Adaptive Training -- How long does a beta usually last?

I actually meant that I am an edge case, not not lol

But I’ve done plenty of my workouts outside this year too, even prior to implementing the current fix, and I had no issues running workouts and getting credit.

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I’m with @trpnhntr on this, I assume most TR users are probably on AT now so changing it to from beta to “full release” doesn’t really change anything because even if it’s out of beta you can be sure it’ll be updated/changed/improved for a long time to come. The AT process is simply too new for the coaching/training industry, so the more AT data they have to analyze the better they can refine the AT progression.

However I can’t wait for progression levels to figure out unstructured group rides/races (obviously a very tough challenge), and for the levels not to be so sensitive to small-ish FTP changes.

Having done some alpha and beta testing for a very, very big software company, a public beta need not be close to a release candidate. Apple and Microsoft release various types of betas of their software. I would liken TR’s closed beta to the developer betas Apple distributes of its OSes. Of those, some get designated Public Betas. But early public betas need not be close to the release candidate. When I was testing for Apple, a release candidate was almost always almost identical to the golden master (i. e. the final initial release) unless there were showstopper bugs, i. e. the finished product released to all customers.

Google famously released quite a few features and products as beta even though other companies would just call them initial releases. Gmail started as a public beta in 2004. If memory serves, it stayed a “beta” for many years. Then there is software that is not considered beta, but extremely broken (btrfs comes to mind).

Drawing from my experience, the closed beta felt like developer betas: broadly speaking, the features were there, but you ran into lots of edge cases. The open beta right now feels like a public beta with some important features being delayed.

Most notably is the algorithm that scores outdoor rides and outdoor workouts (at least those done with Wahoo head units). They can screw up PLs of people who ride a lot, and there is no good solution right now, but to override AT when necessary. I reckon that this algorithm might also be used to score custom indoor workouts. (Last time I checked, the workout editor is still based on Adobe Flash, which has been deprecated years ago and looks like it has been designed for Windows XP in 2007.) However, you can mitigate this by getting to know AT and overriding it when it makes sense. I don’t find that super hard, to be honest, and the progression levels are on average a very good indicator of how hard a workout taxes you in a particular power range.

I wouldn’t mind if AT stayed in public beta for quite a while longer: it is a feature that can only get better if it is used and tested by a wide array of athletes — including people like you who like to rock their custom workouts. :slight_smile: (I reckon that alone makes AT of much less use to you than to me.) And your criticism that you don’t find AT useful for you is totally fair. Fortunately, the solution to your issues is also clear … but unfortunately, isn’t on the horizon yet.

IMHO my main beef with TR’s software is elsewhere: beyond the workout screen (which does its job very well), I just don’t find their apps very good. One big miss is the lack of analysis tools: how did my performance change over the course of one or several seasons? How does my performance compare the same time last year? The closest is the list of dates and FTP numbers, but I don’t think anyone can parse this without creating a graph. They should also integrate some basic nutrition info (optionally, of course) so that you can track how much you drank or ate during workouts and compute liters per hour or grams of carbs per hour automatically. Things like sleep tracking and the workout editor should be built in. Integration with iOS’s Health app. Similarly, I think you should have some visual marker if you took a break during a workout. Oh, and proper calendar management inside the mobile apps.

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Yes. And I’ve got a long wish list too. My fundamental issue is that I found a better macro approach, or base/build/specialty if you will, and no amount of AT is going to fix that. I’m absolutely certain TR’s approach works for others, but I only care about my performance. The season planning discussion in HighNorth guide (that I bought today) had an interesting discussion on season planning.

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IMHO TR puts some effort into displaying how your fitness develops over time, AT could be very useful at one point. Progression levels could track your progress. And you can enter the FTP by hand, so you can use any testing protocol you’d like.

And you might still benefit from AT if you pick your workouts for your custom training plan from TR’s catalog. Progression levels should still give you a good indication of your progress, and be a good indicator of what a good alternate workout is.

Yes, TR has had the ability to show how fitness increases or decreases over time. Its called a power curve and was rolled out when performance analytics was launched over 29 months ago.

