Baron Biosystems is one of those companies I see pop up in the newsfeed every once in a while with something that seems at times over my head technically, but upon closer look could benefit a lot of riders out there. They are essentially a sport’s science company so a lot of what they do is software development, designed to improve training and the real performance on athletes. If you are serious about improving yourself, their workout designer is definitely worth a further look.
The newest innovation though is the development of Smart Workouts. Rather than working with static power zones and pre-set intervals, they’ve developed a mathematical model to measure your power & heart performance on the fly, and adjust your training accordingly in realtime to maximize training benefit. They say it is a better way to ensure that each workout is more consistently difficult for you, enabling you to get the most benefit each time you train. It essentially becomes an automatically adjusted training plan with each new effort, and is available in their latest Xert app for Garmin Connect IQ, Android, or desktop…
Smart Workouts base your training on the actual strain on your body and the power you can generate. Smart Workouts basically hit three targets…
- They are based on mathematical models that can evaluate what your Max Power Available (MPA) is at any point in a workout, ie. how fatigued you are.
- They can use new, adaptable types of intervals to bring your body to predetermined stresses to hit a desired training load.
- Then the device you are using to manage your workout uses mathematical modeling to recalculate on-the-fly the duration & intensity of intervals to help you meet your training goal.
All this is wrapped up on the latest edition of the online Xert Workout Designer platform, and pairs with their catalog of fixed and adaptable workouts.
They also make their way into the new Garmin Connect IQ App, called The Xert Workout Player for Edge 520, 820 & 1000 devices. That app also can connect to and control a smart trainer, calibrate your smart trainer on the go, can switch on/off to allow another connected device or software to control the trainer (like letting Zwift take over), and can send data back to the Xert Online system for desktop tracking.
Of course their Xert Mobile for Android and Xert Remote Player have also both been updated with support for Smart Workouts.
All in the new Smart Workouts results in something like a new performance metric – hardness…
“To measure athletic hardness – which is a measure of an athlete’s motivation and willingness to endure discomfort – we’ve created 16 new workouts that you can perform that will assess your current hardness level. A hardness test is a great workout in-and-of-itself, but when used in your training calendar, they can provide you with feedback on your preparedness to race or just to get to the next level.”
How tough are you?
