After listening to part 2 of the Steve Neil interview on the Jack Burke podcast, I really want to start using XSS buckets within Xert.
I’ve searched around the forum and FB group and seen some people mention how they love using this great feature, but I think it would be a great idea to have one place where people share how they are currently using XSS Buckets.
I can also start by asking if people solely try filling up the buckets during a ride or do you also keep in mind the focus duration and/or specificity.
As a mountain biker I find buckets a great feature for outdoor rides. I can use climbs to fun descents to fill the buckets and stop when they are full. I did a ride at one of our local trail centres just after Christmas and did repeats of two of the best descents to fill my high power bucket on the climbs to them. Without buckets, I would have done the last descent maybe two times, but to fill the buckets I had to ride up the climb to it five times! More tired afterwards, but had a lot of fun seasoning the descent :). On LIT days I just spin around the country lanes and easy off-road sections until that bucket is filled. It does make training more fun.
I did wonder about the way I filled the buckets, in that, does a 3x10 minute at VO2 make a difference if I go and do a ride with 4x2 minutes and 4x3 minutes at the same power. But I realise that XERT increases the amount of time in those buckets as you progress through your plan, so you are subjecting your legs to increasing amounts of load. And, I do have two routes local to me, where one has 3 x unto 15 minutes of climbing and the other plenty of 2-4 minute climbs so I can alternate if It think it is making a difference.
I’ve just done my first ride using them after listening to that podcast.
I was on a local community group social ride and just went hard at the recommended Focus Power whenever I got the opportunity and when I hit the 100% mark in the 2 intense buckets just road easily to the end of the ride.
It seemed to work brilliantly and I plane to use them all the time when I get the opportunity.
Hi @mathieurrr , glad to hear you’re enjoying the new features! Years ago when we first introduced the concept of ‘Ride to Focus’, it was getting at this same concept, since Focus (& Specificity) are calculated from the ratio of Peak:Low XSS (and High:Low XSS). Understandably so, most people found the concept too abstract to be useful.
XSS Buckets (and a new feature in development ) make it fairly unnecessary to monitor Focus & specificity directly during a training ride since we now just show the amount of Low, High, & Peak XSS needed to complete the training - and we can calculate the L/H/P remaining as well, in real-time!
I’ve been alpha testing our new feature to help fill my High/Peak buckets while free-riding on Zwift. Here’s an example from my Saturday ride. I hopped on and joined a pace partner for ~75 min and then pushed myself on a few Zwift KOM segments. After those hard segments, I used the new feature to top off my buckets with some intervals. Unfortunately I had a crash so I wasn’t able to monitor my MPA for the conclusion of the ride, maybe I would have been able to dig a bit deeper during the final Zwift sprint segment. Lost a lone Watt of threshold on the Fakethrough Oh well, I know I’m due for another BT soon!
) make it fairly unnecessary to monitor Focus & specificity directly during a training ride since we now just show the amount of Low, High, & Peak XSS needed to complete the training - and we can calculate the L/H/P remaining as well, in real-time!
Oh well, I know I’m due for another BT soon!
You’ll have to wait to see that