Lets look at how my fitness dropped after switching from self coaching to using TR training plans:

and then increased by switching from TR to another approach using an off-the-shelf plan (purchase once, use over and over):

That is 7 months of FasCat off-the-shelf plans with some mods based on feeling. Really I stopped training the second week of June, most of the gains on that chart are from 5 months of switching to FasCat approach.

And some improvements on short power too, after switching from TR to FasCat approach:

Thanks for the pep talk, but the data and feelings are crystal clear. I’m sure adaptive training would help, thats not the point. Using other analytics I can post my heart rate data, and this new approach has put less strain on my heart.

Thanks but I’ll stick with what is working, as I’m stronger and healthier by following a different road.

I know about the power curve, but it provides only very coarse grained information (not least because it is based on seasons). Two big problems that come to mind: (1) you will have to wait for a while for it to be populated with meaningful data and you have close to zero granularity in the time dimension. And (2) what if your goals change from one season to the next? To give you an idea what I mean here, last season I opted for the Crit Plan to change things up and I was hoping to compete in a few crit races (I did one so far). As a result, I got a massive boost in FTP and could hold 117 % FTP for almost 7 minutes without going all-out. But I predictably I wasn’t able to hold my (relative!) power level for as long as I did before. That wasn’t because I was failing, that was by design. In absolute terms, I had the best season ever. How do I extract that kind of nuance out of my power curves? What if I want to check progress mid-season? Furthermore, it is currently not available on the iOS app.

All I am saying is that what TR has now is not, hmmm, good. A chart with progression of PLs on top of FTP changes could add very useful information here. But so far they haven’t attempted that. Heart rate data could be very useful to show how fit you are. (I can tell how fit I am by seeing how quickly my heart rate recovers after a hard interval to my VT1ish heart rate. If it is less than 1:30 minutes after a few intervals, I’m in good shape.)

I think you misunderstand my arguments: I think the tools TR makes should also serve people like you who are probably using Training Peaks in addition to TR (I’m guessing here, so feel free to tell me that I am wrong).

I used to use TP, but found their system of their trifecta of metrics antiquated. It was less a measure of my performance and more a measure of how hard/easy a training week would probably feel like. Their race and ride analysis tools were nice and you could track metrics like mood and sleep, but in the end I wasn’t using it enough to really justify the cost. Plus, I felt like they weren’t doing anything with the data, I’d have to parse them manually.

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I’m not buying the “power curve, but …” argument. My entire power curve dropped after switching from self-coaching with Carmichael Training Systems approach over to TR plans. Then my entire power curve increased after switching from TR plans to FasCat approach. I’m faster, stronger, and healthier. Without question, except perhaps in forum-land :man_shrugging: In the second chart above I didn’t even train 2-5 minute power and saw a huge increase over TR.

I’ve got a WKO license (paid $170 Sept 2019) and can extract all kinds of interesting and nuanced stuff. Except for things like yesterday, wherein at the start of my 4th week back after a 5-week off-season (during which I was sick twice), my 2 hour benchmark zone2 workout is back to the peak of my fitness in May. But the same happened when I was self-coaching in 2017, and I have a hunch why.

???
I am confused why you interpreted my post as criticism of your training approach. I did not. You should do what works for you, and it seems you have found your jam. I just think TR should aim to cater people like you who use their own or external training plans better than they currently do, not least because many other users could benefit from the additional functionality. Specifically, I was criticizing that TR did not put in much effort into showing you how your capabilities evolve over time. (And at least when I used it neither did TP.)

Yes, it is easy to see improvements if all of your numbers increase, so you could easily see your progress in the power curve. But I think my point still stands: the power curve only gives you one particular way to visualize your performance data, and it does not have much resolution in the time direction. Nor are you able to answer more refined questions.

I’d like to tease out more nuanced information like “How many watts/%age of FTP did I lose over my rest period?” “How did my fitness develop after, say, the first block of Base training? What workouts did I have a hard time with last season? Did I achieve my last season’s goals (e. g. improving my short power), i. e. did e. g. the short power build block affect my capabilities differently than the general build block I did the year before?

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Sorry, working late. its 1:30am.

