The results so far 12-03-17

I have had the trainer now since mid November 2016 a total of at least four months. The story is complicated as in December just after Xmas disaster struck. I had a major accident on my outdoor bike resulting in a partially collapsed lung and multiple broken ribs. I was facing two months of recovery before taking to my bike outdoors again. However having just purchased the trainer it gave me an ideal opportunity to accelerate my return to fitness.

Zwift reports it's results directly back to Strava exactly similar to the reporting of Garmin results for outdoor activities.

The key concept to keep in mind to track a recovery situation is ftp (Functional Threshold Performance). ftp is nothing complicated, it is basically the amount of energy you generate over a 20 minutes period. Currently I generate about 194W and my weight is 78Kg so my ftp is usually around 2.5W/Kg.  Zwift reports ftp to Strava however you need the Premium package to dispaly the results in terms of graphs alternately just take an image off the Zwift results page and note the numbers down.

The following graph shows my recovery. Less than two weeks after my accident I was able drag myself on to my trainer. The X axis is days (as I did 30 days continuous every morning for an hour).  The Y axis is ftp as previously described. The red line is ftp as calculated by Zwift and the blue line is the average (normalised for terrain) normally reported by Strava without the Premium reporting package.

 

 

 I hope you can see from the results I improved my ftp from 1.24 to 2.5 an improvement of 2x in performance over 4 weeks. The purple line is my average ftp before the accident.

 

The graph above is when I started mixing trainer and outdoor activities. The interesting stats from Strava of average power can vary quite widely but howevr the Strava computed ftp is much more consistent. I offer no explanation for this as Strava don't explain the exact method. The lesson here is if you want to track your progress out doors the the Premium results are necessary.