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

I’ll take a peep at that - I had forgotten that those options existed.

In terms of progress, there have been a number of workout swaps, but workouts marked ‘Stretch’, and I report as ‘Easy’ are “only” offering a +1, +2 which feels quite glacial. I’m feeling strong, and I do want to feel stretched.

  • Then it’s best to follow the info I shared above (top of current level, or jump to the next level) which should get you some challenging work in short order.
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Am i correct in assuming that custom work-outs do not increase progression levels?

For example, if I do a free workout or custom workout, that is exactly the same as a TR workout, one will increase PL and the other will not?

Just for an experiment and in the spirit of K.I.S.S. I’d like to try something, but the PL is a very nice tool and guide and so far helping me be challenged and progress, so don’t want to derail too.

  • No, that’s not correct.

  • PL’s assigned to TR custom workouts DO lead to changes in rider PL once the workout is completed.

The issue that currently exists is that the PL values assigned to TR custom workout may be incorrect. We have seen reasonable values to ones that are wildly incorrect. If a rider completes a workout with those bad values, it alters their PL and can lead to issues for AT in setting pending workouts in a training plan.

TR knows about the issue and plans to address it. Until then, custom workout users have to recognize the issue and live with it or use regular TR workouts instead.

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I JUST had something like this happen and sent a detailed Support Request in. It was coupled with a strange change in my Training Plan after updating an event to a B Event (after my A event for this plan.) The short summary is that after I loaded a 90-min VO2 max workout (that looked like it’d be a stretch), I pulled the plug at 60 mins due to time and lack of sleep. I was asked to rate it normally, so I did and called it Very Hard (I think I could’ve maybe finished it.) I never saw a failed workout survey and was given FULL credit for the effort (+0.9 VO2 Max I believe). I accepted the upcoming adaptations and sent support the details.

More to follow…

A post was split to a new topic: Add workout day to training plan with AT connection

So today i did a Free Ride 30 where i did 90%/110% over unders. Something that i can’t exactly find in the TR library. I could have made a custom workout, but Free Ride works too, so that’s what i did.

So far, there was no pop up for the PL’s.
But looking at the before and after PL’s, Sweet Spot and Threshold both dropped.
Not that i’m too bothered about that, it was a challenging work out, that’s what matters.

I had Prater -5 scheduled earlier, based on train now, as it was a productive over/under, but then i did my Free Ride with over unders, which is a harder work out than Prater -5, yet PL’s dropped

Prater -5 = 40 TSS / 0.90 IF

My ride = 42 TSS / 0.92 IF

An FTP increase isn’t needed at this time to make your workouts feel more difficult. I tested what your AI FTP Detection result would be, and it’s very close to what you manually updated in to early June.Outside workouts can feel easy when there isn’t consistent compliance to the outside workouts at times, and executing them as intended will really help increase that feeling of difficulty.

Here’s an example of one outside workout interval where the goal was 104% of your FTP for 4 minutes, followed by the work done during that interval.
image (1)

When thinking of compliance, the goal shouldn’t be to match overall averages of IF or TSS, but rather to focus on every second of the work interval itself to try to consistently ride at the target for as much of the effort as you can. For that specific workout, there was 12 minutes total assigned in that zone, but we only saw around 5.5 min. Really sticking to that target for the entirety of the assigned work interval will be significant in making the workout feel more challenging.

That said, I do know that following power targets outside exactly can be tough, and slight variations are expected and normal, but we can see here from the full scope of this outside workout that even while an average or normalized power may align with the goal of the interval or workout, it doesn’t necessarily mean the ‘work’ is being done as assigned.

Moving forward, I challenge you to try really hard to strictly adhere to the structure of those outside workouts to see how it impacts your perceived difficulty, and then to mark ‘I did not pass’ if you look back at your workout and feel you didn’t adhere to the structured work.

I’ll gladly provide more clarification about how to do those outside workouts most effectively, or to examine your prior workouts more closely via DM if you’d like! Let me know and I’ll be happy to help.

