Training Effect and Status from 3rd Party Apps

Hi Steve, I agree with your statement od the "problem" and share your desire for a cleaner solution. Its getting to be trainer season and am putting in some efforts in zwift which get auto loaded to Strava. Ideally I would like these efforts to be considered by firstbeats training status algorithm in my 1030 and FR635m without any further effort. I now do the following : record my workout on zwift which gets pushed to Strava and in parallel I record the effort with my 1030, to capture the training impact with the goal of updating training status. As I normally want my workouts which are recorded with my 1030 to be uploaded to Strava and garmin connect (when riding outdoors ) I now get doubled up workouts, so I always go into Strava to remove my workout (as recorded by 1030) and leave the zwift workout.

It is a "pain" or "hassle", despite the rude commentary of the other poster stating otherwise. I agree it is a nice to have and I do not expect that this functionality should be available, but nonetheless would appreciate. I have a feeling there are more than a handful of people using the 1030 which face a similar conundrum, but it's certainly not a typical use case, so I don't see this being resolved.

TrainerRoad is not a TrueUp compatible device. Garmin issued a list of compatible devices.

So I worked on this a bunch yesterday as it was driving me nuts.  I understand it a lot better now and have some possible solutions as well.

First, the FirstBeat metrics are licensed to your device.  We all know that.  But that's important to know as it appears no calculations actually happen on the Garmin server side.  What appears to happen is the calculations are done on the device and then included in the FIT file, which Garmin Connect uploads and analyzes.   You can see this by opening a FIT file with one of the tools out there.  Compatible devices will alter your Training Effect and such on your watch if Physio TrueUp is enabled.  What this means is once an activity is recorded without the metrics, there's no way to get it since FirstBeat doesn't make this information public like TrainingPeaks does.  It also means that any device that populates a FIT file with the metrics will update your watch, regardless if they are Garmin or not, because it's the populated fields that are important, not the device differentiation.

But..... if you dual record an activity such as Zwift in Bike Indoor mode and then take the FIT file from your watch and the one from Zwift, there is software out there that will combine both files for you.  This will give you all the Zwift data with all the watch data and replace fields (Speed, elevation, distance, GPS data) as necessary.  It's not free.  I don't want to list it here since there's the whole license thing and even though you're recording on your perfectly licensed Garmin and simply combining the file, in theory it should be totally legal.   You aren't calculating some number you don't have a license for, you are simply pulling data from your unlicensed file and merging it to your perfectly licensed file to make one complete activity and overall picture of your training.  

For the trainerroad specific part, I believe the best solution is to disconnect trainerroad from your Garmin account and use your Garmin Watch or GPS head unit to record the effort. Then it will flow to Strava, Connect, Watch, Trainingpeaks, etc.

Of course it is not ideal, but it should work...

The work around I use is to record my indoor workouts (Zwift and TrainerRoad) on my edge. They then sync with all the Garmin TE, VO2Max, etc etc. neither Zwift or TrainerRoad send activities to Garmin which avoids the duplicate workout issue. TrainerRoad can still send a scheduled workout to Garmin so I can do an outdoor workout. 

it shouldn’t be required but it does work. 

Hi Folks-

I am wondering why my zwift cycles are not showing training effect on garmin connect. 
I have an elite suito and ant+ garmin hr showing all details of my cycle, hr, power, garmin cadence sensor etc . Yet when it syncs to my strava and garmin it says my event has 0 impact. I assumed this was as i didnt have hr linked until recently and got an ant+ device to link my HR band (more accurate than the fenix 5 hr?).

I have a garmin fenix 5 and it records a lesser set of data. Just HR and duration of exercise and of course it shows i have anaerobic and aerobic values. :( I would prefer to have all coming from the one zwift cycle. Surely with height and much more details such as speed and cadence the training effect will be much more accurate. 

https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/5095067007  zwift activity- no effect. 

https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/5095272007   fenix 5 activity - started a bit later- both effects shown. 

Apologies- to add an other option- I have an edge 520+ that i could try instead of the fenix 5- but I think zwift if doing all the hard graft and edge 520+ wouldnt give much more than the fenix 5.

Stumbled across this by mistake whilst looking into the training effect feature.

I use garmin 945 for running and wahoo elemnt roam for biking.

No wonder my cycling Vo2 never changes 

It completely annoys me also that my wahoo rides won’t auto sync to garmin connect to give me a complete fitness record, but that’s a bit irrelevant to this thread...

I’m thinking if I want a complete training effect record I need to...

Record the ride on wahoo (so that I can use the route navigation on future rides, which the wahoo is just awesome for) and either use that to sync to strava or let GC do it.

plus..

Record the bike ride on my garmin watch so that it 1) syncs to GC (which in itself is helpful) and also 2) influences training effect.

It feels annoying that I’ll have to use two devices and also feels like somehow I’m not using the wahoo to its full extent, but at least I would not have to import historic bike rides into GC which I do periodically plus I would get the training effect info.

Now I just have to remember to start the watch on each ride!

If I’ve got this all wrong please let me know