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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ah, OK. Wahoo may be a bit wack. Anyway, I figure if the ERG mode control loop is working correctly, I might be able to go above or below the set power for a few seconds, but I couldn’t substantively change the average power because the trainer would always correct it. For me, it’s academic as I don’t use smoothing, not because I think it’s deleterious, but because I prefer the look of a spiky trace.
Glad I read this thread. I did not realize the pause was affecting the level of the workout. I took a minute near the beginning of my workout to set up the fan (forgot to do it before I started). Later I used a gap between intervals sets to refill my bottle. Lesson learned.
Just mentioning this since we see so many “I forgot to set up the fan” posts. I use a cheap remote and plug. I leave the remote on the tray where I set my phone and tv remote and this will never be a problem. It also means the fan doesn’t have to be on during warmup.
I’ve just had this issue and it threw out my AI FTP detection. I always set up my laptop and have the workout ready to go before I swing a leg over the bike, as I’m sure many do. Sometimes I procrastinate (especially if it’s a Vo2 Max workout ) and the ‘pause time’ is therefore significant.
This was the response from TR:
“We recently made some updates to the way that workout levels are calculated to account for pauses, as well as going above or below the target power… With regard to your AI FTP Detection, it looks like this pause was making a slight difference”
The ‘slight difference’ was a 10w decrease in my FTP when I have been training consistently for 8-10hrs a week since my last FTP detection. Also, subjectively the workouts have felt easy at that FTP and I know I need to bump it up a little to get the most out of my training, so a 10w decrease is just wrong.
There’s no way to see what’s causing this error without contacting support so I feel like this is a poor implementation of these changes. Not sure if it’s just me, but I feel like the AI FTP detection was pretty good up until they released this update a few months ago.