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:laughing: I feel like my homework has been presented in public

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Would you still suggest this even if the inability to adhere to the structured work was due to circumstances beyond fitness or stamina? For example if you were not able to maintain an interval because you had to stop at a traffic light or slow down due to a congested bike trail?

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FWIW, I mark it ‘did not pass’ any time I go look at the analysis and my NP for the intervals is off by more than a few watts. I’ve also repeated intervals during the workout (Wahoo lets me rewind) if I know the environment kept me from doing them properly.

If I didn’t do the work, I didn’t do the work. Thinking I totally coulda done it without that stoplight doesn’t count as doing the work.

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Guys, where are we at with outdoor rides and training plans?

After burning out in January hitting PL10 on Sweet Spot I have essentially only used TR to control the trainer and selected manually every workout.

Given summer time, I have been able to completely avoid the trainer and built a plan myself as I do not have confidence in TR plans due to their extremely intensive nature and well HV plans are capped at less than 10 hour a week.

Are there updates planned to the platform shortly in this regard?

The aforementioned advice definitely applies:

Regardless of the reason, if you weren’t able to do the work, you should make sure you’re taking ownership to not get credit for it. :wink:

Fair enough. Just curious if that would decrease PLs for whatever system that workout was for? If that is the case I am curious why would you want those to decrease for a reason other than fitness or fatigue.

If you don’t do the work, for whatever reason, should you get credit for it?

If you’re really worried about your PLs, just do the workout inside

FWIW, I manually added a 90minute ‘Breakthrough’ VO2 max workout on Sunday, 4x5mins @ 110%, found a nice flat loop - rather than the usual rolling terrain I’m on - and was able to execute it cleanly.

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Not completing a workout due to intensity is treated differently than not completing a workout because of a mechanical issue. Adaptive Training wouldn’t adjust my levels based on a mechanical but it would if I said that workout was too intense for me right now.We want to help identify some general guidelines to help athletes evaluate what to do when an interruption occurs during an interval. It scales differently based upon the work, and this should help differentiate short interruptions versus repeated ones.

  • Endurance/Tempo: If the interruptions you are experiencing are frequent, either restart the interval when circumstances allow you to be consistent, or keep track of time lost from interruptions and add them on to the end of the interval, as accumulation in these zones are key.
  • Sweet Spot and Threshold: A brief interruption of a few seconds doesn’t result in a need to restart the interval, but if the interruptions begin to grow in frequency, then you should get to an area where you can adhere to the intended structure of the workout, and restart the interval.
  • VO2max: Any interruption in VO2max intervals should signal you to restart the interval. This also applies to rest to some degree, where VO2max work limits your rest to keep you at peak aerobic uptake (ie: 30/30s), so extending that rest could detract from the intended effect of the workout.
  • Anaerobic and Sprint: These intervals are very short and specific, and as such should not be interrupted in any way. If they are, restart the effort that was interrupted.
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This is great information. Thank you!

I apologize if I wasn’t clear. I wasn’t asking about PL increases for efforts not done. I was simply asking if your current PLs would decrease if you were not able to do efforts due to logistics.

I mean PLs are a huge tenet of TrainerRoad and is a significant reason why unstructured rides processing is a big feature request. I grant you one should ride for the sake of riding but as an avid user of TR and its adaptive training feature I would like to have my cake and eat it as well: ride outdoors and still care about PLs.

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I don’t think that your PLs go down if you’re not able to complete intervals, they just may not go up since you were not able to complete the intervals. That said, if you go long enough without being able to complete the prescribed intervals, for whatever reason, I think your PLs will go down.

It makes sense though, I don’t see it as a penalty, just being accountable for what you’ve done. Perhaps when they are able to account for unstructured rides and outdoor workouts this will be fairly resolved.

But if you were supposed to do 5x5min VO2 Max intervals, and because of traffic, or hills, or whatever that ended up being 15x1min VO2 Max intervals interspersed with a mix of Active recovery/endurance/tempo, you might not get the V02 Max PL credit you were supposed to, but you would have gotten other PLs that you weren’t supposed to get…

Overall, it should be fair and an honest accounting of your effort.

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