Using W Prime in PerfPro Studio To Get the Most Out of Your Body

W Prime is a great way to measure your training load.

Not everyone owns a power meter for their bike. Some people do not want to make the investment in equipment. Some just want a great workout and want to see how hard they can push their bodies. W Prime in PerfPro Studio is a great tool to help athletes measure their effort better.

PerfPro Studio has added features almost weekly now for several years. This is a robust, solid training platform that is my go-to for indoor studios. It is consistent and is easy to operate. PerfPro Studio shows riders what they need to know, both on a dashboard and graphically, so they can achieve their goals.

Since 2015, I have been employing W Prime testing at my studio, Cycling Center Dallas. It’s a great tool, and in this post I show you how to put W Prime to work for you.

Five Stars On Xert: What It Takes To Get to Pro Level, Part One

    I’m excited to announce that my coached client, Dr. Kyle Keeter, has gotten to Five Stars Training Status on Xert! A Five Star Training Status is the result of A LOT of work on the bike! This means that his training volume, per his daily and accumulated “XSS” (Xert Strain Scores) values, has […]

Xert In a Crit: Prime Win and Victory!

Travis Pope is a big guy with a big engine. He loves to ride, loves to race, loves Xert, and he loves to train with it. He has been a client for years, but has suffered several crashes that left him on the sidelines. It also affected his training consistency.

But this year has been a different story. Travis has trained consistently. In early June, he bought a Garmin 1000 and began training with Xert Fields.

The Race According to Xert

Last night, it all paid off! Here’s how Travis used Xert training to turn his hard work into success on the podium.

Interval Shapes – Intensity Over Time

Take a look at this graph. Each interval has a different shape.  It shows four separate 45-second intervals of maximal effort, on a 4% slope. I used PerfPro Studio to design this workout. Recoveries were three minutes each.

We also need to take into account that these intervals are taken 53 minutes into a 60 minute workout. The rider was fatigued, but the lesson is still relevant.

In this post I’ll show you how to use not just intervals but interval shapes to craft your intensity over time for maximum gains in fitness and available power.

Reliability, Accuracy, Results: The Beautiful Consistency of PerfPro Intervals

I’ve been using PerfPro Studio since it first came out in 2008. I’ve watched its capabilities grow, especially as we developed workouts and schedules for controlled progression and periodization. The workouts allow you to ride with absolute wattage, wattage as a percentage of Threshold, wattage based on percent of slope and any mix in between. […]

ShockWiz Tuning – A Video Discussion

Here’s another video highlighting my experiences with the ShockWiz Tuning System for mountain bikes. This is a tougher trail, with more rock and twists and lips, and I’m convinced that I’ll be faster, and smoother, because of this investment.

OH yeah—6 watts difference on my average power between the first and second lap, led to a 2.5 minute improvement over 4.8 miles. THAT IS HUGE!

Studying Suspension With the Shockwiz

[caption id="attachment_969" align="aligncenter" width="525"] Air Pressure determines Sag and Compression, while the red ring sets rebound speed, and the black and blue dials help determine when the shock gets activated on bumps of different sizes.[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_914" align="aligncenter" width="768"] Coach Wharton using a ShockWiz and a Power2Max to study mtb suspension on the Womble Trail in Arkansas.[/caption]

Mountain biking; nothing makes me happier on a moment-to-moment basis than riding a mountain bike. Mountain biking is where I began cycling, and its’ challenges continue to push me every time a throw a leg over and head down the trail. Mountain biking is fun, it’s something I can do with my wife and with friends, and the technology just continues to impress me, as suspension, geometry, wheel diameter, gear options, and brake technology improves in such a quantum way.

My first mountain bike was all steel, had eight  gears in the back, three up front, and no suspension. It also had 26″ wheels. That was in 1987. The next year, I was riding a bike that was half-carbon, half-aluminum, had a 2.5 inch house-brand front suspension, and weighed 4 lbs. less. By 1995 I had purchased an early dual-suspension Trek Y-bike, and by the time I pretty much quit racing in 2001, I had a titanium frame with a soft-rear suspension, 3 inches of travel up front, and one of the first PowerTap MTB hubs ever built.

[caption id="attachment_916" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Coach Wharton’s Trek SuperFly with Power2max, Shockwiz, and Garmin 1000.[/caption]

Now, I’m riding a 2012 Trek SuperFly 100, with 4 inches of travel up front and in the rear, hydraulic disc brakes, two rings up front and ten in the rear. The wheels are 29 inches in diameter. THE NEXT YEAR, SRAM and then Shimano, introduced Single-Ring front drivetrains, 11 gears in the back, with broader ranges than I’d ever seen before. I think front and rear suspension gains a technology flip EVERY TWO YEARS! My own rig (and that of my wife), now has an OBSOLETE front and rear suspension system, a rear linkage system that has not been used since 2013, and the tires are 3/4 of an inch TOO NARROW.

It’s incredible. Technology has literally transformed mountain biking. It’s safer, faster, more comfortable, and higher performing than I’ve ever seen before.

BUT IT STILL TAKES SOMEONE WITH AN ENGINEERING DOCTORATE TO EXPLAIN SUSPENSION TO ME! AAAUUUGGHHH!

[caption id="attachment_917" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Shockwiz Suspension Tuner on a Front XC Sid Fork. Richard Wharton,[/caption]

Enter the ShockWiz, by SRAM. It’s two little boxes that mount to your frame and fork, and then attach to the compression air ports, where they measure impact, rebound, and all sorts of things that I just can’t explain. I’ll let it do the work.

The ShockWiz started out as a GoFundMe project, and is the brainchild of an Australian mountain biker. It started out around 2014, if I recall correctly, and ended up going to market after SRAM and Quarq saw the opportunity, bought the concept, and got it to the finish line. I was a fascinated early investor, but sadly, my opportunity to do some REAL mountain biking, is usually limited to 3 or 4 days a year. I don’t compete, but when I’m out there, I love the challenge of every corner, every tree, every root, every rock garden, and every climb and descent. But I’m absolutely convinced that if I KNEW how to properly tune my suspension, I could improve my confidence, my competence, and the joy would compel me to do the simplest thing I can do – RIDE MORE OFTEN. I am convinced that the ShockWiz is doing that, right now.

[caption id="attachment_915" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Wombly Trail and Ouachita Lake, Highway 27, Arkansas[/caption]

I’m writing this from a remote fishing village in Arkansas that sits along the famous “Wombly Trail”. It’s almost 40 miles of singletrack along the Ouachita River, and for me, it’s Heaven! But it’s also a PERFECT place to put the ShockWiz to use, and I did that today.

My 2012 SID Air was the first component to get the treatment, and it started with a roughly 15-minute calibration procedure that allowed the ShockWiz app to figure out my baselines. I used a shock pump to set the manufacturer’s recommendations for the upper and lower chambers into the fork (as well as the rear shock), and then took off on my ride, with my wife not far behind. Over the course of the next twenty minutes, we rode, and when we pulled over for our first break, I consulted the app, which was reading the data behind-the-scenes, the entire time. It gave me recommendations for compression, rebound, ramp rate, preload…. all that stuff that is a mystery to me.

Read on (subscription required for this part) for a review of the initial recommendations…and step-by-step screencaps of how I worked through the process of getting the best suspension tune of my life.