I was just wondering what the best way is to account for walking in the training calendar.
For general health reasons I try to walk briskly (>3 mph) for at least 60-90 minutes per day.
At the moment I record the walks and it is added to the calendar. I realise that it is not cycling specific but it does result in a small amount of fatigue and XSS similar to a cycling recovery ride, and that is why I am adding it.
If you are on iOS and have a fitness watch (does not have to be Apple Watch), you can use RunGap to sync activities to XERT. RunGap is 15/yr and it works great. I use it to sync my gym workouts to XERT and I can sync my non apple recorded activities to Apple Health. You can pretty much sync between all major platforms.
Xert should be able to work a TSS out based on the heart rate. My heart rate is so low when walking that I can’t imagine that there would be any meaningful training effects.
I was actually wanting to get views on whether it was a good thing or not to include my walking into Xert.
At the moment I am including them because they do produce an small element of fatigue and they seem to give an XSS equivalent to a recovery ride of the same duration, which I would include if I did one.
I think the more the activity is integral to your normal daily routine the less you need to worry about including it as an extra activity. The stress is already incorporated into the workload you’re capable of while cycling.
Where it makes a difference is if the activity is out of the ordinary. For example, you suddenly decide to go on a 4 hour hike on Saturday when a HIT workout is planned for Sunday.
The walks are definitely extra to my normal day to day life. Instead of walking I could, and do, just jump on the trainer when the weather is bad and cycle easily for 30 minutes. ( I was recently told I had pre-diabetes and I try and walk/move /cycle after every meal- I have worn a CGM a couple of times and the difference it makes to the area under the blood glucose curve is quite marked)
Even if you can generate XSS based on the heart rate data of a walk, it doesn’t mean that you should.
Say you do an endurance workout at 120 bpm for one hour on your normal cycle and it generates 60 XSS.
Then you do another endurance workout at 120 bpm for one hour on a hand cycling ergometer without a power meter. Xert will then give you 60 XSS for that as well because the heart rate data is the same.
You might become better at cycling by using the hand cycling ergometer, but not in the same extent as cycling. The reason you might become better is that you will train your central cardio vascular system. But the specificity is low and the effect is low. You are mostly using your upper body, which is not that relevant for cycling. Maybe you should only give that workout 5-10 XSS instead of 60.
Walking is of course closer to cycling, but it is still not the same. So make sure you give a decent discount if you include it. And also ask if it is worth it or if it will just confuse the xert algorithm that will try to predict your fitness signature and training status.
I am doing XC Skiing, but I never include that as XSS. It is more of a hassle than a benefit. Even if the workouts last 1-2 hours of hard work.