Adaptive Training Is Now Out of Beta & Fully Available to All TrainerRoad Athletes!

Big Update, Adaptive Training is now out of beta and fully available to every TrainerRoad athlete. When you log in, you’ll see a notification that Adaptive Training is enabled for your account.

From here on out, this thread will act as a landing page for athletes to receive Adaptive Training updates from the TrainerRoad team and share experiences and helpful tips. But we don’t want it to serve as a place for athletes to post general questions or how-to’s, bug reporting, or support team help.

The forum doesn’t have a great infrastructure for athletes to search for questions and solutions that apply to them, so posing FAQs and getting help on the thread can make it messy and hard for everyone to follow—as we saw in the previous threads of over 7,000+ posts! Additionally, relevant issues/bugs/solutions are constantly changing within Adaptive Training, and TR support has the best and most up-to-date information and help.

If you have questions or need a second look at any Adaptive Training topics like Progression Levels, Surveys, or pending adaptations, please check out our recently updated Adaptive Training Help Guide.

Let support@trainerroad.com know if you have any questions or need a second look at anything; otherwise, feel free to post helpful tips and experiences below, and follow along for updates from the TrainerRoad team!

Speaking of which, we now have comprehensive new Help Center resources for Adaptive Training:
Adaptive Training Overview
Adaptive Training Known Issues
How to Check for Adaptations
How Does Adaptive Training Recommend Workouts?
Progression Levels
Difficulty Levels
Workout Levels
Post-Workout Surveys
Calendar Annotations
How to Add Time Off to Your Calendar
Why did my Progression Levels Adjust after an FTP change?
How to Use Outside Workouts with Adaptive Training
Does Adaptive Training Recommend Adaptations for Swim and Run Workouts?
Does Adaptive Training work on non-Plan Builder Training Plans?
How to use Workout Alternates
Updated Training Plans FAQ

Let support@trainerroad.com if you have any questions or need a second look at anything, otherwise, feel free to post helpful tips and experiences below, and follow along for updates from the TrainerRoad team!

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Update on this latest release!

We definitely heard athletes on this one, and released a prompt to alert athletes with public profiles!
It will look like this:

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Sorry if this has been asked before …. one of the AT help pages mentions that “Currently, unstructured outside workouts are not taken into account via Adaptive Training.” But if I do a regular outdoor ride (not an outdoor workout), then when it syncs into TR it shows “Missing response” … and I can click that text and fill out & submit the survey to say how the effort felt. So is the information I provide being used, or not? I’m confused….

Sorry for the confusion, that is correct that these unstructured outside rides are not being considered for potential adaptations (yet), but we want athletes to have a consistent opportunity to leave themselves feedback on every ride. :+1:

UPDATE We’ll add that clarification to both both the Post-Workout Surveys page and How to Use Outside Workouts with Adaptive Training page to avoid further confusion about the purpose of those unstructured-ride surveys + clarify that they don’t result in adaptations yet.

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I remember seeing something about FTP updates that could be suggested without needing FTP tests. Is that part of adaptive training or a separate beta feature?

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That is a “future” feature that Nate mentioned (in the intro podcast) as something they want to do, but it is not part of the TR system at this time.

  • You still have to perform FTP tests or make manual adjustments from now until the introduction of that or any other alternative.
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Apologies if this has been discussed and covered already. Is there a way to change the Sunday workouts to longer, lower intensity sessions which is offered in the weekly tips as an optional substitute? I have changed the workout easily enough, however, it doesn’t seem to be included for AT adaptations? It might be that I am not doing it correctly?

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Sunday workouts are very easy Sweet Spot workouts as they are. E. g. in my case I am Sweet Spot level 6.2, but this Sunday’s workout is level 4.1. I think what you want to do is replace this easy sweet spot workout with an endurance (Z2) workout. Their difficulty scales mostly with time. I think the most difficult 2-hour workout is about progression level 6.2 or so (e. g. Boarstone), but you can get lower ones. That means once you fix the duration, say 2 hours, your gamut will be quite small, roughly 3.3–6.2.

So in my experience, it isn’t really necessary to adapt these workouts. You just have to determine for yourself what intensity you would like. To improve endurance, you’d have to go longer, although at a certain point I wouldn’t want to do that indoors.

