WKO Smart Segments

Smart Segments in WKO5

Overview

Workout segments have gained a lot of popularity over the past five or ten years. Driven by Strava’s KOM/QOM ranking and Garmin’s follow-up introduction of segments, endurance athletes are more focused on their segment performance than ever before, and WKO provides an easy and powerful way to review, track, compare, and analyze custom segments.

What is a segment, exactly? Popularized by Strava, a segment is a specific GPS track with a defined starting point, route, and ending point. A segment can be thought of as a specific stretch of road or trail, typically featuring a specific element such as a climb, descent, or fast section for which segment time, speed, and VAM are tracked and compared against other riders.

What do you do with segments? Our goals for segments are usually all about ranking our performance against others. Let’s use the local Flagstaff climb as an example. Pull on some spandex, head over to the climb, and give it your best go, then download your data and review your performance against the thousands of other climbers who have completed Flagstaff. As you train, you want to improve your time and therefore your ranking, fueling your competitive fire.

Can you improve your performance on a segment? Of course! And we can help. TrainingPeaks WKO5 introduces Smart Segments, bringing together the fun of segment domination and WKO’s well-known analytics power.

What are Smart Segments?

Smart Segments are user-defined GPS tracks that can be captured and analyzed in WKO5. Smart Segments are not a ranking system against others, but a powerful analytics tool that will track your own performances on each segment and allow for deep analysis of those performances. Click here to learn how to create, compare, and rank Smart Segments in WKO5.

Why analyze a segment? Well, have you ever wondered if you climb that local hill faster in a lower gear or at a higher cadence? What about your power trends? Are you faster when you go harder at the bottom and hold on at the top, or when you just ride it all at an even pace?
As an example, look at the screenshot above to see that Joe Rider created a Smart Segment for a local route and named it Admire SST. He’s completed this segment forty-three times and can compare his performance from any of the occurrences.

Key Benefits of Smart Segments

 Smart Segments have numerous benefits beyond tracking your segment performance. Here are just a few:
  • Rank your performance on specific segments by speed or power.
  • Analyze the results of a Smart Segment performance for specific insights that can be used to improve future performance. Going for that KOM/QOM? Smart Segments can help.
  • Track performance intervals as Smart Segments for a robust way to analyze interval workouts and compare them against past performance.
  • Compare your performance on your routes or segments. 
  • Create your own defined analytics for deeper analysis into specific performance.

About TrainingPeaks WKO

WKO is a power data analytics engine built to unlock the secrets of your endurance training and performance data. Click here for more information and to download your free trial of WKO today.
Share by: