After reading about resistance mode for like two years I finally decided to give it a try on some 30x15 intervals this morning and let me tell you…I cannot make that line straight. How do you people achieve consistent power on short, hard intervals in resistance mode?
I can see how longer intervals would be doable in this mode since you have more time to find the right gear and settle in, but 30 seconds seems too quick to get up to power and maintain it consistently.
Maybe relevant info:
-These were VO2/anaerobic intervals
-I have a Tacx Neo 2T trainer
-Running TR on Android phone
-Resistance mode was set to 10 out of 100
I can feel how resistance mode avoids erg death spirals so I’d like to figure this out.
You should be able to find you gear after the first one . I mean you shouldn’t be going thru that many gear changes, so in the off you might be in gear x, then the one you shift up 3,4,or, 5 gears as you get on top of it… then go back to x for the rest period and repeat
On the intervals I was doing this morning the highs were very high and the rests were very low so I was having to rack through almost the whole cassette.
I use a Tacx Neobike, so admittedly with “virtual” shifting I have a little more flexibility, but otherwise a similar set up–running TR on Android.
–I have two “virtual” chainrings, 40 and 50t, and a “virtual” 11-36.
–I set the resistance in the app so that the lowest wattage for the work out is on the 40 and the largest on the 36.
–I’ll switch to the 50 about 5-10 seconds before the interval starts, then go up as high as needed (working it out during the warm-up)
That’s worked well for me–I used ERG exclusively for my first few years, but rarely do it now even for long Z2.
Obviously having to do it on a real cassette is different, but it might be worth playing around with the resistance setting to see if you can optimize the number of gears you need to shift up.
Are you on a 1x? I use the small ring for the off intervals and then upshift to the big ring, which saves me a few shifts and gets things moving quickly. I just pick one gear for the off and one for the on, so I know every time it’s something like “big ring, up 4 harder in back, back off to 3 if needed”. It only takes 1 interval to figure it out and then I just stick with it for the rest.
For shorter interval I spin up a bit beforehand but I don’t really bother about having a nice flat graph just push to my Oxygen based (not power based) VO2max, e.g
1x with a narrow trainer cassette but its a mechanical TT/Tri bike so running the length of the cassette is quite easy for me vs clicking through on a brifter. I usually set the resistance so that on the hard levels I’m at the end of my cassette and when it gets to the rest I just dump (pull) the shifter to the easiest gear. Usually I can keep that same resistance settings but sometimes I find I need to drop it on longer rests if I’m hitting a wattage floor for the gear and cadence I want.
I also as mentioned above try and get going before the interval so with 2-3 seconds left on the rest I’ll start to crank my cadence up and shift about halfway down the cassette and then just shift as the trainer resistance catches up, usually by about 4-5 seconds in I’m in the gear I want.
If you are doing the workouts on Zwift - the Neo 2T now supports virtual shifting which would make this easier. It gives you your virtual Gear number on screen so you can easily flick up to it for your interval.
