Companion App Update Enables Group Workouts in Zwift Clubs

Yesterday Zwift released an update to their Companion app on Android and iOS. The new version (3.36) unlocks much-requested functionality for Zwift Clubs: the ability to host group workouts!

Available Workouts

In this first iteration, Zwift has made 11 popular cycling workouts available – three apiece from the “Less than 30 minutes to burn”, “Less than 60 minutes to burn”, and “60-90 minutes to burn” categories. They’ve also included the Ramp Test and Ramp Test Lite workouts.

Cycling Workouts

Run Workouts

For runners, Zwift has enabled 4 popular workouts in this initial release – two apiece from the “Less than 30 minutes to burn” and “Less than 60 minutes to burn”.

Run Workouts

Future updates will certainly include additional workouts, but our guess is Zwift wanted to get these out to the community for initial testing and feedback.

Creating a Group Workout Event for Your Club

Creating a workout event for your Club is easy and intuitive, much like creating a non-workout event. At a minimum it requires 4 easy steps:

1. Tap “Group Workout” on the initial Create Event screen
2. Tap the workout template you want to use
3. Fill in the event details (everything is pre-filled except for date/time, but you’ll probably want to customize the title and event description, among other things)
4. Tap “Publish Event”

In practice, creating an engaging and high-quality group workout event will require a bit more work:

1. Tap “Group Workout” on the initial Create Event screen
2. Tap the workout template you want to use
3. Fill in the event details (everything is pre-filled except for date/time, but you’ll probably want to customize the title and event description as well)
   • Tap “Change Route” to change which route the event uses. Each workout template is attached to a particular route by default.
   • Select a ride leader if desired
   • Tap “Change settings” at the bottom and turn off Late Join (see below for more on this). You may also want to make the event visible to anyone with the event link.
4. Tap “Publish Event”
5. Notify your Club members of the new event, by whatever means you’d like

Note: rubber-banding (“keep together mode”) is enabled for all Club Workout events at this time, and cannot be disabled.

Zwift Insider’s First Group Workouts: Ramp Tests!

We’ve created two group workouts for today (Friday, June 3) to test the new Club Workouts feature. Both are under our Zwift Insider Club (join club here), and both events use the Ramp Test workout:

• Early event (1pm GMT)
• Late event (11pm GMT)

Join one of our events and give this new feature a try! We think it’ll be a fun challenge for riders to keep pedaling as long as they can. Once your legs stop turning, cheer on anyone who’s still going, via in-game chat!

Next Steps

This initial release of Clubs Workouts seems to work quite nicely, so kudos to Zwift’s team for rolling out another much-requested Clubs feature! For the first time ever, Zwifters are now able to create group workout events without resorting to the goofy Meetup hack we published back in December 2019. We found that creating Club Workout events via Companion was quick and easy, and once Clubs start using this feature certainly the most popular request will be more workouts!

Here are some ways we’d like to see Club Workouts improved/expanded:

• Late Join: Late Join is currently enabled for Club Workouts by default. But late joining a workout is probably not an ideal experience, as it places you in the middle of the workout, wherever everyone else is at! (An especially terrible idea for a Ramp Test.) Our recommendation: disable it by default, but let event organizers enable it for those odd workouts where it may make sense.
• Toggle keep-together mode: keep together mode is enabled for all Club Workouts by default, and cannot be disabled. It’s possible, though, that Club owners may want to host workouts where riders aren’t rubber-banded together. Give them that option.
• More workouts: give Club owners more options for workouts to host from the on-demand library. Of course, if Zwift is going to make its full workout library available then a search/filtering interface will need to be developed to help Club owners comb through the hundreds of available workouts.
• Custom workouts: this will be a common request, especially from Clubs centered around a coach who puts together team workouts. But implementing this feature will be a more involved project than just adding additional on-demand workouts, due to the way Zwift stores custom workouts on a per-individual basis.
• Group metrics: this idea is more of a stretch than the others, but how cool would it be if we could see metrics (real-time or after the event) showing how many group riders finished each interval, who had the highest wattage or w/kg, how many riders started vs finished, which interval riders failed the most, how many riders adjusted their FTP bias mid-event, total group calories burned, etc. (This would be interesting for all group workouts, not just Club events.)

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