TrainerRoad + Apple Watch for HR? [Feature Request]

+1

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+1

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+1 As mentioned above, Zwift has apple watch support for heart rate that works pretty well. Still holding off on buying a dedicated HR strap b/c AW has the functionality already

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This is a major drawback for TR compared to Zwift … everyone knows that HR isn’t the best information to base your training on but it provides invaluable feedback.
Just connecting it to the app for HR would be a start, running the app on the watch could come later.

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+1
Always have issues with HR straps, my Apple Watch, despite being a series 0 always appears to generate a more realistic (notice I haven’t said accurate!) hr reading. By this i mean that when I put my Wahoo HR strap on and I’ve not even walked out the house and it says 160bpm and my apple watch say 55bpm I take it that the apple watch figure is the more realistic one!
Given I can no longer receive WatchOS updates though I’m probably asking too much for any potential TR implementation to help me out unless app is backwards compatible with older devices.

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@JoeX Since the explosion in sales of power meters, the pendulum has swung far too wide that somehow HR has no (or minor) relevance and power answers all questions about athletic conditioning and performance. Elite athletes would love it if their competitors thought the way you have portrayed yourself.

What is your decoupling factor from interval to interval within a workout? From the first interval of two workouts separated by a month of training? What is your recovery rate (measured in seconds) from threshold to tempo to endurance after each type of interval? Early in the workout, late in the workout? Overall, how do you measure your cardiovascular systems performance improvement over time?

If you want to become a Faster cyclists, then by all means, use just what you have. But for others of us, as well as elite athletes who don’t want to be just Faster cyclists, but want to be the FastEST cyclists we can possibly be, there is lots more information that we need than what is provided in TR’s analytics today, and HR metrics are a piece of that equation.

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More data is always better than less data.

Also, the inherent variability in HR gets averaged out over a season. And once it’s averaged out, the day to day variability doesn’t really matter anymore, and it becomes a useful metric again.

For example, if your Z2 HR trends downward during your base training, you can pretty confidently say your training was effective. Especially because that type of training won’t always affect FTP, it’s useful to still have something you can do to measure it.

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:face_with_monocle: I was thinking more of the whole TR community. Questions around HR are almost always from people coming from HR based training that haven’t been through the change in mindset.

I agree :+1:

I still don’t think most people will go to that level of analysis, but I’m not suggesting it be ignored or that it can’t have relevance. For me, and perhaps for others, simply checking HR when they think something is up could be enough.

For example I’ve been using a gym watt bike with no fan and totally failing - I looked at my HR and it was 20bpm above for the same effort in my cold garage with a fan. That’s useful, even to me.

I think we could discuss your opening statement for some hours, but I hadn’t thought of season trends :+1:

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Additionally, it’d be helpful for those without power meters on their bike to see where they are or how many matches they’ve burned. I.e. a workout that has an NP close to FTP could be correlated to HR and then used for when on the bike with no power data. It wouldn’t be perfect but will get you in the ballpark. In fact, it’d be nice to look down at your watch and see

5% Z5
60% Z4
30% Z3
5% Z2

And get from that glance that you probably can’t push too much harder without redlining.

I would love to see this integration, particularly now that outdoor workouts are available. I have no plan to buy more devices and have trouble seeing how to utilize outdoor workouts unless I have the time/rpe display on my watch. Currently outdoor I setup an interval app on my watch.

Out of curiosity, can you explain what the problem here is? I speculated in the other thread, but honestly I don’t know anything about development on the Apple Watch. Is it hard to get heart rate data from the Watch? Would you have to support a custom protocol to make things work? Are there too few TR users with an Apple Watch to make it worth your time?

I think a lot of your customers have Apple Watches, and it’d be nice if we could use them for monitoring our heart rate.

+100000000

There is not really a problem exactly, but rather it is an issue of feature prioritization. Adding support for the Apple Watch would be very development intensive project and would require a 5th app to be built and continuously supported.

We have some other major projects in the pipeline that are currently of higher priority, but as we complete these projects, we may reconsider focusing development resources towards support for the Apple Watch.

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Ah, so your problem is that the Apple Watch’s software stack is not compatible with your multiplatform code base, correct? (If that’s the case, it makes sense from your perspective.)

And I am happy to hear you are open to dedicating resources to developing an Apple Watch app. Consider this a +1 vote for the Apple Watch.

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Out of curiosity (I don’t own an Apple Watch), does the watch have a HR broadcast feature?

I used to use my Garmin FR235 watch and had the HR broadcast to my phone/macbook whilst performing the workout on my phone/macbook

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Zwift had no problem doing this… over 2 years ago…

And yet, Zwift lacks the functionality of a Training Calendar, ability to import rides from outside, no extensive review or training analytics tools… and many more features present in TR.

The point… each company has different priorities and places that it spends it’s own limited resources. Comparing one against the other, especially when they have very different focus, is not the best option. Each one has elements and functions that the other does not.

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You guys need to merge the Mac app and iOS app over to Catalyst and kill 2 (maybe 3) birds with one stone

Hi guys! I’ve made a small Apple Watch + iPhone app with which you can use the Apple Watch HR with TrainerRoad. It exposes the heart rate of the Apple Watch by sending the data to the iPhone,
which then sends it to any other device by mimicking a bluetooth heart rate sensor (I tested it with TrainerRoad and the Hammerhead Karoo bike computer, both work :slight_smile:). It’s still very beta (first test was yesterday, but if anyone is interested in helping me test, just email me at heartbyproxy@jorritposthuma.nl ).

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Hey there I was pointed here by another member, and wanted to share my side project BlueHeart: Bluetooth HeartRate. It’s an app that works with your Apple Watch and iPhone to broadcast a BLE Heart Rate signal like a chest heart rate strap would.
I created it because I hate chest heart rate straps and through it was silly to have to buy a new one when I had a perfectly good Apple Watch. It works with every and any device that takes BLE HR because it follows the Bluetooth SIG specifications for a heart rate monitor. Since I use it daily I take privacy seriously and its GDPR, CCPA, and Apple No-Tracking complaint. I don’t want your data, so I don’t upload anything beside anonymized crash logs. There is also no subscription or recurring fees, just a one time purchase to remove ads. The core features are/will always be free!
Let me know what you think!

Edit* Hopefully not breaking any rules but wanted to share three promo codes for the Pro upgrade. Please let people know when you use one!
JWKA63F7RAEE
NEYTTT97Y336
EFAPHXYW9FEK

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