Comparing Past TR workouts (Feature Request)

I’m sure there’s a way to do this, but I haven’t easily figured it out, so I’m reaching out to the brain trust here for some guidance.

How can I quickly/easily compare two completed workouts in TR. i.e. I want to compare two recent ramp tests. is there a way in the ride analysis screen to compare intervals from each within the same screen?

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The advice given to me when I asked a similar question some time ago, was to open the workouts in their own web browser windows. This works particularly well if using Apple’s iOS, when you can choose “Open in Split View” on an iPad and make comparisons.

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Spot on advice here :slight_smile: What I like to do is, while on my desktop, ctrl-click all workouts I want to compare. That will automatically open them in their own tabs for easy reference.

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Here is my work around for not being able to compare individual rides or workouts:

  1. Open the Personal Records section on the website.
  2. Use the drop down in the first window to enter a Custom Range with the exact date of one workout you want to compare.
    • Make sure to select the same date for both of the start and end dates.
  3. Repeat step #2, but choose a different date with another workout/day that you want to compare.
  4. Repeat one last time (if desired) for the ability to compare up to 3 individual workouts/days.

Note: This grabs any and all workouts from that single day. This may include a warm-up or other rides. But those are unlikely to impact the PR’s on that day.

Additionally, (if you expect that you want to review any events more than once) create a custom season with a single date range, name it appropriately, and you can reuse that day/event any time you want to compare single event records.

The advantage to this method is that you can see all three power graphs together, and can easily see how they compare. But the other method described above is still useful for other details that aren’t captured in the PR graph (like cadence and other stats).

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@mcneese.chad you beat me to my own reply. I had just figured out using the comparing custom dates as a work around. That’s exactly the expected behaviour I was hoping for, but being able to easily select past versions of the workout. Maybe in future this could be a feature @Nate_Pearson?

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+1 on this. It’s kinda odd that the desktop app shows the number of times you have done a particular workout (2x, 3x, etc.) but that info ends up being pretty useless unless there was a way to click through to a direct comparison. “Does it make you faster?” I’m not sure, unless you consider some positive reinforcement or learning what caused failure through comparing notes.

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+1 for more analysis tools

I’m learning how to use Golden Cheetah and was able to compare two recent ramp tests (a week apart), both the entire test and just the ramp portion that starts at 5:00 minutes and goes to failure (14:13 for one, and 14:14 for the other).

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Yup. Golden Cheetah is great for that.

You can directly overlay workouts and with the ‘stacked’ checkbox ticked can easily just look at power, heart rate or any other single piece of data to compare between sessions.

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How do you get the data into Golden Cheetah? Can you import from Strava? Or do you have to export/import a GPX?

You can auto import via dropbox but I like to keep a copy of all my workouts locally as well as in various clouds (Strava, Training Peaks and Garmin Connect primarily). It’s my data history after all.

Generally all my sessions end up in Garmin Connect and I download the .fit file to archive locally and import it from there into Golden Cheetah. I use 3 separate profiles for swim, bike and run.

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+1 On this feature request.

Having gone through SSB II a few times and duplicating other workouts, I’m starting to get multiple instances of the same workout.

If I had the following…

Baxter 12/1/18
Baxter 12/29/18
Baxter 1/15/19
Baxter 1/31/19

It would be amazing to be able to analyze those against one another (watts vs. watts, hr vs. hr, cadence vs. cadence, etc.).

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I have used the TR compare workaround that @mcneese.chad mentioned, but my goto comparison is using cyclinganalytics.com segments feature, which allows me to easily find x number of intervals of a certain length and tag them. Then I open the segments page and I can look at all of the relevant fields for each interval from all workouts that have intervals tagged with that name. I can even aggregate the interval data from each workout into averages for each field.

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that worked well and you can see all the rides that you have done the same and how you are improving. I was wondering how to do that. I don’t really understand much of the information in terms of figures that you get when you analyze a ride, so this helps an average rider, like me, see that they are actually improving.

Thanks.

Gi-Gi

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I like to look at what I’ve done on past iterations of the workout at hand but I think the only way to do it is from the web view. Can you expose a direct link to that page from the Workout Details in the Android app or better yet integrate that data in the app?

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And while I did like chad, I also would like an overlay of each workout over the ramp test view itself, so essentially if you did a better FTP on one test, the tests are sort-of identical until they hit a certain point and then the better one just keeps going.

On other workouts, since they are %FTP based, you could see the new lines follow each other with different colored mocks of each workout background (the blue), but they should be spread apart so you look at your progression over time that way.

I don’t know if it’s a valuable analysis, it’s just what I immediately wanted to do as a user, to see the difference in growth from one workout to the next. When I analyze the workout vs another days ramp test, and I see 400 max 1s vs 421 max 1s, it doesn’t mean much as those were spikes, since I failed before surpassing the 400w step. Maybe none of it is worth analyzing as it’s not a race… but it drives the ego and the good feeling of a new FTP or your progression over workouts.

ROI: Users remain engaged as they see their progression over time when they repeat workouts (heck, you could overlay x recent workout session data during every workout too!).

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plus 1, thought id be able to do this

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While there are other feature requests I’d prioritize, like minimum viable functionality for importing swim/run workouts, this would be nice. I’m very much a data junkie, and one of the things that helps me Get Faster [tm] is the motivation gained by comparing prior efforts and seeing improvement.

The interesting – and challenging – part of this is deciding what is meant by “comparing” workouts, because then you need to do a little more work to define the feature request. Two of my first thoughts:

  1. There should be a toggle to select whether I’m analyzing watts or a percentage of FTP. Both have their place and value.

  2. I’d love to see a little calculation of “smoothness” or “compliance” with the workout profile. Some sort of metric that shows me (for each interval) how well I did. Could be average power and standard deviation which are easy to calculate and understand (smaller StDev shows more accurate tracking of the required power). Could be how many seconds of zero power were included in the interval or the workout, to show whether I needed extra rest. Lots of possibilities, it’d be interesting to list some and make concrete suggestions in this thread.

I don’t think this is currently available, if it is then point me at it and close the thread!

Most of us go Base 1 → Base 2 → Build → Base 2 → Build, etc. so tend to do quite a few of the workouts time and again. At the moment there is Season Match but I’d like to be able to compare the same workout over time.

Under Career->past rides you can filter down to a ride name which shows you the overview of your workout including notes if you made them but it would be nice to be able to view the power curves for them. It is possible to this if you create seasons for the specific days when you did the same workout but that’s a faff and a horrible workaround. Ironically my Personal Records charts do this for the Ramp Test from 1min to 10mins :rofl:

Rationale for this: being able to see improvements more specifically, i.e. sustained power, 1min VO2max etc. The workouts are designed with those in mind but the analysis isn’t.

I merged you Request with the old one for the same thing.

I shared my workaround above, since we don’t have a direct option.

No problem. I was surprised that the suggested similar threads list didn’t come up with anything. I’d figured out the workaround you suggest but you end up with masses of seasons, potentially a couple of hundred per year unless you keep on top of them and delete things weekly or monthly.

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