I’d love to see more duration types added to the workout builder.
Heart Rate [Above | Below] = Do the step until your heartrate is [Above | Below] the value provided.
Power [Above | Below] = Do the step until your power is [Above | Below] the value provided.
Calories = Do the step until you’ve “burned” the defined number of calories.
I created a workout through Garmin which turned out to be the most satisfying guided workout I’ve ever done, and the results were, for the first time ever, as expected. It required being more dynamic and less dogmatic than anything from Garmin’s plans, suggested workouts, or any workout from any other source. I have other similar workout for other training objectives, and I’d like to be able to create those through intervals.icu. Ultimately, my goal is to use historical performance to estimate the number of intervals necessary to achieve a target TSS and create the corresponding dynamic workout.
Workout was
Warm-up
Pwr Z2 until HR 121
3X
Bike - Pwr Zone 6 until HR above 184
Bike - Pwr Zone 6 until Pwrd below 305W
Recover - Pwr Zone 1 until HR below 137
Bike
-30m Pwr Zone 2
3X
Bike - Pwr Zone 6 until HR above 184
Bike - Pwr Zone 6 until Pwrd below 305W
Recover - Pwr Zone 1 until HR below 137
The key advantage to this workout design is that it’s (mostly) closed loop. Do the thing until some physiological indicator is met, then do the next thing until some other physiological indicator is met.
There is the unfortunate issue of Garmin’s duration fields being instantaneous, which means there’s no hysteresis (eg, during an effort with a “power below” duration, I road through a dip in the road wich caused the bike to fall away from me, and thus the force on the pedal to fall, and ultimately my instantaneous power output to cross the threshold much earlier than it would have otherwise (I’d just started the interval and hadn’t gotten fully into the power zone).
is this currently the way you’re building this workout or is this a request to be able to do it this way?
I believe right now you can have BOTH power and HR in the same line to signify the steps for each interval. so for eg:
Bike - Pwr Zone 6 until HR above 184
This translates to
Press Lap when ready 60m Bike - Z6 89% HR
the 60m just adds an arbitary number to the interval and you press the LAP button when you’re ready to go the next step. (outdoors, power / hr control would be manual anyways, unless you’re indoors on a trainer then there’s another suggestion)
Is there a mode that doesn’t use power and only uses heart rate. I build interesting heart rate structured workouts on intervlas.icu and then execute them with breakaway. This is very helpful with a kinetic bike!
This is a 10m Z1 Power + HR at Z1 workout (note, when you use Zones, BreakAway will follow what Garmin and intervals does when sending the workout outwards, which is to use the center of the zone eg: Z1 = 70-80%, we will use 75%)
I build the workouts in Garmin Connect, and there’s no pressing of lap buttons. When my heartrate goes above the the Duration: Heartrate: 135, it AUTOMATICALLY moves to the next step. I then ride in my anaerobic power zone until my heartrate is in the anaerobic zone and my Edge AUTOMATICALLY moves to the next step, and I ride in my anaerobic powerzone until my power drops below a set value (basically, as long as I can maintain it), and my Garmin AUTOMATICALLY moves to the next step…
It would be nice to have these additional “duration” types in the intervals.icu workout builder mostly so I can automatically generate workouts with the correct number of repeats/sets to achieve the day’s training load goal and add that through the API. Mostly for my own use, but it’d be nice to be able to share my workouts and tools once I have the bugs squashed.
Coros has a conditional lap trigger but only for TL (their implementation of Training Load which is different from TSS). So once you get to that TL, it advances to the next step.
That will always be approximative because you don’t know when the HR/Power target will be reached.
Something kinda that I have done for running which would be a nice feature in general is during time based activities having a cut off if you reach a mileage before the time.
For example:
Run
-60m Z2 till 6 mi
meaning whichever one you hit first triggers the lap.
I am not sure if this would be hard to implement, and the user can always just hit lap, but it would be nice to have it automated.
