Trainer Road outside workouts inside whilst Zwifting!

TrainerRoad Software
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I wanted to complete the Zwift Haute Route, but also had a 1hr 30min TR ride on Saturday. Had a brain wave which worked absolutely fine and I think I’ll do it again. The Zwift ride was up Alpe du Zwift and the TR plan was 5x10mins sweetspot.

So I sent the TR schedule as an “outside” ride to my Garmin, then fired up Zwift as usual and rode Zwift whilst also doing the TR schedule as planned!

Clearly I had to match the power output to what TR wanted as Zwift was controlling the trainer, but up the Alpe that was fairly easy to do by varying cadence and gears!

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Yup I’ve been doing this now for 4 months, works like a charm. Only downside is when you go to your career it doesn’t show it as TR workout which sucks because I like stats :sweat_smile:

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I do it as well but I don’t do it as an outside workout. Is there a difference?

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Been doing this as well. I follow my TR workouts and have Zwift set without a controllable power source. That way if TR says an interval of 250W, that’s what you do, regardless of Zwift terrain.

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Yeah I do this too. TrainerRoad on my phone in control of my tacx neo, and my quarq paired to zwift on AppleTV. There’s a bit of an offset between the two that powermatch would normally take care of, but in this case I just adjust the % on TrainerRoad until my quarq is reading the correct interval power.

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Same here. I start Zwift first, but I don’t think it really matters. I pair everything in Zwift then deselect “controllable.” Setup your world and route as usual. I pair to Zwift using Ant+ since BlueTooth is stronger for my setup.

Next I open TR, select the workout, and then pair sensors.

Finally I minimize TR so that it takes up the bottom 1/5 of the screen and shorten the Zwift window to take up the top 4/5. Works great. I also had one day where TR was misbehaving so I ran it on my phone. As a final option, you could also send the outside workout to your head unit and let that control the trainer in Indoor Workout mode. Not sure all the different head units that support this but I know Garmin 530/830/1030 and Wahoo Elmnt/Bolt/Roam do. I personally haven’t needed to do this yet.

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yes, with an outside workout TR isn’t controlling any resistance at all, the watts are all down to you.

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@philrcook @rkoswald sounds like you are running TR differently to what I described, I just ran it as an “outside workout” so zero control of the trainer.

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I might try this.

I’ve run TR and Zwift together plenty of times but also want to record via my garmin for cycling dynamics and L/R balance - which would mean recording 3 times.

If i do the TR workout via my garmin I will only need to record via Zwift and my Garmin. Unsure if i can have my garmin control the resistance of my trainer whilst measuring the power from my pedals though… I’ll give it a go.