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Nate also said in the announcment video (in Feb) that his system processed outside workouts, and that was coming soon

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I think a lot of the early steps were very much alpha, if not development. But as far as my team would be concerned, this wasn’t ever a beta test, and isn’t currently, and the main reason for that would be that the purpose of a beta test is to determine if it works, and not that “words are spelt correctly” and “does the survery list the right order”, but does it actually work, as in, does my FTP actually improve when following adaptive training at a greater rate than if i wasn’t, and also the users weren’t set an expectation of was expected of them during the beta test, these are prerequisits for us, but I work in software in the healt industry and mistakes aren’t as simple “ftp has gone down”, this to me (but again it could be my training), this is about throwing untested code at users, calling it a beta, and seeing what happens

For me the beta test would have been “does this improve ftp at a faster rate a standard plan” as far as I can tell, this hasn’t been tested (there is another thread about ftp going down)

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Well everyone is different, so the test should be for the majority rather than 100%. Additionally as I mentioned above, the people posting on here are likely to be the vocal minority (I guess there must be tens of thousands of people using AT now, and how many are posting on here?), so it would be surprising if the feedback on here was totally representative.

Personally I had great results using it this year, setting all time PRs etc across all durations, and I think this was mainly due to better compliance with a smoother progression - previously in the fixed plans there used to be a few progressions in Build which would totally wipe me out, then I’d lose motivation and basically stop following the plan. But I am not making threads about it :slight_smile:

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I totally agree, you should be very careful about analysing a forum, only the angry people post, but two things

  1. You post is a cop out, you are saying that all is well, because the thousands of people that using AT, only the angry ones are posting, which dismisses the angry ones as irrelivant, without evidence, not everybody that is angry posts either, so the best feedback is no feedback ?
  2. That wasn’t what I wasn’t what I was talking about, so you are dismissing my post with “happy users don’t post”, I was talking about the aim of a beta test would be to detemine if the product work “does it improve users ftp”, and by your own post, this hasn’t been done. because the “the happy users haven’t posted”

Feedback from a beta test should never be “how many people post in a forum”

Oh no, that wasn’t what I meant, sorry!

I was only really saying that just because a few people have threads saying they’ve had issues doesn’t invalidate the beta - no training approach will work for 100% of users, surely. I totally agree that you can’t validate a beta just because angry people aren’t posting on a forum! The evidence will be in the data, which we don’t have access to, but TR does - would be cool if they could post something, even high level.

Oh I totally agree, but I am saying (suggesting) is that this was never a beta, because it didn’t set user expectation, or reporting

I’m sorry but that is another dismissive statement, and can’t be checked or questioned, it was used on people who said that the progression rates of TR plans was to high (look in my history) and when DJ posted his video, why there was so much feedback, because so many people were dismissed

And only using your data will be miss leading (if you only look at patients who have died from cancer, 100% of people die from cancer), TR data can quickly be skewed by people not using strava, triathletes would have a different progression rate than cyclist, but TR don’t gather swimming/running data (or other sports), do TR actually employ statisticians ?

It’s just a easy comment to dismiss other people, and doesn’t fit into what should be required in settting up a beta test, and setting user expectations, and that the user behavior is consistent during the beta test (do they upload to TR)

Please understand: not very.

But it’s true isn’t it? We can’t know how effective AT is unless TR publishes some evidence, as they hold all of the data here.

Even if you were to ask people to contribute you are going to get only a subset of data (i.e., those engaged users who post in this forum, unless you invest a lot more time into it).

To whether TR employs statisticians - I would guess yes but obviously I have no better idea than anyone else who doesn’t work there.

To be clear I think they should show some evidence. At the moment we basically just have their word that people on AT do better than those who aren’t on AT.

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Maybe, but you dismissed my argument with “TR have the data”

Exactly (presuming they have actually looked at it), but , again, my post was entirely about is this a beta test, not if AT works, you dismissed that with TR have the data, in my experiance, thats no a guarrente of accuracy, and like I said, a dismissive comment that can’t be questioned as unless “TR publishes some evidence, as they hold all of the data here.”, which wouldn’t be per reviewed

And thats me out of here