Zwift has just introduced the Ride V2 indoor cycling setup, which offers more adjustability than the original model at the same price, and announced a raft of updates to its online fitness platform over the coming weeks.
> Over a decade since it revolutionised indoor training, has Zwift stood the test of time?
Ride V2 comes with a more compact frame than previously, and it’ll accommodate a slightly wider range of rider heights – 146cm up to 198cm. That’s about 4ft 10in to 6ft 6in.
Zwift Ride now comes with adjustable crank length as standard. You get to choose from 160mm, 165mm, 170mm, 172.5mm and 175mm.
> Check out our review of the original Zwift Ride with Kickr Core
An updated seatpost design also offers greater fore-and-aft adjustability, allowing you to set the saddle further forward than before.
> Head over to our indoor trainer reviews
If you already own a Zwift Ride and don’t fancy shelling out on an entirely new setup, the adjustable cranks and updated seatpost are available to buy as accessories from Zwift.com.
A Zwift Ride V2 with Kickr Core 2 is priced at £1,099.99
> JetBlack launches £599 indoor trainer frame so you can leave your outdoor bike alone
New roads in Watopia
Watopia’s the biggest map on Zwift and it’s getting bigger. From 26th October the Archipelago Island chain adds a series of new roads that connect the Jarvis Island loop to the jungle. Inspired by the West Coast of California and Catalina Island, the expansion specifically adds two new crit circuits on Watopia, each with its own start pen. There’s also a new Watopia Power Segment, which is a loop in the shape of the power icon from the game’s interface. Like the NYC power segments, The Grade, and Montmartre, you’ll be able to benchmark yourself around the Power Segment, although exactly what power numbers you’ll be able to get isn’t yet clear: it doesn’t look long enough for a full 20-minute FTP effort.
The expansion also adds 20 new routes for badge-hunters, some of which will be very short – the circuits themselves for example – but the expansion does mean there’s effectively a new perimeter ride for Watopia, so there will certainly be longer ones as well.
Whoop integration
Zwift has also announced a new integration with fitness/recovery tracker Whoop.
“This first wearables connection helps Zwifters get a fuller picture of their training, providing insights based on their Whoop Recovery Score (Recovery measures how well-prepared your body is to handle strain and exercise).
> Read our review of Whoop 5.0
Zwift says, “On red days, Zwift will automatically adjust your Personal Recommendations, so athletes can still get a meaningful session without overreaching.”
The Whoop connection is available within Zwift today. Later in the autumn, you’ll also be able to see your Zwift rides and runs within the Whoop app.
New look for Zwift Companion app and Zwift game homescreen
The Zwift Companion phone app will get a new look in October, with Zwift promising major updates to the home screen, while your weekly activity graph will be split into two screens, which should make it easier to track your fitness.
And starting in a couple of weeks, the Zwift game home screen will get a refresh too. One thing that’s welcome is that your hardware will now pair in the background: no need to go through that pairing screen every single time you fire up the app.
“Scheduled content is elevated within the new home screen design, meaning your next activity is just a click away,” says Zwift. “Additionally, day tags assigned to planned activities help you visualise your week by what’s coming up.
“Zwifters will also notice a new Progress Widget, helping them track their progress towards their weekly goals, alongside career progression stats, a much-requested update.”
Watt Lock – coming next month
Sometimes you’re supposed to have an easy ride, and once you’re riding around and the competitive instinct kicks in, it’s often hard to stick to your guns. You could schedule an easy workout, but for this winter there’s a new option. Zwift already has an ERG mode that automatically adjusts your smart trainer’s resistance to match the target wattage of a structured workout interval, and Watt Lock does what it says: hit the button and you’ll be switched to ERG mode, and the game will keep you at the power you picked. You can nudge it up and down using the game controls too, like you can with the intensity of a workout. Great for those days where you want to make sure you don’t go too hard, and it also might be a useful tool for attacking one of the big climbs: If you know you need to hit a certain power for the time you want up Alpe d’Huez, you can just dial it in and see if you can make it to the top.
> What is ERG mode on your turbo trainer and how should you use it?
