Recently, Stryd came up with new innovations for their running power meter. In this article we highlight one of the new developments: the Stryd Workout App. This app is available for Garmin watches and Apple Watches. Globally, these are big brands. In addition, they allow third-party apps. Other brands have to wait a while.
The advantage of this new Stryd Workout App is that you get advanced training sessions automatically loaded onto your watch. With beeps and vibrations, you will be alerted to the transition to the next block of training along the way. It is not at all complicated. We will show in this article how it works. We do that for the IQ app version for Garmin. You can install it in the usual way as other IQ apps in your watch. For Apple Watch, it is similar.
Training Plan
Stryd offers a range of training plans. Currently, they have about 60 schedules. You can select one from the Stryd app on your mobile phone or from PowerCenter. On your phone, you can start by tapping ‘Stryd Training Plans’ in the opening screen of the Stryd app.
Then you get the question what you want to train for. You can choose between 5K, 10K, half marathon or marathon. We chose the half marathon. The next question is when is that race? Due to Corona, we don’t know if there will be one on January 10th, 2021. But we chose it anyway. The next question is not illogical: when do you want to start training for that half marathon?
The screens follow up logically with questions about how many days you want to train during the week and how many hours a week that can be? Not to mention the question on which day you usually have time for a long run?
If all that is answered, in this case 2 training plans are proposed. One with a limited volume (Low Volume) of 4 days a week with an average of 4 hours of training per week and a more intensive (High Volume) for 6 days with an average of 7 hours per week. When the choice is made, the Stryd calendar fills automatically with training sessions for the next 11 weeks.
If you have a training schedule from your coach, or have purchased one from third parties such as TrainingPeaks, Final Surge, or 2PEAK, you can also import it into PowerCenter. Then it syncs similarly with the Stryd Workout App on your Garmin.
Where’s the Stryd Workout App on your Garmin?
You can access the Stryd Workout App by pressing the button in the top right corner of your Garmin for a long time. You’ll see the familiar screen where you normally choose ‘Running’. For the Stryd Workout App, scroll down until you see ‘Stryd Workout App’ appear in the dark background area. Click here. You’ll be in the Stryd Workout App.
The first training
Make sure your Garmin is far away from your phone with the Stryd app.
In the Stryd Workout App on your Garmin, you can see the workouts for the next 3 to 4 days by first using the button in the top right corner of your Garmin to get the clicks on the ‘Workouts’ screen and then ‘Fetch Workouts’. The training sessions for the next few days will be in your Garmin.
Then you go to the field ‘4 Workouts’ on your Garmin. Here you can see the training sessions that have been brought in on that day and date. If the training for, for example, Tuesday is not convenient, you can choose here to do the training on another day. PowerCenter will accept this.
You can’t do it the other way around. As in the paid version of TrainingPeaks, you can’t drag the workout from one day to the next if it suits you better in PowerCenter. Stryd is working on this. This option is still to come.
As a first introduction, Ron chose the ‘Easy Run with Strides’ on Thursday. On your watch you can see how this training is built up. You can see this in more detail in the Stryd app on your phone. This first training consists of 2 blocks of 22 minutes in zone 1 ‘Easy’. In between are 4 intervals in zone 4 of 30 seconds followed by 60 seconds of rest low in zone 1.
The zone distribution is personal and linked to your Critical Power. Ron’s CP currently stands at 294 Watts. If the CP improves (or deteriorates) towards the race day during the course of the training schedule, the system automatically adjusts the settings with which you have to run.
You always train at the right level for you. So you don’t depend on the level of your training group, which could be too high or too low for you.
Stryd has a solution for runners that have not yet determined their CP: the ‘Introduction to Power Plan’. This is a training schedule of 2 weeks that asks you to run a variety of training sessions. Based on the data obtained, the system determines your personal training guidelines. After these 2 weeks you can scale up to one of the other training schedules offered by Stryd.
On the move
The readers of our book ‘The Secret of Running’ and the many articles at ProRun or the website thesecretofrunning.com know that you get the best results by keeping the wattage constant. You do this by varying the pace depending on the wind or gradient. In the image, this is graphically illustrated. Uphill you run slower than average and downhill faster. This is also the case with head wind and tail wind.
The screens of the Stryd Workout App on your Garmin help you keep up the right pace. The upper field of the opening screen shows your current running power. The color is green if you run within the target power bandwidth for the training block. If you go too fast then the color of this field turns red. Blue is too slow.
In the middle field of the Garmin screen, a countdown appears in 2 ways. A clock goes back to zero. And the green bar of the middle field becomes shorter to the right until the block is done within the training. At the beginning and at the end of such a block, screen-filling figures count down from 5 to 0. Beeps and vibrations support all this. You can’t miss it. You can hardly do the training wrong.
After the training
At home, you can take a good look at your performance and evaluate it. The results appear in Garmin Connect, in PowerCenter and, if you use it, also in TrainingPeaks or other tools like this.
Stryd indicates that much more is under development. And all of that is free for everyone until mid-2021. Then, analogously to Strava and TrainingPeaks, they will have a free and paid version of PowerCenter.
It is expected that the free version will have the functionality that Stryd has offered so far. We suspect that all new possibilities will come into the paid version. Maybe it makes sense. Stryd not only offers a running power meter but builds a complete ecosystem with artificial intelligence around it.
Our book ‘The Secret of Running’ is for sale in our webshop. Also available in German as ‘Das Geheimnis des Laufens’, and in Italian as ‘Manuale completo della corsa’.