In general, you should not add activities other than cycling to your cycling profile. This is because the XSS you input from other activities will get applied to predictions and, for most activities, the benefit they provide to your cycling fitness isn’t easily measured. If you’d like to keep a record of what you’ve done in other sports, you can log them using the Fitness Planner but be sure NOT to assign an XSS value to them.
To account for the effects from other activities that can influence your training, use the Freshness Feedback feature to adjust for any additional tiredness you may feel from other activities to ensure that the recommendations of the Xert Adaptive Training Advisor accounts for these effects by delaying some workouts until you fully recover.
Deep Dive
Put simply, Xert quantifies the training you are doing from your power data, and can use this information to predict your future fitness and to recommend what training you should do. It uses this data to calculate your Training Load as well as your Recovery Load. Together they are used to determine if you are fresh or tired and what type of training you are able to do at a given time. This is where having multiple sports represented in your cycling profile can be problematic; the Training Loads and Recovery Loads from one sport do not necessarily apply to another sport equally so the advice you get on what training you should be doing isn’t going to be correct.
To illustrate, one could argue based on anecdotal evidence alone, that 2-hours of cross-country skiing might benefit your cycling. By how much? How about the recovery demands afterwards? We know that specificity reigns when it comes to training. This means that to improve cycling, you need to ride your bike. At this time there is very little scientific data available to suggest how much training benefits from one sport is transferable to another sport.
So, for these reasons, you should keep your sports separate.
Running Power
If you’re running with a run power meter, like a Stryd, let us know at support@xertonline.com. We can help you set up a second account to manage your run data separately.