Obviously this is a smart-trainer-only feature. Also: we’d love to see some kind of option to have the lock as a limit, rather than a set power: you can ride around as easy as you like, but you’ll never go over the upper limit you set yourself. That’d be an even better recovery day tool.
The workout library is getting a workover
About sixty percent of Zwifters are regularly doing workouts on the app, so it’s a big part of the ecosystem. As Dave said in the Test of Time feature the workout library has grown organically to the point where it’s a bit of a mess: a lot of historic stuff from collaborations, for example, that overlaps some of the core stuff. We’re being promised “more refreshed collections with more options per collection” and we don’t have any more clarity than that on what the changes will look like, but hopefully they’ll rationalise the content a bit so it’s easier to find a plan or a workout that’s right for you. There is new content coming too, with 40+ new workouts being added.
Zwift racing is expanding and getting more newbie-friendly
What’s the first thing that happened to you when you tried Zwift Racing? You got dropped? Because you didn’t know to spin up and kill yourself for half a minute to even stay in the race? Yeah, us too. ZRacing is Zwift’s most popular racing series, and this season it’s introducing a scripted ride, Racer 101, to work new racers through the experience of joining a race, and what happens during a race. The formats available within the ZRacing series are expanding too: it has focused on short-course mass-start racing until now but this winter you’ll also be seeing time trials, crits, and longer epic races – and there will be rewards in the game for diversifying your entries too.
> Everything you need to know to start racing on Zwift
Zwift Racing league, in association with WTRL, is back as well. This is a team competition, and again Zwift is trying to help newer riders navigate the waters, with a ZRL introduction ride that helps riders understand team racing. There’s a new “race of truth” format too, which is a mass-start draftless race. No hiding in the pack! There will be four six-week rounds from September (starting September 22) to April.
More broadly, some completely new racing formats are coming too. Points racing is something that has long been requested by the Zwift racing community and Zwift is now working with some of the big players in the Zwift racing scene to make sure it’s building the experience that people want. There’s no specific launch date for that though.
Tour of Watopia is back
If you’re keen on amassing XP points to level up in Zwift then the Tour of Watopia is back and should be on your list, because there’s double XP on all the rides. It’s a five-stage tour that will help you tick off some of the new routes from the Watopia expansion, and there are three levels of ride for each stage of the tour. If you manage all 15 then you’ll qualify for the “ultimate unlock”, we’re told, which last year was a ton of XP and a special hat. A virtual hat, not a real hat.
New drops in the Drop Shop
Zwift describes the Drop Shop as “The ultimate storefront in cycling” and there have been 30 new bikes and wheelsets added since April this year. The differences between the entry-level gear and the fastest stuff aren’t trivial: if you want to climb the Alpe du Zwift in under an hour then changing out your stock bike for the best climbing setup (we think that’s currently the fully-upgraded Specialized S-Works Tarmac SL9 and some Princeton CarbonWorks Alta 3532 wheels) will save you well over a minute. Anyway more new stuff is coming: a Zwift x Pinarello Dogma F collab, all the fastest bikes from the Kona Ironman, and a Factor/Black Inc special edition. Maybe time to switch up that stock frame you’ve been bumping around on?
There are new Halo bikes coming too. These are the bikes that are the hardest to acquire: you need to buy and fully upgrade three bikes from a manufacturer to even unlock the ability to buy one, and then it costs a ton of drops and you still have to upgrade it to get to its full potential. If you’re spending long hours on Zwift, then it’s something to aspire to. New Halo bikes from Cervélo and Canyon are coming this winter.
Rouvy integration begins
If you missed the news that Zwift bought Rouvy: well, Zwift bought Rouvy. We’re going to go out on a limb and say that the two training platforms are fundamentally pretty incompatible – one’s augmented-reality real video, one’s a full virtual world – and so making them one coherent thing is going to be a complicated job, if that’s even the plan. However, the first steps will be happening this winter, and the very first step is that you’ll be able to sync your Rouvy rides to Zwift and get XP for them. This isn’t going to affect many users – you need to be a paying subscriber on both Rouvy and Zwift already – but it’s the start. Rouvy rides will count the same as outdoor rides, so you’ll get 5 XP per kilometre ridden.
