Zwift Camp: Baseline is now underway, with several thousand Zwifters participating so far in this assessment-oriented training program.
I’m one of those Zwifters, and plan to share my experience in four posts – one for each workout in the program:
- 5-second power (Zone 6+)
- 1-minute power (Zone 6)
- 5-minute power (Zone 5)
- 20-minute power (Zone 4)
Red Zone Repeats
The first workout of Zwift Camp: Baseline is all about sprinting. It’s 40 minutes long and consists of a warmup punctuated by 5x 10-second primer efforts, followed by 3x maximal 10-second sprints, followed by a cooldown. In between the important bits you’ve got zone 1 and free riding blocks to keep your legs moving and give you time to ramp up your effort into a maximal sprint.
I did this first workout as a group ride, just to see what that experience was like and how Zwift had set up the events. (You can also do the workouts as an on-demand activity on your own, whenever you’d like.)
53 riders were in the event, and I was on my Cadex TT bike because I’m still working on upgrading it to its max level. I was surprised to see that the event didn’t have rubberbanding enabled like you typically see in group workouts, so the group sort of split apart, although people were still blobbed together for the most part thanks to the magic of drafting:
Since most of the ride is in Erg mode, you can’t really push harder to change your position in the group or bridge up to the next pack. Being on a TT right, my avatar didn’t draft, so for most of the ride I found myself on the front of a small group, pulling them along as we worked our way through the various intervals.
Overall, I found the workout to be pretty easy – which was a good thing, since my legs were tired from two hard rides the day before. (I can do a few maximal 10-second efforts on tired legs, but I definitely don’t want to do the 5 or 20-minute efforts later in this program unless my legs are fresh!)
One callout worth mentioning is that Zwift has put a 30-second free-ride block before each of the 10-second sprint blocks. This allows you to ramp up your speed and gearing so you can hit your sprint section in a high gear, ready to put out maximum power. (This is especially important for anyone using Zwift’s virtual shifting, since it reverts to gear 8 at the start of a free ride section, and you wouldn’t want to be working your way to the right gear during a short, 10-second sprint effort.)
For me, that meant shifting into gear 18 when doing out-of-the-saddle sprints, while gear 16 felt good for my one seated sprint attempt. Gearing is extremely important when sprinting, as you need to find just the right mix of torque and cadence to achieve maximum power!
Watch My Video
Results
I completed the Red Zone Repeats route during the cooldown portion of the workout, but it wasn’t until I clicked to end the ride that I was greeted with a few achievement banners:
I received an email from Zwift, subject line “Power Check Complete ✅”, as soon as the workout was finished. It included a link to my Zwift Camp Dashboard, which now looked like this:
The dashboard compares your power numbers in the Zwift Camp workouts to your 90-day best numbers. Zwift computed my best 5-second power in the workout as 1032W, which I’m happy with even though their critical power curve for the workout showed 1040W:
In fact, I set new power bests for 1-10 seconds for 2025 in this workout, according to my Strava power curve. I’ll take it!
Wrapping It Up
If you’re looking for a sprint workout, this really isn’t it. Sure, you get a few sprints in, but this is more of a sprint test. The training will come in future Zwift Camps, but for Baseline the goal is for riders to test and establish their power bests. To set baselines.
Overall, my experience with this first workout was fine, and I appreciate having quick access to my dashboard via the email link and Zwift Companion. There are a few things that would have made the workout itself a bit better, though. Here’s my list:
- Show me my 5-second power after each sprint effort. Tell me how I’m doing, and give me something to shoot for.
- Have my result match the critical power curve in the Ride Report screen.
- Don’t drop me down to virtual gear 8 every. Single. Time. Just return me to whatever my last virtual gear was.
- The power required at the start of the cooldown ramp should match the power I’m already doing. It always feels like a low blow when I’m spinning easy near the end of a workout, then the cooldown ramp kicks in and asks me to go harder. (For whatever reason, this is a common thing you see on Zwift workouts.)
Your Thoughts
Have you done this workout yet? How did it go for you? Share your experience below!
I agree with all your points. The one additional thing I would like to see is how I compare to the rest of the Zwift Baseline Population.
Agree. In the absence of an overall comparison I compare myself to Eric instead.. So far I’m happy, just 😃
Agreed, I like to see where I’m at compared to others in age group, weight, gender, etc…
If I do this twice will it update my best effort?
I’m quite sure it will. It appears the best efforts are updated from doing any of the baseline workouts, eg, you could set a 20-minute best in the Red Zone Repeats workout if you did the power.
So I’m sure repeating the workouts would work, too.
For some reason the route badge gets put between the France and Paris badges, not with the Makuri badges
The sudden drop to 8th gear when exiting ERG mode is a really disruptive issue that I hope Zwift prioritizes for a fix. Eric’s suggestion of reverting to our most recently used gear would be an improvement, but it doesn’t help if the ride starts in ERG mode. I would LOVE to see Zwift continually estimate which virtual gear would most accurately match your current cadence, power, incline, and wind resistance. That estimate doesn’t need to be perfect. Even if it’s off by a couple gears, it would still be much better than dumping us into gear 8.
That’s a good idea – just drop us into a gear that matches what we’re doing in ERG just prior.
Agreed. I went into zone 5 before the spring to ramp up my gearing. It was super disruptive.
Also, Eric, like you said, these aren’t so much workouts as they are power tests, which is a bit annoying.
Exactly the same observations Eric! Overall though, i thought it was structured really well and rejoiced when I saw the lack of rubber banding!
Reading here that is was not rubberbanded was enough to get me to do it in a group instead of solo.
I like the format, having the free ride leading into, and out of, the sprint is much better for producing the peak numbers. No erg mode transition oddities.
Shame that it was still time based instead of actually aligning to the sprint segments on the route.
Agree with all your wrapping it up points.
Oooh nothing worse you’re cooled down and the cool down then is harder than last easy effort. Hate that 👍👍👍👍
Since this is a test of your baseline sprintpower I really wish they would show the result better.
Same issue as Basecamp last year. No email with my results
I wonder if you need to be opted into emails from Zwift, like last year? Or maybe it’s some other issue?
Regardless, the email doesn’t really have anything other than a link to your dashboard, which you can access here: https://www.zwift.com/zwift-camp/dashboard
Did this workout today in a group and here’s my thoughts:
1) This is actually a terrible “workout”…but for the purposes of a 5s test it works just fine.
2) I think I would have actually preferred it to be fenced. By the end of the workout, there were such big gaps between most riders that you might as well have been riding alone.
3) Agree with Eric and others about it being weird that there’s no indication of how your 5s went for a particular effort. Having that feedback could inform you on how to attack the next effort and/or provide motivation.
4) I also noticed discrepancies in the final results. The 5s power on my CP was higher than the 5s it gave me for my actual result at the end. Stranger still was the 5s number that Strava listed for the ride was yet even higher than the CP 5s number.
Overall I guess it does provide a place to test yourself but I think it feels a bit underbaked as a training program.
Question: in a free ride modus during a workout like this. What is the trainer difficulty? Like, is it 50% like Is normally ride or set to 0%. Because it makes a major difference if you will need to shift gears during such all out intervall due to the road grade
You don’t feel road grades during a free ride section of an ERG workout. It basically just feels like you’re in a flat road the whole time, and it’s up to you to shift to whatever gear you’d like to put out the power you want.
Le truc c’est que les instructions sont en anglais et donc je vois au dernier moment moment ce qu’on attend de moi