There have been a few noteworthy changes recently beyond the integration of Garmin Connect. In one sentence: The power history chart has been added, laps can now be edited, Garmin Connect users can choose to only have cycling activities imported, and there is an option for the calendar to show plan titles rather than ride titles when they’re linked.

The power history chart shows the best efforts and how they vary over time. By default, it shows the best three five minute efforts (in terms of average power) for each month. It’s quite flexible and isn’t hard to configure to show, for example, the best five efforts of ten minutes for each 60 day period.

It’s now possible to edit laps. This can be done with the “edit ride” page. New laps can be added, unwanted laps can be deleted, and lap times can be adjusted.

There is now an option to only import cycling activities with Garmin Connect. This option is found on the “linked accounts” page. When used, Cycling Analytics ignores FIT files coming from Garmin Connect that are tagged as anything other than cycling, such as running and golf. (Someday, Cycling Analytics will be able to properly handle other activity types.)

Finally, there is a new option for the calendar to always show… continue reading

Cycling Analytics now works with Garmin Connect. Rides uploaded to Garmin Connect are automatically imported to Cycling Analytics when users link their Cycling Analytics accounts with their Garmin Connect accounts. Many Garmin devices are able to automatically import activities to Garmin Connect, making this a very easy way to get rides into Cycling Analytics.

To use this, head over to the Linked Accounts page and click the “Connect” button for Garmin Connect. Once this process is completed, rides will be automatically imported to Cycling Analytics.

Note that the first time a new ride is added to Garmin Connect after linking accounts, this ride and all others from the previous thirty days will be imported into Cycling Analytics. This may result in duplicates, especially if rides were imported from Strava. If so, these can be easily deleted from the rides table.

A handful of changes have been made to this site recently. Here’s a quick summary:

• Added highlight option to searching rides table (instead of search only filtering)
• Added CSV export for rides table
• Allow clicking on power curve chart time labels
• Moved training load chart settings to training load page
• Changed plan text rendering to faster and simpler HTML converter instead of Markdown
• Show HR and cadence peaks on ride edit page
• Added support for ThB and SmO2 sensor data in FIT files
• Raw file download via API
• Added PWC₁₃₀ to Flexicharts

In more detail:

The recently introduced table of rides has two new features: Searching can now highlight rides that match the search instead of only showing rides that match the search, and a CSV representation of the data can be shown with the click of a button.

When showing CSV, the data can be separated by either commas or tabs (TSV). Tab separated data can be copy and pasted directly into Excel or other spreadsheets, while comma separated data can be saved in a plain text file and consumed by programs.

The power curve chart has been updated so that the time labels can be clicked on, which is equivalent to clicking on the chart at that time (so it “freezes” the chart at the given… continue reading

Here’s an easier way to make training plans. Plans can now be dragged directly from the training plan library and onto the calendar.

Clicking on “plan library” now reveals a list of training plans, which can be dragged and dropped onto the calendar. It’s normally taller than in the screenshot above, but I wanted a picture that includes the top and bottom. Holding the mouse over a plan for a moment reveals the details of the plan. Typing something into the “filter” searches for plans by title or group. Clicking on “show full editor” brings up what clicking on “plan library” used to.

The complete list of drag and drop operations supported on the calendar is:

• Drag from the plan library to the calendar: adds the training plan to the day.
• Drag a plan from the calendar to another day on the calendar: move the training plan to the new day.
• Drag a plan from the calendar to another day on the calendar while holding down control/alt/option/command: copy the training plan to the new day.
• Drag a plan from the calendar to the “rubbish” area at the bottom of the plan library: delete the training plan from that day.

If you don’t see the “plan library” button, it’s probably because you haven’t… continue reading

This update has been in the works for a while, but it’s finally ready. And it’s a big one. Here’s a summary of what’s new and improved:

• Rides views
  • New searchable and sortable table
  • Calendar now shows more summary info
  • Plans can be dragged and dropped on calendar
• Power curve chart
  • “New” power curve chart is now default power curve chart
  • Power curve chart library
• “Drawing” on training load chart
• RPE
• Virtual rides
• A handful of other things

Rides views

Previously, there was the “new” calendar and the “old” list of rides. Now the calendar shows monthly power curve and training load summaries, the old list has been updated so it’s going to stay around, and there’s a new sortable and searchable table that is also useful for mass editing and deleting. The interface has been updated to make all these views easily accessible, and any can be set to the default view.