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Workout Alternates! That’s hyperlinked so you can check out the how-to.

You should check in with support@trainerroad.com if you’re unsure. If you use Workout Alternates, even if the ride is ‘shorter’, its still designed to help you hit the same marks so wont necessarily result in a suggested adaptation. :+1:

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Super gentle friendly reminder of what this thread is intended for, and what we are trying to avoid that we’ve seen in prior posts that ultimately didnt serve to help athletes find the help they need.
Please read below.

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My apologies, I should have been better when reading the opening post :man_facepalming:

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Haha its okay! I was prepared for this, you’re not alone :rofl: :heart:

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Can you please change the default progressions? You guys have mentioned that if you don’t know what workout to do, go with a 4.0. If that’s the case, the default after a ftp change should be 4.0, possibly 3 or 2 for beginners.

It’s hard to follow AT, if it constantly gives too easy workouts and I constantly have to manually find an alternative. Defeats the whole purpose.

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I’ve been in the beta and had a couple of problems that I’ve raised with support. The AT “system” does now seem to be working for me, whether it’s improving me is yet to be determined! :grinning:

Some points raised as a result of contacting support. Note that I use the web calendar interface and since it’s summer here in the northern hemisphere I’m doing all workouts outdoors. I use Garmin head units.

  • There’s a possibility of a race condition between Garmin Connect and Strava in sending the workout to TR so disable your Strava connection. Things definitely work better with this done - I occasionally have to reconnect as I also record rides on a unit that doesn’t work like the Edge units and that’s the only way to get those into TR. I disconnect afterwards.

  • The sequence of what happens when you update the calendar is, at the moment, odd. It should be that you are presented with the survey dialog then adaptations are applied but the “Checking for adaptations” and then the “Adaptations pending” popups appear first. Ignore them, open the recently completed workout, fill out the survey, save and you will then get the adaptation popups again and you accept/decline them at that time.

Adaptations are applied upto a couple of weeks ahead, usually just for workouts in the same training zone so completing a Sweet Spot workout tends to just cause adaptations to future SS workouts. Threshold/VO2max workouts occasionally affect one another, I think it depends on how close to the boundary between the two the workout is, i.e. efforts in the 100-105% range.

At the moment I do head over to the workouts library and check the before and after workouts to see what’s different, no doubt that OCD behaviour will pass. I’ve had some workouts being changed twice a week so my plan is completely different to how it started.

@IvyAudrain, with that being this thread’s intended purpose I think you should lock it - unlocking only when you guys post an update - otherwise it’s natural that plenty of people are going to overlook your request and just post here anyway. :man_shrugging:

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+1
Locked and sticky
And reopen the 7k thread for public playground (what would @mcneese.chad do in his spare time anyway? :stuck_out_tongue:)

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@IvyAudrain kudos to the TR team transitioning AT to an open beta. That is a huge milestone!

Regarding How to Use Workout Alternates on the Web, I think the web process will prevent the added workout from being adapted.

The mobile and desktop apps have a “replace” button whereas from the web:

Step 4. Select Schedule to add your new workout to the Calendar.

Note: Once your new workout is added, you need to manually delete the old workout you’re replacing.

Several different places on the website indicate that workouts added outside of Plan Builder will not be adapted. See, for example, Does AT Work on Non-PB Plans and Train Now.

If developing a “replace” function for the website is not in the queue, recommend adding it.

Thanks and, again, congrats on transitioning to open beta.

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A threshold workout is never easy. At minimum it’s a moderate otherwise your ftp is off. I answer the survey honestly and don’t want to manipulate the AI algorithm. My last threshold workout was actually hard but what happens with these 4-6 week plans is you start at 1 and work towards a 4.x and then it resets to 1 even if your ftp change is 5W up or down. The bulk of the workouts end up being 1.5-3. If you were a 4.0 progression in a zone at let’s say 250W ftp, you’re not a 1.0 at 255 ftp.

The issue I have is just from the math perspective and error rate in testing… A 5 watt change on a 250 watt FTP is 2%. It is just within the realm of being the same FTP. Small changes in FTP should have small changes in PLs.

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