Tacx flow and garmin fenix manual resistance

Hello,

I train on tacx flow connected to fenix 6. I bought a new one because old flow broke last week.

Usuaĺly I train with 'free ride' and I adjusted resistance to 20 with the old flow. That was fine to get decent wattages (160w-400w) using the bikes gears.

With my new flow, I set resistance to 10, 20, 30, 40, but its way too light. On 50 and 60 it's suddejly way too hard.

Strange, because setup is the same. Same bike, trainer, watch. Trainer is calibrated.

Anyone had this problem?

Thanks, Bart

0 L.Rouge over 2 years ago

A similar problem with different Garmin device. I have had a Tacx Flow and a Garmin 530 for about 8 months, my first "smart trainer" and fairly pleased. While it provides a good workout it has issues relating to simulating real rides. I generally use the 530 to do a "free ride" with a set grade essentially the same as a set resistance. I also re-ride courses I have done (or would like to do) with varying grades.

With the Garmin 530 controlling the trainer I find I can ride constant grades (eg 5%) 50% faster than I can in reality but riding a level grade is much much harder than reality (although less resistance than the 5% grade) and thus slower than I could in the wild, in all cases the trainer has been calibrated using the TACX Trainer App on my phone.

I had come to accept that this is just how it is until I did an FTP test using the Tacx App. The test is a varying grade warmup followed by 20 minutes at a constant 5% grade. With the app controlling the resistance my grade performance was much closer to reality and my level performance (in the warmup) was much faster than the same "level" grade with the Garmin in control.

So now I wonder if the Garmin and the Tacx App are using the same algorithm to convert grade into resistance? What I would really like is that the performance simulated the corresponding real performance but maybe that is too much to expect from a cheapest smart trainer