For touch screen users, the arrows in the header can now be clicked/touched without navigating to the top-level link (which affected the coaching menu and would have affected the rides menu.)

… continue reading

There are far more males than females who use this site, which has meant that there hasn’t been enough data to make decent comparative statistics charts for females. Now there is, so now there is a second set of charts for females that can be found under Athlete > Statistics.

The power curve chart for females looks particularly rough because of the lower number of people it’s based on. It’s similar to what the chart for males looked like when it was first added, but it will improve over time. The top group shown on the chart is the 90–95% bracket, leaving the top 5% not shown on the chart.

There is now a new top segment on the chart for males, which shows the 98th percentile, leaving only the top 1% not shown.

… continue reading

Quite a few improvements have been made to Flexicharts. The most obvious one is that there’s a “chart creator” button, which, when clicked, shows a simple interface that allows custom charts to be created with a few mouse clicks and no typing.

This chart creator isn’t able to create a lot of charts that can be entered directly as commands, but it makes it possible to build some charts with a quick and simple interface.

There are a lot more changes to Flexicharts beyond the chart creator.

The colour of points can be based on data by specifying color as an axis.

chart().pwc170(0.5, 'y').epower_curve(1200, 'x').day_lts('color').color('blue-gold').x_axis(160, 360).y_axis(190, 420)

… continue reading

Here’s a long overdue update to the site. The major new feature is segment tracking with automatic interval detection.

Segments are parts of a ride. They are given a name, and all segments of the same name can be compared against each other. The main use of segments at the moment is tracking intervals over time, as it provides a very easy way to see, for example, how all of those twenty minute intervals are going.

Segments can be created on ride pages, using the tools there to find and save segments. Alternatively, segments can be created automatically for intervals recorded with a power meter. To do this, you first need to set it up by specifying what duration intervals you do and a couple of other things so that the site knows what to look for. Intervals are then searched for in all existing rides, and all rides uploaded in the future.

There’s quite a few more updates too, including:

• Trend lines can be shown on the “power vs. L/R…” chart, which shows L/R power balance and other advanced power metrics.
• Trend lines can be created on Flexicharts using the .trendline() function. This uses the Loess method for estimating the trend.
• Duplicate rides can be uploaded.
• HTTPS is always used, as opposed to being optional… continue reading

If you don’t want to share your power data with the world, it’s now possible to have the power data of your rides stripped from the ride files that are uploaded to Strava. There are also options to remove heart rate and cadence data. These new options can be found on the linked accounts page.

This works by creating a new TCX file based on the ride file was uploaded and uploading that to Strava. If none of the data stripping options are enabled and your ride is a FIT, TCX or GPX file, then the original ride file is uploaded to Strava. If your ride is one of the other file formats that Cycling Analytics supports, a converted TCX file will be uploaded. TCX files don’t support temperature data, so that is lost in the process.

On the topic on importing and exporting rides, a number of people have asked about automatic importing from Garmin Connect. This isn’t yet supported, and the main issue is that Garmin charges US$5000 to access this. When this doesn’t seem like so much money, I imagine that this will be added to the site.

In one sentence: Two new Flexicharts commands, coaching UI improvements, some more calendar options for showing day names and week numbers and changing the first day of the week, and Pioneer ride files are now supported.

There are two new commands for Flexicharts. rebase_dates allows the dates to be shifted so that multiple data sets can be shown on top of each other on the same chart, which means it’s possible to compare the long-term stress of multiple years on one chart (as shown below). accumulate causes the chart to show cumulative data, so you can see how distance accumulates throughout the year. There are a couple of examples of this in the default Flexicharts library.

rebase_dates works by giving it a date, and then it shifts the x-values (when dates) so that the date provided is day 0, the next day is day 1, and so on. The Flexicharts documentation has been updated with more details and examples of the new commands.

Coaches will notice that, when looking at one of their athlete’s pages, there is now a dropdown menu in the header to provide access to the analysis and athlete configuration pages. The URLs for the athlete pages have also changed to make this possible, and coaches can use these pages for their athletes without using… continue reading