I have an interval workout planned for tomorrow. I noticed on the intervals that over each minute the wattage/ftp% increases from 130-180%.
I know a lot of people do their workouts outside and a previous coach I had would set the intervals up like this only because it’s difficult to hit an exact wattage outside.
I’m using erg mode on a trainer, so I wanted to double check whether this workout was intended to increase in wattage over the 1 minute or if the goal was actually to try to hit an exact target. I hope this makes sense.
The range from 130 - 180% is the target you should be in. Not an increase. Most tend to start higher and slowly fade. The range on the anaerobic intervals is so wide because some riders can produce much higher power anaerobically than others. These are tough to do on erg mode because erg mode will hold you back slightly from going full gas.
With that said these are effective as long as you are holding your power over 130% of your FTP.
Ok. So what I’ll do is go in and change that to “target” instead of “range” in TP because when the workout gets loaded into zwift, if it’s “range” it will start me at 130% and increase over that minute to 180%.
I’ve done Tabatas for 20 secs on/10 secs off so for the 1 minute interval today I will set the target at 150% and adjust accordingly in the future. If those are too hard/easy I can always increase the wattage +/- 10% in zwift as I’m doing the workout.
Yes, sorry if my explanation didn’t make sense. The tabatas I did are 170% which I realize the % is what makes them a tabata. I was trying to say that I’ve done 170% before but only for 20 seconds, so for today’s workout I will set my target at 155% since it’s for 60 seconds and then I will adjust based on my ability. Hopefully that makes more sense.
When you do these in Zwift does the power ramp up from 343W to 475W? I think when I load these on Zwift to be done on my Kickr it doesn’t do a ramp up it just takes the average of the min and max. In your case 409W.
