Three reasons to make Zwift your indoor training companion

The days are shorter, and the weather’s colder and wetter, but that doesn’t mean you have to put your cycling on hold until spring. Zwift has plenty of great ways to keep you in the saddle throughout the winter months, including some exciting features purpose-built to add an extra dimension to your indoor training.

Zwift, the global online fitness platform for cyclists, is constantly evolving. The platform has recently added new routes, better event capabilities and improved content discovery to the mix, meaning that Zwifters will now be able to search for suitable workouts based on their duration or the effort they want to put in. 

Here, however, we want to focus on three exciting features that can bring a fun, competitive edge to your training.

Pro Training Camp gives you access to the workouts used by top professional cyclists from leading pro teams, while ZRacing gives you a chance to enter competitions against real-life opponents from across the world of your own level. Perhaps most tantalisingly of all, the new HoloReplay function can pit you against the most formidable adversary of them all – yourself…

So, with the indoor cycling season upon us, here’s everything you need to know about the exciting ways Zwift can help you get the most out of your winter training.

1. Pro Training Camp

Winter training camps have been an essential part of a pro cyclist’s itinerary for decades. Unfortunately, flying out to southern Europe to enjoy a couple of weeks exploring picturesque mountain passes, bathed in beautiful sunshine, isn’t an option for most of us. Zwift’s Pro Training Camp collection can remedy that, however, by bringing the training sessions to you. Best of all, it’s flexible enough to fit around your schedule.

Zwift’s use of the word “Pro” is no accident, because Pro Training Camp gives you access to workouts based on professional riders’ own favourite sessions. Zwift has recruited some top-level talent to help out, too, with Ineos Grenadiers, Jumbo-Visma, Movistar and BikeExchange-Jayco bringing along big names like Geraint Thomas, Marianne Vos, Annemiek van Vleuten, Carlos Verona and Lawson Craddock to share their expertise.

There are incentives for getting stuck in. Completing any of the team workouts unlocks their team cap for your Zwift avatar, while completing any two workouts from each of the four participating teams (that’s eight workouts in total) unlocks a special Pro Training Cap.

As with any other FTP (functional threshold power) based workout on Zwift, the difficulty level will be scaled to match your own current fitness and cycling ability – Pro Training Camp is training like the pros, rather than training for professionals. (To get the most out of Pro Training Camp, it’s worth keeping your FTP accurate and up-to-date, using the choice of four FTP tests built into Zwift.)

Zwift’s Pro Training Camp runs from 21 November 2022 to 15 January 2023, with registration open now. Workouts can be completed at any time on demand, and once you’ve put in the training, you’ll probably want to test yourself by taking part in December’s ZRacing series…

2. ZRacing

Why go to the effort of travelling to a race when the race can come to you? Zwift’s always-on ZRacing feature gives you a chance to take part in races throughout the day, with new contests getting underway every hour. Adding to the flexibility, courses and durations are carefully planned so that you can warm up, race and cool down in the space of an hour – all while pitting your new-and-improved fitness levels against other Zwift users from around the world.

There’s no chance you’ll get bored of the routes, either, because Zwift changes them every week. You also get themed monthly race ‘series’, with the December line-up picked by the pro teams who’ve contributed workouts to Pro Training Camp. 

And if competitiveness is a priority, you can rest assured that Zwift has taken care to ensure races in the Zwift Racing League (ZRL) are an even playing field. Zwift takes data from every ride you do – whether in a free-ride or an event – to build your own customised power profile. Category enforcement then prevents riders from taking part in a category below their ability, resulting in fairer and more fun races for everyone. Season 2 of the Zwift Racing League is already underway but season 3 kicks off on 10 January, so there's plenty of time to register and beat the post Christmas blues by racing with your friends.

3. HoloReplay

Pitting yourself against your fellow Zwift users is one thing, but there’s one rival who’s always going to run you close on the road – yourself. HoloReplay, a new feature that was high on the Zwift community’s wishlist, translates the exact same effort you put in on a particular Zwift segment into a translucent, on-screen avatar.

But this HoloReplay isn’t just based on your average speed throughout a particular section of road. Zwift uses the data recorded on your previous rides to ensure that your avatar is a genuine blast from your past, an opponent riding an identical bike, taking the same line on the same course, with exactly the same power output as your previous self. The HoloReplay’s performance can be based on your last ride, the occasion you set your most recent 90-day PB, or a combination of the two.

Aside from bringing a fun competitive element into play, taking on your HoloReplay rival is a helpful training tool. If, say, you’ve been trying for ages to go sub-60 on the Alpe du Zwift but keep blowing up in the closing kilometres, you can pace yourself better next time. Or, if you have steering enabled, you can see if you can work out an improved line through a particularly twisty segment. 

14-day free trial

If you want to try out Pro Training Camps, ZRacing, HoloReplay or any more of Zwift’s exciting training features, Zwift offers a 14-day free trial. That’s plenty of time to get a feel for everything the app has to offer, without making any financial commitment.

For more information on Zwift and its exciting features, visit zwift.com.