Problem: 5 second spinups in ERG with power at 3s

I rode Ebbetts yesterday with it’s 5 second spinups . I use ERG mode and have the power at the 3s averaging. That doesn’t seem to give an accurate reading. I am guessing it’s the 3s power averaging combined with only 5 seconds of spinup interval. There was no perfect cadence/power ratio to hit the marks.
Going hard with cadence pushed the power reading above the required 400 mark, but then my accelerating cadence caused the power needed to fall to 230 because of ERG mode. The lower 230 reading was recorded as my effort. Then I tried adding power strongly but slower to let the sensors keep up but with only 5 seconds for the interval, I only attained about 320 - 340.
I use a very old and cheap component city bike on the trainer so ERG mode saves me from it’s archaic shifting. It seems to me the Ebbetts ride is not useful in ERG mode. What setting am I missing?

there is no magical setting. 5s bursts are simply too short for erg mode to catch up. The plus side is you do not miss anything - the only purpoise of these burtst is to activate more muscles and by going sharp over FTP it is enough.

like @jarsson said, don’t bother looking at power during those bursts. Just go hard. Here are the goals from Ebbetts:

Ebbetts also aims to increase your ability to generate a lot of power in a very short period of time via increases in how much muscle you can activate as well as how quickly you can do it.

These muscle-activating tags are short enough to avoid overwhelming your muscles as long as a quick cadence is utilized, so spin quickly through the bursts and then promptly return to your pre-burst cadence.

Try to keep your cadence above 85rpm during the majority of the intervals and then as fast as you can control during the bursts, ideally above 110rpm.

Its neuromuscular training, teaching your brain and your muscles to get better at quickly recruiting more muscle fibers. So go hard and quick for 5 seconds, and then drop back to high sweet spot power at previous cadence. Easy.

1 Like

Cadence is paramount for efforts like these, it wouldn’t hurt to checkin with the support team (support@trainerroad.com) so they can take a look at the internal ride log from this workout and confirm that ERG mode is responding as it should, and so they can look at your cadence before/during these efforts to see if an adjustment could help quicken the response time!

2 Likes

Thank you. I was overthinking this and I will follow your advice.

Coincidentally I had Ebbetts yesterday as well - guess we’re SSBMVII buddies!

While I almost exclusively ride in ERG mode, I rode Ebbetts in standard mode, for exactly the reason you are describing. I rode in one gear at 80rpm for the recoveries, then shifted two gears down the cassette and spun up to 95 or so for the steady state. For the spikes, I held the same gear, but spun up aggressively, not paying particular attention to the actual displayed wattage.

There is definitely a component of unfamiliar cognitive load from managing the steady efforts myself, rather than relying on ERG to do that, it was actually a nice change!

Given your comment about wanting to avoid shifting during a workout, you could find the right gear for the steady state sweetspot work, stay in the same gear and spin up for the spikes, and then flip on ERG for the recovery valleys. That way you get more linear response for the spikes while still avoiding shifting.

2 Likes

Thank you. I can probably try a one to two gear change and see how it works.