Hey everyone,
Following the discussions in this thread Workout builder ramp function in Garmin, I would like to suggest a new feature that introduces the concept of stepped ramp.
Today, we have the keyword ramp enabling us to create a ramp of x minutes for a specific FTP range. Most platforms support that but not Garmin Edge devices. To address that, we thought about stepped ramps, and as its name implies, the idea is to have this new keyword to automagically creates steps acting like a ramp.
To illustrate that, let’s take an simple Z2 workout:
Warmup
- 10m ramp 45-70%
Main
- 40m 70%
Cooldown
- 10m ramp 70-45%
We could imagine having a new syntax that would enable to automagically create n steps given a ramp step duration. The regex for this syntax could be: stepped ramp 1m.
In practice, that would give:
Warmup
- 10m stepped ramp 1m 45-70%
and would create for the warmup 10 steps of 1m with the power incrementally increased based on the ramp range specified.
Alternatively, instead of providing the duration of a step, we could instead define the number of steps for a given minutes. Using the same example as above, that would look like:
Warmup
- 10m stepped ramp 10 45-70%
(10m / 10 = 10 stepped ramp of 1 minute)
To compute the power value of each step in the ramp, the following formula can be used: (ending power % −starting power %) / (number of steps in ramp - 1)
So given a ramp going from 100W to 150W → that would give 5,56 (round to 2 decimals) as the number to use for the increment, which would result in 10 ramp steps being:
- 100.00
- 105.56
- 111.11
- 116.67
- 122.22
- 127.78
- 133.33
- 138.89
- 144.44
- 150
(In practice, we would certainly want to Math.round these numbers)
Now, regarding Garmin’s limit of 50 steps per workout, I would say that it’s up to the user building the workout to be aware of this limitation. And since this syntax would be new, I would assume that users using it know the limitation of Garmin Edge devices. If we think it’s important to warn users about this limit, a warning message could certainly be displayed in the UI if steps > 50.
What do you think?
Best,
Kevin