That doesn't sound "serious" at all. Possibly wrong bike fit and/or core weakness (or other muscle imbalance), rather than zwift racing

Why would you race 3x a week? Would be nerly impossible to be fresh for all those races with regular training too? Maybe quality races > quantity.

there are plenty of races that are shorter <30 minutes, with some in the 5-10 minute range. definitely able to 2-3 per week without issue. 3 x 100k races would be a different story. this article says average top zwifter does 2.6 races per week, with the high (outlier) of 11.6 races per week. https://zwiftinsider.com/top-a/ i would doubt this level of intensity would cause injury unless you had very little cycling background

I’d agree with the other commenter that it’s probably more to do with bike fit and/or muscle weakness. The racing aspect may just be exaggerating the issue since you may be getting caught up mentally in the racing/competitiveness and not necessarily noticing things like movement on the bike to get more power when main muscles are fatigued

Hey, I have noticed that my hip flexors, glutes and hamstrings get much more "tight" from hard intervals on the trainer (and same thing doing hard intervals on rowing machine) vs doing same or higher intensity intervals outdoors.

Around 12 years ago, I found the solution to this was jogging for 5-10 min after every super hard session on the trainer (an unnatural things to do more so than outdoors). Indoors I am much more static sitting in a fixed position and almost all is at high intensity vs outdoors. Doing the jogging allows the spine/hip flexors/glutes/hamstrings to swivel a bit on our center line restoring things to a more natural range of motion that otherwise gets more and more restricted with continuous trainer time.

In this self experiment of 1 I actually found this out during the 100/100 when I had to do extra minutes of running to make my daily quota and I noticed a correlation to better recovery and body feeling if I did short transition runs than just cooldown riding on the the trainer (you never unwind the compressed hip flexors in the trainer position). I am almost 55 now and been doing that since I was 43 and it helps how my body feels. Almost every one of my indoor bike or rowing machine sessions is followed by jogging for a short period.

Thanks, this makes sense. I ride the tri bike while Zwifting. I think the compressed range of motion at hard effort is damaging.
To your point, running actually provides relief!

Are you in aero on that tri bike? IMHO I really don't like the idea of people riding in aero too much on the trainer. For one thing when you are on the road you are always making micro adjustments on-the-fly so that static position isn't as static as you think. On the trainer it becomes very static IMHO and is not good.

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I confess that sometimes I get lazy and just pound it out in the aerobars but it does seem like the wattage isn't quite as high as sitting upright.
I actually have a Redshift dual position seat post and sometimes ride in the full road position; this seems to help with breathing as well. Maybe I should just ride in regular road position all of the time.

This is what I found on the trainer vs road. Firstly all my trainer riders are hard, mainly because I don't do volume on the trainer and trainer riding is all intensity for me. Second thing is its all mainly in aero, third is that on the road even when I do intervals, the bike is moving around a bit under me, and we have hills, traffic lights, cracks in the road and other natural obstacles where we keep changing position. The solution for me was easy transition runs off trainer to dynamically change my bodies range of motion along its long axis (spine) vs short axis (hips)

Dev

I'm disappointed...I thought we were going to get a picture of you after you crashed your bike while on the trainer.

FWIW, here is what happened
- I was doing these Zwift races too hard without sufficient warm up
- The IT band did affect the knee
- I went on a run and came down hard sort of lock-knee'd - this created an acute injury that was bound to happen.
- Lots of pain and discomfort going down stairs
- Swelling

This led to a Doctor visit and subsequent xray and MRI. Findings:
- Injured quad atrophied; 20% smaller than the other. The VMO in particular was the worst
- Cycling Dynamics on Garmin Connect indicated 60/40% bias
- Diagnosed with arthritis on both sides of the knee and under the knee cap. Floating bodies behind the knee and possible small fracture

I ended up doing PT. It was remarkable how weak my right side was. Interestingly I completely lost any desire to run though still love cycling and swimming. This said, I can walk down stairs and get out of the pool without looking like a seal a lot better now.

10 weeks later, finally started running again. Knees (actually both) seemed to feel every impact.
- Got Hoka Bondis. They help a lot

Now running 10 pace which feels like when I would run at 8 pace which used to be 7 pace...
And maybe because I run so much slower, I don't feel that beat up the next day.

I hope this is helpful to folks who are in a similar situation.