Workout builder ramp function in Garmin

The workout builder is awesome and works really well. When I use the ramp feature eg ramp 50% 70%, it works in Zwift, but when I do the same workout in Garmin 830, the ramp just widens the acceptable range and picks midpoint t rather than ramping. All other workout features working the same in both ZWO and Garmin.

Anyone got any experience with this and. Ould help? Thanks

1 Like

If also noticed this. When my Garmin 830 goes the the next workout step, it shows a power range around the correct value, and then use the average of these range values. Even if the workout step value in the workout builder has no range. The result power setting on my trainer (in ERG mode) is correct, but it’s still strange why an average value is used.

Because of this I can’t use the ramp function in icu workout builder. Instead I use small increasing/decreasing steps simulating a continues ramp.

Is this caused by my Garmin or not?

1 Like

As far as I know Garmin does not support ramps. I could construct a ramp automatically in small steps but there is a 50 step limitation for workouts uploaded to Garmin Connect which would become a problem.

3 Likes

Hi, thanks for the reply David, I can manually create a few small step ups as a workaround and get the result. Great site again!

I ran into this issue also so I made a simple Google Sheet to make steps for me. Give it a try:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZAGsVv4atPf-UXn0I0hD2dw1eLa1nPHFfx-ScHqDmo0/copy

1 Like

Hi! I just noticed this issue today. It would be great to have an automatic function to create steps for Garmin. Or maybe an option in Step builder to convert a ramp into x number of steps.
Now that I know I’ll start adding steps manually.

You’re still gonna get hit if you have more than 50 steps in a workout tho. Just keep that in mind.

1 Like

As @app4g says the 50 step limit is an issue so its probably better for people to make manual ramps as they can decide how many steps to “use up” on the ramp based on the rest of the workout.

I’ve found the same issue, Garmin Edge 830 takes a workout RAMP and (in erg mode) forces the rider to produce the average wattage of the ramp.
My Wahoo Bolt is quite happy to implement a ramp in ERG mode.
The Garmin even when displaying the Workout on-screen does not show the segment as a ramp.
I’ve opened a Garmin Support ticket on this, let’s see where this goes!
ramp

Barry

1 Like

Garmin still does not support workouts with ramp steps. It will read a ramp step as you have described. I have never seen anyone from Garmin (Garmin forums, Garmin support, subreddit, etc.) say that they were planning on including it in a future update, but I typically stay on the running side of things.

2 Likes

I just submitted this idea again via Garmin’s idea form, even though other users have probably done so as well. I’d love to see it on Garmin devices!

it is possible to sync
/import the workout to tp and there it will be converted to a stepped ramp. this is ready to import/sync to garmin. If the app offered here in forum is used for icu/tp sync and tp to garmin is connected it is just a few clicks.

Yes, but then you need to make sure that you don’t hit the Garmin 50 steps limit… :wink:

So I spent a few hours this morning doing this conversion so that workouts sent from BreakAway to TP will convert Ramps into Steps (just 3 steps). Seems to work. Tho I think not many ppl will be using this as it’s going to be round about way to get workouts to Garmin and it likely introduce duplicate workouts in. Garmin too. (intervals.icu → Garmin and TP → Garmin)

I do make some presumptions and I follow TP to only make it into 3 discrete steps, but still may still fail if you have > 50 steps (i’ve not made the code to check for # of steps or even to only limit ramps to WarmUp and CoolDown)


This is an expanded screenshot

At this point, I would prefer to not have to rely on an external platform to do this ramp steps transformation.

What about suggesting to @david to add syntactic sugar to the workout builder screen so that we can optionally specify how we want a ramp to be divided in steps?

For example, 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.

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

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.

While your request is valid. I’m sure there’s a ton of other things which is on the todo list.

But who knows. Maybe it’s such a low hanging fruit that took a couple hours to code will only take David 20m.

Yes. That’s basically the idea behind what I did as well.

I think this is a great suggestion that looks to be easy to implement and would certainly solve the problem. You could “on hover” a 50 step limit on the “add step” button in the workout builder as well to CYA