In xert, I scheduled Smart break on through to the other side. I also downloaded it as a .zwo file.
Instead of 30 seconds at 400 watts or whatever, and then a rest interval of 30 watts, I get this inside of zwift. I’m sure there is some esoteric thing I am missing. If anyone has an explanation, please let me know and please don’t use any xert acronyms in the explanation. Thanks
Mixed Mode workout (learn more from our YouTube video here).
Other apps don’t allow you to set a target power & free ride. Most of these types of workouts include near maximal efforts that aren’t well suited for ERG mode, so they’re exported as Free ride to other platforms (but they don’t include the power target). I’ve tested a few of these in Zwift and found the best way to do them was to disable ERG and use my gears (or virtual gears) to ride hard for the red intervals, ride easy for the grey/recovery intervals.
If you use the Xert EBC app, you’ll have the target power and the app will automatically switch your trainer to slope mode. So you’ll need to use your gears & cadence to hit the targets as best as you can! They can take a bit to get used to them, but they make for fun & engaging workouts that can really push you to your limits.
SMART - Full Gas Finale is one of my recent favourite Mixed Mode workouts. It combines these hard interval where you push yourselves hard & then the SMART intervals after will adjust based on how hard (or easy) you went on the previous interval.
My question is a bit related so that’s why I post it in this thread. Let me know if it’s better to start a new thread. I just started using Xert and so far have been pushing the workouts to Zwift. I understand that it’s not possible for Zwift to use the sloped power curves so in general for certain power profiles it’s a lot harder in Zwift because it uses only a steady decline. Yesterday I tried to use the Xert EBC app (Smartphone controlling the smart trainer) and Zwift for visualization and everything worked perfect. Only problem I have is with sprint intervals because I am using a Zwift ride with virtual shifting so I am unable to shift in sloped mode. Is there a workaround for this? Maybe adjust the slope gradient or just do everything in ERG? I haven’t found anything yet to tackle this problem. Any help or workaround would be helpful.
So I can do an interval or two hard and then the numbers will appear?
the stuff about setting the trainer to slope mode are meaningless to me. I’m using disconnected rollers
Target Power numbers will always appear in our app. For mixed mode workouts exported to other platforms, they likely will never show the target power for free ride intervals (Zwift, Rouvy, Garmin, Wahoo etc. do not allow you to specify a target power & to ‘free ride’).
If you’re doing the workouts on rollers anyways (hardcore!), then trainer mode won’t matter for you anyways, so you could make a copy of the workout and modify any intervals that use ‘at _% Slope’ - heres your example:
In this case, modify the circled intervals above to use ‘5.5 MMP’ for work interval and ‘70% LTP’ for recovery interval (the default library uses Slope > MMP & Slope > LTP for this workout):
Yeah, I can appreciate this. Right now virtual shifting is a proprietary feature for Zwift. Personally, I’d love to see Zwift make their virtual shifting protocol an open standard (like ANT+ & Bluetooth FTMS) so the industry as a whole can benefit & use Zwift’s hardware in other apps too (I have the Click for my Tacx Neo trainer and they’re great).
To answer your question, our app doesn’t support virtual shifting at this time. I’ve done some experimenting on my own to figure out what works best and in my experience so far, the best way to do Mixed Mode workouts with Virtual Shifting was to send the workout to Zwift and disable ERG control for the workout. I then used virtual shifting to control my efforts through the whole workout.
This option worked quite well for me (see below). You can tell where I disabled ERG mode - about ~35 min through this workout, once I got to the sprints.
This was the SMART - Basket Case - 60 workout.
Scott,
How do the difficulty adjustments work in the EBC app, i.e. the plus/minus buttons for the different modes (auto, slope, erg, resist, off); can they be used as “virtual shifting” or will Xert interpret them contrary to that effect?
I’ve played with them during a workout once or twice to change difficulty, but don’t really know what the intent for them is. Also, they are very laggy and not very responsive to changing the values rapidly.
Has xert considered the option to preserve the numbers shown in the workout in xert as it is passed to zwift.
WHy, in anyone’s world, would you see a workout with wattage goals, and export to another platform, only to have those numbers disappear. For real guys. Why is this the solution. It only leads to customer anger with no reason behind it, no explanation unless you ask in a forum. You give your clients far too much credit for asking the reasons why.
Thx Scott for the info, good alternative!
I can appreciate where you’re coming from. Unfortunately, other apps don’t let us send them the target power and specify that it’s a free-ride segment - it’s one or the other.
Many of these interactive Mixed Mode workouts are designed & intended to push you to your limits (or beyond them). Doing them in ERG mode might be just as frustrating if your cadence gets bogged down, you get the ERG spiral of death, and you may need to stop/abandon the workout.
Here’s a workout (below) that - if done exactly as prescribed in ERG mode - would push me to reach failure with 7 intervals left. I would either have to hope to push through them all and get a breakthrough, or likely reach failure and have to pause to recover or simply skip the remaining intervals. However, if done with gears & cadence, as intended, I could back off a bit and really spend myself on the final couple of intervals. Much harder to do that in ERG mode, even with using +/- buttons. Hope that explains the logic from our end.
I suspect that your situation is perhaps a bit different from most other users (given that you’re on rollers, I think?), but perhaps another alternative would be to send all the interval target wattages in ERG mode and specify that we strongly recommend disabling ERG for these workouts? Thoughts?
This got me thinking that I should be turning ERG off more often, even when not recommended! I almost always fail Zwift workouts with short high intensity intervals (I have zero sprint)! I usually try a few times then get frustrated, do a cool down, and quit.
In general, I’d rather see power targets than “Free Ride”. Could you also use the Zwift tags to pop up a text message asking the user to disable ERG (using the description tag) before the going gets rough? So, for example, in the workout you show above, display a message to “disable ERG for this next set” and then another one to re-enable when it’s done?
TrainerRoad workouts inject a lot of text messages in their workouts and I do miss that. They are helpful. In this case, they would be a necessity. Maybe I’ll try doing this myself next time I do a workout with similar sets of intensity on MyWhoosh since I have to manually Import and Edit each workout anyway.
