I have started a base plan mid volume and wish to be more consistent this year. I’ve used trainerroad for many years but I haven’t been consistent over the last couple of years and have lost a bit of fitness and motivation. I’ve started a base plan but the suggested adaptations seem like huge jumps. Breakthrough rides suggested in both sweet spot and threshold after the first week. I fear that if it’s too hard too quickly, I’ll lose heart and find reasons to not go into the freezing garage. Do people trust the adaptations? Surely they are a massive plus to the TR plans but if I keep ignoring them then what’s the point? Maybe I don’t understand the feedback scores as I’ve never liked 2=moderate 3=hard. For me moderate is still a good effort so I’m often putting 2/5. I don’t think “moderate” is easy but maybe the AI does?
I want to slowly build fitness, not kill myself and burnout by March. I have not events or targets, I just want to get close to where I’ve been in the past, lose some weight and enjoy riding my bike again.
When you look at the intervals, do they look doable based on what you’ve done before?
That’s the acid test for me. If I look at a workout and it’s 3 × 15 at 210 watts, say, it doesn’t matter to me if the workout difficulty is 4.1 or 7.1 if I know that I recently knocked out 2 × 20 at 220 watts (for example)
Rank the hard rides hard and trust the algorithm.
The system evaluates after each ride, so if you blow up or fail the first breakthrough workout, it’ll dial the difficulty back. This is particularly true in the first week or two of a new plan. But if you succeed, you and the AI both have a much better idea of what you are capable of. It’s OK to fail occasionally - that’s how you know where your limits are.
Breakthrough rides always give me pause, but they also give me a huge feeling of accomplishment when I finish them.
Somebody pin this post to the trainerroad homepage. I know I’d benefit from reading it every week or so.
Its been talked about in a lot of posts here, but TR goes off your shown ability now rather than gradually stepping up and wasting time with rides which are too easy for you. AI will always reevaluate after every ride anyway so don’t worry about burn out.
Thanks, I think I’m too used to the old days where each week was just slightly harder than the previous week without major jumps. I’ll just accept everything and cry when I need to.
@Jameslarkin9876 I agree with the recommendation to see how you handle the workouts and rate them accordingly. However, you can dial down how aggressively TR AI ramps your progressive overload. Go to Calendar, click your plan, then Edit Plan, click on the Approach tab, and then select something less aggressive.
It looks like you’re doing great so far! Keep it up!
Don’t be afraid of those higher-level workouts. We’re only prescribing what we think you can do. Some of them will be challenging (like yesterday), but you need to push yourself sometimes to see solid results.
If at any point those three hard workouts plus a group ride become too much to recover from, you could switch to two hard workouts a week, a recovery ride (on Monday or Wednesday), and a group ride to see if that’s more sustainable.
I’d give what you’ve got on your calendar a shot, though!
How do you think you’ll find the scheduled workouts?
I am in a similar position, returning to TR after a few years with maybe 10 rides a year. I think my FTP is set too low at 224w (AIFTP suggested 150)
Since the start of the year my progression levels have risen to 3.1, 5.5, 7.9, 4.2, 1.0, 1.0 and 1.0. This feels very quick but the workouts are still very manageable.
I’m trying to play the long game and I’ll happily take a month of easier workouts as I’m sure they’ll get harder eventually.
As I’m questioning my ftp I’ll perform a ramp test before my next AIFTP to get me at the right levels
I survived. Probably the mental challenge that I needed to re-motivate myself a bit. I found that my heart rate was starting to rise into what I would consider to be more in the threshold zone previously after about 40 minutes of sweet spot but that’s to be expected with my lack of base.
I haven’t been doing nothing but I’ve gone from about 6 hours per week to about 2-3 with less structure over the last 18 months or so do to life events (new job and converting a campervan over my weekends). I think doing hard rides will shock me back into things but It’s obviously more of a mental challenge to get on the bike when you know it’s going to be difficult so that’s something I need to manage. Obviously all my rides are now harder having completed this…
This is exactly the purpose of Training Approach and RLGL. If you feel that your training plan is too aggressive change your training approach to be more conservative. It will then take it easier on you by doing smaller gains in difficulty each workout.