to dismount.
Can you not just pedal and the app displays the power even before you start the workout? I haven’t used it on my phone ever that I recall but between a tablet and laptop that I have I can pedal and see power before it starts. I actually do this every time to get a final check that its all working before I hit start.
And is the phone not in reach because there is no way to hold/mount it or is this like an intentional get it away from me I don’t want to even see it kind of thing? I get that the pause and the wl drop, despite not mattering, is the main issue and happening to others but this also seems like a 1 of 1 problem with the phone being out of reach combined with the pedaling while workout not started part.
My app is set to “pedal to start” so after a few seconds of pedaling my workout starts automatically. Again, that’s because my phone is out of reach so that way there’s not a few seconds of dead time at the start of my workout from hopping on my bike.
I don’t have a phone mount for my bike and I don’t like having the phone right there in my face while I’m pedaling anyways. If the timer is right in my face it’s hard for me to avoid watching it and the more time spent watching the timer the longer the workout feels.
People like them, there is enough fall out from the changes recently I can’t imagine what would happen if they went away.
And despite the fact that they are to some extent flawed, a higher level doesn’t always mean harder, and a lower level doesn’t always mean easier they can still be used for a user to manually select something that is generally harder or generally easier.
Just seems like it’s causing unnecessary confusion. Also a little misleading IMO. Showing them and grading the workout with a score makes people think they are used to choose workouts. Hence this thread. If they’re not used, just get rid of them.
It seems like a stool would solve most of the problems here.
Not the weird pause rating part but the stopping, starting, pausing etc.
I understand not wanting to look at it, when I changed from a laptop to a tablet I put it off to the side, it’s still between me and the tv but I can much more easily chose not to look at it and have done workouts where I basically don’t.
That doesn’t answer my question, which still stands. Why show them? It’s confusing. The levels are shown, people see them, and think they’re used or that they matter. If they don’t matter as you say, then showing them is misleading. Might as well just use a random number generator. If the numbers don’t matter, they can just show any number right.
It took me a minute, but I think what he’s saying is that you can’t extend the warmup until you’ve started the ride. He’d like to add 5 mins to the warmup before he starts, but you can’t do that. This is uniquely a problem because he doesn’t have the phone by the bike. So, he’s clicking start, clicking to extend the warmup, and then bringing the timer back to zero so he can set the phone down and then get on the bike to start the ride at 0:00 with the extended warmup added on.
I think a 20-minute pause is kind of an edge case for the algorithm to handle. I might have just closed out the ride and started over.
It’s interesting this post came up today. My HR strap failed during today’s warmup (first arrow), and I managed to cannibalize a battery from a nearby device while still riding, but dropped everything on the floor and had to do a quick pause to pick everything up and restart with my borrowed battery (second arrow). I was pretty annoyed during the rest of the ride, thinking TR would penalize me for that pause, but in the event, it actually upgraded me a little over the expected PL, maybe because I extended the endurance/cooldown part at the end. My pause was a full stop, but very brief. I was really glad that pause didn’t count against me.
i only came on the forum today because my HR strap died again near the end of the ride (third arrow), so I need to see what people are liking these days. But as your thread appeared, I thought I’d share my experience.
You would be better off discarding and restarting the ride after your warm up rather than rewinding it to the start…
Although saying that I’m also not entirely convinced that’s it the warm up that’s the only (or even main) cause for the level drop - TRs scoring algorithm does struggle with that particular type of workout with the tiny breaks and you have got ERG mode smoothing turned on so the reported power is just the trainer setpoint not the actual recorded power.
I’m wondering if this excessive smoothing is having a bigger effect on the workout scoring than the pause at the start.
That’s not how I understand smoothing to work. The data is still the actual power, but averaged over a period of seconds to remove the spikes. Since it’s the trainer that’s controlling the resistance to obtain the ERG setting, the result will be the ERG setting, because if it isn’t, the trainer adjusts resistance so that it is.
