Easy 15 minute Zone 3 good as recovery ride?
 

If a 15 minute Zone 3 ride feels easy, would that count as recovery ride?

Legs are fresh the entire time but I'm breathing a little harder and HR goes to zone 3 and sweating like rain. It's an interval of 5 minutes standing, 5 minutes seated high cadence, and another 5 minutes standing. No warm up, no cool down.

Is that noticeably easier than what the rest of your riding is or was? If so, then I guess it's a recovery ride. Albeit a very short recovery ride. I thought they were 30 to 90 minutes in length. But some is probably better than none.

15 minutes in Zone 3 isn't recovery.....60 - 90 minutes in zone Zone 1 - 2 are best for recovery....What exactly are you recovering from ?

Sure thing.

Aside from the heat, humidity, and soaking in sweat, it feels easy and definitely much easier than my 1 to 2 hour sessions the rest of the week.

It just feels nice to have a cold shower after some short but relatively intense workout. That's probably my shallow reason why I started doing it. No idea if it's improving the quality of training or making it worse.

I used to do nothing at all on rest days.

I only do a recovery ride if my legs feel sore and stiff. I'll schedule 30' of Z1 at ~85 cadence, using power, which will have my HR way below the upper Z1 limit. I'll frequently quit after 15' of that because my legs say "plenty." That's what a recovery ride is like. If you don't need actual recovery, don't do a recovery ride. Of course one can ride in Z1 for hours if one can take that sort of mental punishment, but that's not recovery, it's training, perfectly good training. Z3 training is training in Z3. A short period of Z3 probably won't do anything. Might be better to save the energy for a real training day.

No. Z3 is Z3 no matter the length, and it ain't recovery.

Usually, I don't even do recovery ride, just rest, no workout the next day after a hard session.

Perhaps, I'll do more tests and see which one is most effective for me.