Zwift Academy Road Finish Line Survey results

Last week we invited Zwift Academy Road finishers to take our “Finish Line Survey” and share how they progressed during the Academy.

Now with over 1000 respondents, let’s talk about the results, which can be browsed live here.

Did You Improve?

For each of the three efforts (sprint, VO2, and threshold) we asked how riders would rate their performance on the Finish Line Ride vs the initial Baseline Ride. Here’s how they responded:

Nearly the exact same number of riders said they improved on the VO2 and Threshold efforts (around 70%). Interestingly, only 48% said they improved on the sprint. Why is that?

One reason: the sprint stats displayed in Companion and Strava don’t show fractional seconds, so if you got 23.4 seconds on your Baseline sprint and 23.0 seconds on your Finish Line sprint, it would still show 23 seconds regardless. So it’s possible people improved, but didn’t have the data to show it.

What about riders who did worse on the Finish Line ride? Approximately twice as many riders did worse on the Threshold effort than they did on the VO2 and sprint. That’s interesting. Is it because riders dug deeper on the earlier efforts and didn’t have enough left for the Threshold effort? Or some other reason? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below.

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Why Did You Improve?

Riders who said they improved on a particular effort were asked why they think they improved in this area. Here’s what they said:

“Better pacing and/or knowledge of segment start/finish points” was the top reason for Sprint improvements, and this isn’t a surprise. If you weren’t sure where to start your sprint in the Baseline Ride, starting it at the right spot would result in a significant improvement.

Unsurprisingly, “Better Recovery Between Segments” was a significant factor for all three segments (around 30% of respondents chose this as a factor). Based on how many riders we saw riding hard between segments (instead of riding easy and recovering as instructed in the ride description), it makes sense that riders would do a better job of going easy on the Finish Line Ride, recovering between segments so they could hit each section hard.

“Improved Fitness” was by far the most popular reason selected when asked why people improved on their VO2 and Threshold efforts, with around 69% of respondents selecting it.

In the end, due to how the Baseline and Finish Line Rides were set up, figuring how why exactly riders improved their times is next to impossible. There are just too many factors at play. But hopefully this data provides some insight to Zwifters and ZwiftHQ when it comes to judging fitness gains and planning future training.

Your Thoughts

Share below!

Eric Schlange
Eric Schlangehttps://zwiftinsider.com
Eric runs Zwift Insider in the spare time he finds between riding his bike and managing various business interests. He lives in Northern California with his beautiful wife Monica. Follow on Strava

7 COMMENTS

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justin
4 years ago

I did worse on the sprint because I was, ironically, going off of the distances that the efforts started in the event description as opposed to my own knowledge of the course (about .3km off), so I didn’t ramp up my effort in time.

KB824
KB824
4 years ago
Reply to  justin

I know the climbers gambit and whole lotta lava had different sprint segment distance so that might have messed you up

Ryan
Ryan
4 years ago

I found that the ZA workouts this year didn’t have much if ANY neuromuscular work, so I wouldn’t have expected my sprint fitness to be better. Whereas there was a fair dose of intervals around threshold/VO2 intensity, which I’m sure helped my performance in those efforts.

CouchTo1200K
CouchTo1200K
4 years ago
Reply to  Ryan

I was gonna say the same thing. There was no sprint training, so why would we expect our sprint to improve? I’m no coach or sports scientist but I thought the whole thing lacked variety and would’ve been tough for Zwifters who are new to structured training. Dan Lloyd at GCN seems to be finding it difficult and he used to ride in grand tours ffs.

Robert
Robert
4 years ago

I did same time on the sprint, 20 seconds better on the short climb and more than 2 minutes on the long climb (Climbers gambit). But I’m not sure it’s ZA result. In meantime I did PRs on almost every Zwift climb. Also I’m pretty sure that I’m better climber than sprinter so results are not a surprise.

Eli
Eli
4 years ago

The workouts were great but to obtain any gains there needs to be a real plan of direction of more than one per week. I think most of us ride more than one day a week so they should launch something of at least three directional activities a week, one for neuromuscular, one for threshold , one for endurance … do that and then watch the improvement.

Tony Lane
Tony Lane
4 years ago

I did worse on all 3, but I put that down to being dead tired for the Finish Line ride (successive nights of less than 6 hours sleep, thanks to work), but I was running out of days to get it done so I just did it to complete the program and unlock the paint job.
I had pretty much already given up any idea of the workouts having any direct effect on my performance. The rides were too infrequent (unless you did each of them twice) and also very similar to each other (so simply repeating them would be of dubious benefit). It didn’t feel like a self contained structured training programme but each workout was interesting and so I’ll probably use some of them again in my general Zwifting.

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