SuperCycle App

SuperCycle transforms your cellphone into a standard bicycle computer that tracks speed, distance, heart rate, cadence, power, etc. However, it also has the unique ability to measure anaerobic reserve which you will find nowhere else. The anaerobic reserve measurement requires your bike to be fitted with a power meter.

If not done already, you must pair SuperCycle with the power meter under Menu ⇢ My bikes.

Next, set the 5 reference power values under Menu ⇢ Settings ⇢ Anaerobic reserve widget. These 5 values are extremely important for an accurate anaerobic analysis.

If you are completely new to cycling with a power meter, the easiest way to determine these values is to do a 40-minute test ride. To get the most accurate values, you must ride with maximum effort for the entire 40 minutes. After the test ride, click the Update button. SuperCycle will analyze all the rides saved in your ride history to calculate the best reference values.

Please note that if your ride history contains only casual low-effort rides, the reference values will not be accurate.

If you are an experienced rider and already know your absolute record power values, then you can manually override them.

It is good practice to do your own testing from time to time followed by an update. If SuperCycle finds better reference power values, they will be updated.

Next comes the real stuff. Under Menu ⇢ My bikes, create a new page for your bike with a widget layout as shown e.g. with the Anaerobic Reserve, Watts, Aerobic Load, Slow Death Load, and Fast death Load widgets.

In this figure, the large widget shows your anaerobic reserve of 100%. During your ride this value will decrease when depleting and increase when resting or recovering. Its minimal value might even become slightly negative.

If the anaerobic reserve becomes negative it means either that your reference power values are too low, or that you had a strong ride with good legs. In both cases an update to the reference power values may be useful.

The outer ring is the power gauge. On this ring you see a yellow and a red point. The yellow point is your Restore Threshold (RT) below which you are in green Aerobic zone. Above the yellow point you enter the yellow zone of slightly anaerobic exercise, the Slow Death (SD) zone. The red point is your SuperCritical Power (SCP) beyond which you get into the deep anaerobic or Fast Death (FD) zone.

The aerobic load widget shows how much aerobic energy you produced on the pedals. A score of 1 means that you rode the equivalent of 1 hour at the restore threshold (yellow point). Of course, this may also be 2 hours at 50% of RT.

The slow death widget shows the quantity of anaerobic energy you produced in the yellow, slightly anaerobic zone. This energy is calibrated to your anaerobic capacity i.e., an SD score of 1 means that you have used 1 full anaerobic capacity. This does not necessarily mean you got exhausted. You could also have a SD score of 1 by riding from 100% to 50%, then slowing down long enough to recover completely, and then pushing again to 50%.

The fast death widget shows the quantity of anaerobic energy you spent in the red, deeply anaerobic zone. The total amount of anaerobic energy is the sum of the SD and FD scores. On a good ride you may easily have a total score of 5. In a hard race professional world tour cyclists may produce anaerobic scores of 20 to 30.

Let us see some real-life snapshots.

Riding 173 W in FD zone and depleting Wbal to 28 %

Riding 100 W in SD zone and further depleting Wbal to 25 %

Riding under RT and recovering

Upon finishing your ride, it is saved automatically to the local history on your phone. Individual rides in your ride history can be exported in formats that are compatible with conventional databases or other websites. To further analyze a ride with our stand-alone program Typhoon.exe, export the ride in FIT format.