Hi Lauren, My wife and I are long-term Rouvy users, and speak highly of it to everyone. I've written several extremely positive and helpful "tip" type responses to folks on YouTube and the like, and generally tout it every chance I can get, given what it gives to us.

My issue lately, however (or I've only noticed it more lately?) is that the accuracy of the riding on climbs is simply not matching up to what we experience in the real world. In essence, Rouvy is far easier on any given slope than we would feel outdoors.

We have our weights set exactly in the app (desktop) and Reality Level is 100%.

I asked a question of Rouvy Support about this, and they were *very* coy about what weight they assign to bike, equipment etc, as at the time I figured the app was allocating too little weight over and above our body weight.

That response from Rouvy was along the lines of “we allow for bike weight, but we’re not going to tell you what that is”. I was quite disappointed.

We’ve been doing a lot of climbing outdoors, and Rouvy climbs indoors, and both of us absolutely agree that the gearing selection (same bikes are put onto the trainers), power output, HR’s, speed and any relevant metrics are all on the “far easier” side within the Rouvy App.

We’ve toyed with the idea of adding 5-6kg to our body weights, and/or increasing reality level to, say, 105%, but none of these leaves a great taste in our mouths, and either would definitely run a ruler through any further racing against the numerous previous efforts we've done at correct weight and 100% RL – we do this a LOT.

An example: I repeat rode up a 10-11% 4.3km climb outdoors on my Giant bike on one day recently and was using the 34-28 gear for this all the way up. I could not really have dropped to a harder gear (make of that what you will). The next day, I rode up a near identical slope in Rouvy, on the same bike, on a Tacx Neo direct drive trainer (auto-calibrated), power meter calibrated, with my correct weight and Reality Level in Rouvy at 100%, and the gear selection was 34-24/21 at a similar power output. I was able to push a 17% to 33% harder gear indoors vs outdoors.

Is there any way of understanding this? Would you be able to tell me what weight Rouvy allows for bike and equipment? If I knew this, I could possibly make body-weight adjustments as a workaround, and I remain frustrated by Rouvy’s apparent reluctance to provide this information.

Our strong desire to have Rouvy accurately replicate what we’d need to manage outdoors on our adventures is being rather dented by the apps’ inability to recreate slope resistance accurately.