I would really like the option exclude pauses from calculations. A 30-60 second pause to grab a dropped drink or adjust my shoes or god forbid use the bathroom during the warm up or cool down should not impact the training effect.
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I don’t think I have ever seen that happen - I think the issue is that whenever a pause is detected there is a message saying that is has affected your score even if it hasn’t.
I’m the opposite. If pauses have zero impact, it makes me lose faith in the scoring.
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I don’t think your examples would drop the score unless it was during a work interval.
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Brief pauses outside of the work portions should have basically no affect on the adaptations from the workout.
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I agree. I don’t believe they should be completely ignored when it comes to the scoring though. You’re talking about a human body adapting and I’m talking about math. The person I replied to specifically mentioned that they felt it should not impact the calculations. I think it should.
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An extra 30-60 seconds in a recovery interval can be absolutely massive in terms of physical recovery. The following hard interval could be much easier because you had a longer rest period. We could be talking about a 10%-100% increase in recovery time between intervals, depending on the workout.
This is why the AI takes into account pauses now, no matter where they are in the ride (I believe). I could see an argument for being dinged less (or not at all) for pauses during warm up and cool down sections of the rides.
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I think the questions we need answered are, is the warmup considered to be part of the workout, & if so, how much of it?
I’ve been pinged for extending the rest between the warmup & the first set. But I’ve also had a couple of times where I’ve paused, but haven’t been shown pauses lowering my score, probably because I overachieved in other areas of the workout.
If I haven’t yet seen a white dot for a power target, I presume it doesn’t count. If I don’t see a white dot between intervals, I’m free to get off the bike. Typically I don’t pause; I just let the workout play out. If I miss the start of an interval, so be it.
This might be cause for turning off auto-pause in Zwift etc.
Also out of interest, what are the implications (mathematically) of skipping past a warmup & diving straight into the first set? -If we presume that the body has already been warmed up adequately, maybe through an effort that was not recorded. I would be interested to see the results of a TR dev duplicating a workout target as an output, overlaying the two, massaging the data, inserting pauses, cropping the start & finish etc., to see the effect. Doing multiple passes on the same workout, even in erg mode, will be different every time, so not apples to apples comparison.
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Why not? A break is a break, it doesn’t matter the reason for the break
IMO if the pauses won’t have an effect on the outcome of the workout (in terms of increasing one’s fitness) why punish the athlete with a lower score?
Of course there is a threshold where it will make an impact but adjusting for minor differences is just punishing the athlete for no reason.
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To me, “Punishing” is a strange word to use for the outcome of a mathematical algorithm, and therein lies the problem. If the equation is X+Y=Z, but I do X+Y-.005, it’s not surprising to me that the outcome is Z-.005. I don’t find that to be punishment, just math.
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Since I didn’t see anyone answer you actual question @GForce , I know some people have had a bug where their data gets lost or something during a workout and shows up as a pause even though they were pedaling the entire time. It’s obviously a bug, but I’m not sure what causes it or if it’s been fixed yet.
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I agree that mathematically it will be different.
But personally I would want to scoring of a workout to reflect what is happening physiologically as, at least for me, I value that more as feedback.
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The warning shows up even when the score isn’t reduced.
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I feel like we both keep saying this but nobody listens 
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Similar experience just now in a 90 minute sweet spot, :32 seconds of pauses detected right at the start of my warm-up when I hopped off the bike to start my fans up. I had zero pauses after the first couple minutes, hit all my power targets and kept cadence up.
On second look, it’s not clear how my scores were affected, but I do see the message that my scores were lowered. Would hope the first couple minutes of the workouts during warm-up the AI is a bit more forgiving as people are making adjustments/grabbing stuff they forgot.
Edit - it was a 0.3/2.7 Threshold score that got dinged, for two breaks totaling :32 seconds between the 1 and 2 minute mark of the ride (warm-up).
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Athlete Levels don’t mean anything
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What sweet spot workout was it? Are you sure you didn’t exceed on it?
Wright Peak -5
Hitting the 2.7 score would not have progressed me as I was already at 5.5 Threshold, so in a way it didn’t matter in this case. Assuming the “miss” isn’t calculated into a future FTP update. Anyhow in the future I’m going to just discard and restart my rides when I need to make an early adjustment.
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