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ERG+ Automatic Intervals Detector
The CyclingPeaks ERG+ product introduces the first self-adaptive, features-based, automatic intervals detector for bicycle power meter technology.
Perhaps the first thing you will notice about riding with a bicycle power meter is how much your actual power reading will fluctuate, even though you believe you are exerting a constant effort.
This is (mostly) really you, and power meter manufacturers employ various means to present you with real-time display smoothing options, as well as graphical post-ride analysis smoothing options.
Upon downloading your ride, you can see the detailed data, or smoothed views. If you had the chance to press the buttons on your power meter at the start and end of interval efforts, you would have a number of "markers" in your file that tell the manufacturer's analysis software that special sections of interest exist, and their software will compute separate statistics for each of these sections. Some manufacturers let you mark intervals manually after the ride as well, by requiring you to beaver into the graphs with scroll, zoom, and highlight operations. Following this time-consuming process for each interval "rep", the statistics for the section can be displayed.
CyclingPeaks finds the whole exercise profoundly unnecessary and tedious, since your intervals, jumps and rests, are detectable from the power data itself: intervals detection does not require manually-entered markers.
Furthermore, none of us would take the time to hit the on-bike computer's interval marker during a race, and this is data we should analyze, but rarely take the time, due to the inconvenience and apparent "noise".
Typical software that comes with a power meter, like other analysis tools, requires you to either mark intervals while you execute them, or zoom, scroll, mark and manipulate the graphical views to expose and compute interval power statistics. But not with CyclingPeaks ERG+.
The view below shows the entire workout following intervals detection and "fitting" with CyclingPeaks ERG+. The blue line shows the mapping, and we've used "hats", which instantly show the average power of efforts and rest for each interval.
Here is a detailed view, zoomed into the middle set, showing the original trace with no smoothing. You will notice how the detection is highly tolerant to the noisy variations of the rider's real power signal. This rider was quite honestly trying to ride at fixed power levels during effort and, to a lesser degree, her rests.
Here is the same data mapped to "wedges", which actually reveal the linear trend of power data within each effort and rest, to indicate whether your interval is constant, or steadily decreasing (or increasing), and also whether you are resting as you intend. Here, "Bonita" has been a little eager during her first two rest periods, and she is a little bit unable to sustain her initial effort power chosen for each interval. It's up to her or her coach to decide if that's good or bad.
Parameters computed and displayed:
When you highlight an interval "hat", the statistics of the hat interval are revealed in the design box. You will see: interval start and end time, effort duration, rest duration, effort average power, and rest average power. For wedges, you will see the same time-domain information, but power is expressed as "best fit line" start power and end power of the effort, and "best fit line" start power and end power of the rest.
The design boxes are used to manipulate the workout prior to saving it as an ergometer ride. You have full editorial control over the "converted" workout, such as inserting a different warm-up, removing sections, scaling, and even inserting new shapes and more files.
Storing the intervals data is accomplished by storing the ride in our .Erp format or saving them as .csv which is easily readable using Excel or Notepad.
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