Just because I disagree with someone hardly means I am a bot. I think TR has the data to back up their training approach at this point.
Be nice.
The meme was a joke because you keep repeating yourself without answering the questions I asked you (which is classic bot and/or trolling behavior so I was seriously questioning). Sorry if you took offense, it was not intentional.
I appreciate the doubling down on the 5 hours of training is all anyone needs. I strongly disagree⊠but would love to hear why you believe that other than âAI says so.â
TR may have data that suggests people perform better with more intensity and less volume. However, âhaving dataâ is not the same as proving a conclusion.
TrainerRoad has always presented itself as a science-based company, so itâs reasonable to ask: where is the published evidence showing that intensity alone is the most important factor in training outcomes?
Platforms like Strava and Intervals arguably have access to far larger datasets from real-world athletes. In theory, they could use AI to analyse that data and develop evidence-based training strategies. Yet they donât claim to have discovered a fundamentally different training paradigm, and thereâs little evidence that TrainerRoad is doing that either.
Meanwhile, one of the most widely cited bodies of research in endurance trainingâthe often misunderstood 80:20 model associated with Dr. Seilerâsuggests a different principle. The idea is to train as much as you can overall, with the majority of that volume at low intensity, while adding only as much high-intensity work as you can recover from while continuing to maintain high training volume. Among Norwegian endurance athletes, this often works out to roughly an 80:20 distribution.
So simply dismissing that approach because TrainerRoad doesnât prescribe it, on the basis that they âhave the data,â isnât a very convincing argument. Without transparent evidence, it risks sounding less like science and more like marketing and trolling.
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Maybe all the world class coaches and world class athletes are wrong and the optimal amount of aerobic training is between 4 and 6 hours per week.
That doesnât seem very likely, though. Not really.
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What data does it have on people who follow a more volume and a little less intensity approach?
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This. TR is a business and that business is getting arses on saddles, preferably indoors with their plans/interfaces. There is a significant risk of selection bias in their datasets. Nothing nefarious just the fact that for most of us the point of this is the outdoor, largely unstructured ride. Something TR is not in the business of providing. Nor can it parse such data as it has coming from those rides, by dint of the fact that they are unstructered. There is no âThey did X and the outcome was Yâ in there. The dataset that the AI is ploughing is all the indoor ( or outdoor structured) rides that we have completed and it will naturally glom on to ones we finished and discount those we didnât. While ignoring all the unstructured stuff. Maybe there is some clever stuff on the fatigue models in there but I would be surprised if you can extract a lot of meaning from such stuff for unstructured. Any TIZ data will be fuzzy; amalgamating traffic light starts for some sort of anaerobic stat on an edurance ride is nonsense. The more volume people are going to naturally fall out of the TR database. It takes a particular type to strap a trainer onto their arse for more than a couple of hours. My limit is 1.5. Hence the selectional bias in the dataset. The LSD crowd are not in there.
There will be some slicing and dicing where you amalgamate data sets from ârider typesâ to give an enriched personalized insight. Then action the plan accordingly but to claim that the AI is just right when it is more intensity less volume seems to miss the point a little.
I donât do TR to become better at doing TR. I do TR to become better at riding my bike IRL. Riding IRL takes more than just âfitnessâ. It takes bike handling skills under fatigue, It takes feeding strategies, weather management, ancillary adaptions such as I mentioned. None of these are served by a max ride time of 1.5 hours, unless all you ride are track or criteriums.
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I thought they up the intensity because they know in the main their customers donât have enough spare time/willingness to train longer?
Didnât they used to prescribe longer endurance rides, but found their users didnât do them.
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Initially they did leave the âSunday Rideâ as a user outdoor ride but then we the users complained of the lack of progress/ desire for an indoor option/ compliance to plan. Probably brought about by all the town sign sprints, hill yomping, testiculating and general mayhem of a Sunday ride that was nominally slated to just be an endurance pootle in the plan.
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