XERT – multiple sports profiles allow toggling between sports

XERT – New Feature, Multiple Sports Profiles

XERT has recently enabled the ability to create multiple sports profiles within one account.

XERT majors on POWER in sport but previously you had to have separate accounts for Cycling Power and Running Power. Now you can have them all in one account and easily switch between the two. Well I say “two”, you can have more than that and in theory, I could have a sports profile for my Vasa Swim Trainer and you could have a Rowing Profiles for your Concept PM4.

The Problems with combining Power

Problem: There’s no science which tells you how to do it!

Let’s say you create a running and cycling profile in Xert. It’s not yet possible to combine the Training Load from each nor is it possible to assess how one impacts recovery in the other. So the newly added features allow you to toggle between sports but that’s still better than having two accounts and I have to admit to forgetting about my running power account with Xert quite some time ago even though I still consult Xert frequently for cycling.

My understanding of the issue is that, from a Load/TSB type perspective, there’s no (easy) way for Xert to provide a single solution that works across triathlon sports. Some partial workarounds currently exist by taking into account your ‘freshness’, however that needs to be manually updated and, in my opinion, that’s too much of a faff.

Hopefully, the new Multiple Sports Profiles are the first step towards an over-arching solution by Xert for the triathletes who train by power.

Some More Technicalities

You can set up several sync sources. I have Wahoo and Strava. The Wahoo source feeds my bike activities as that source is ‘clean’ and good for me.

For running power I have to use my Strava account that I created just for HRV4Training as it’s the only one for me that automatically updates my runs AND is correct fro power.

I’ve set up a 3rd profile to try to add together my Vasa Swim and Rower sessions. However, it seems not to work as I can’t get the power through from Vasa to Garmin CIQ and on to Strava. I don’t think Strava can hold power for non-runs/rides. I’ll look into that more closely at some point.

In brief, here’s how you set up the syncs.

Sync > Garmin Connect or Sync > Strava

Xert is flexible and allows you to specific what sports are synced from each platform

Opinion

A nice step on the way to combined multisport power.