🎉🎉🎉 Announcement: Personalized Custom Training Plans! 🎉🎉🎉

[ming]

Hey everyone,

We’re so excited to announce a huge update to TrainerRoad’s Plan Builder: Personalized Custom Training Plans! Our training plans have been adaptive for years, and now each training plan is customized to you based on TrainerRoad’s analysis of your training history and preferred Training Approach!

One of the most common questions we get is, “How much volume and intensity is right for me?” and the answer usually starts with, "Well, that depends…” because there are tons of variables to consider. With this update, TrainerRoad removes all the guesswork by creating a custom training schedule for you. Using AI to analyze your training history, goals, and Training Approach, we can determine the exact volume and intensity you need.

How It Works

Every athlete has different goals and needs a unique path to reach them. Once you’ve synced your training history and let us know your goal, we can build that unique path.

Plan Builder has an all-new look streamlined for simplicity. One of the new additions is Training Approach. This lets us know how hard to push you, and controls the intensity and workload of your plan. Here’s some guidance on who each training approach is for:

• Conservative: A conservative approach is for athletes looking for more modest gains while benefiting from a reduced training load.
• Moderate: A moderate approach is for athletes who want steady progress and consistent improvements with a comfortable and manageable training load.
• Balanced: A balanced mix of training load and recovery makes this approach the most effective and sustainable option for most athletes.
• Demanding: A demanding approach is for athletes who want significant performance increases and can handle a high training load and increased need for recovery.
• Aggressive: An aggressive approach is for athletes who want to push their limits. Due to the higher training load, athletes using this approach must place an even greater emphasis on good nutrition and recovery between workouts.

Set your Training Approach and we’ll analyze your entire training history (don’t worry, this only takes a few seconds ) to customize a plan schedule just for you.

That’s it! You’ve got your customized schedule recommendation just like that.

For the keen-eyed, you might’ve noticed a 4-workout schedule. That’s because we’re launching 2- and 4-day plans as part of this release! If you’ve ever felt “between sizes” with volume, rest assured we’ve got you covered.

If you make changes to your recommended schedule, TrainerRoad will let you know with an “Adjusted Schedule” message.

If the changes are likely to be detrimental, you’ll receive a “Warning” message.

To go back to a recommended schedule, select “Restore Schedule”.

How Do I Use It?

The updated Plan Builder is now available on the website!

You can get to the updated Plan Builder from the Training Plans page or by editing your plan from the Calendar (click on the name of it in the upper-left corner, or the plan start/plan phase annotations). If you haven’t already seen the announcement on the website, you can access it straight from there, too.

Note these updates are only on the website now, not in the desktop and mobile apps.

What Else Is New?

We packed a ton of new stuff into this release to make Plan Builder even better. For athletes who aren’t racers, or are taking some time away from racing, there’s a new way to focus on your goals. Let us know your primary training discipline, your training goal, and how long you want to work on that goal and we’ll do the rest.

We also know that your goal dictates the type of training you need. If your goals require more endurance training, or an increased focus on intervals, that’s factored in.

And you’re not locked into training inside! If TrainerRoad recommends that your long endurance ride should be longer than 1 hr 30 min, we’ll automatically switch it to an outside Solo Ride – complete with wattage/RPE targets and guidance on how to execute that ride. You can also manually change any of your weekly workouts to be Group or Solo Rides, and they’ll have the same targets and guidance.

This is all available on the website right now! And I want to give a huge shout out to the team at TrainerRoad for mobbing on this project, we’re really proud of what we’ve built.

Here’s our Help Center article with more information and an extensive FAQ: https://support.trainerroad.com/hc/en-us/articles/360037923191-Plan-Builder-Overview

And our blog post announcing the updates to Plan Builder: New Personalized Training Plans - TrainerRoad Blog

Can’t wait for you to use these new features and get feedback! We’re here to answer any questions, and, as always, you can email support@trainerroad.com.

[WillS]

Is there no longer a way to change the specific base/build/specialty plans that plan builder uses? I liked being able to change those to be better suited to my events.

There’s also something weird going on with the training load warning. I moved all the workouts ahead one day during the setup, so they would be Monday-Saturday instead of Tuesday-Sunday without changing anything else and got a warning that the training load might be too high. The warning went away when I moved them back to Tuesday-Sunday.

Is there a way to use the old plan builder?

[Rizzi]

Possible bug:
I picked Building endurance and moderate which resulted in 4 days (3 hard, 1 endurance) and I got this message:
“Your Customized Schedule Recommendation
We recommend this custom training schedule to match your current capabilities, goals, and Moderate Training Approach.”

Then I reduced to 2 intense days (masters) per settings which resulted in this:
“Warning
Your training load might be too high, potentially leading to overtraining. Consider reducing your training load and increasing recovery.”

So a reduction in intensity resulted in a overtraining warning whereas more intensity was the recommended schedule.
That messaging doesn’t make any sense.

[MI-XC]

The review of the plan before you add it to the calendar is super basic and doesn’t really show you anything. I liked it in the past when you were able to go into each phase for more details, workouts, etc and make changes. So to see the plan details I added it to my calendar and its been “Checking for Adaptations” for about 5 minutes. This is in the Beta calendar.

[ming]

@WillS

Is there no longer a way to change the specific base/build/specialty plans that plan builder uses?

You can still add individual training phases to your Calendar if you’re looking to self-coach. And you can change your customized plan to be a Masters plan by choosing 2 days of intensity. You can edit your plan to be a Masters plan at any point.

Another thing to note is that Polarized plans will be supported soon in this updated version of Plan Builder.

@WillS

There’s also something weird going on with the training load warning. I moved all the workouts ahead one day during the setup, so they would be Monday-Saturday instead of Tuesday-Sunday without changing anything else and got a warning that the training load might be too high. The warning went away when I moved them back to Tuesday-Sunday.

Looking into this one, thanks for letting us know!

[ming]

@Rizzi

Then I reduced to 2 intense days (masters) per settings which resulted in this:

Warning

We’re looking into this now, thank you for reporting it!

[AlphaDogCycling]

I 2nd (and 3rd, and 4th, …) the point that the overview / review is too basic, and really should show the proposed plan before it is added to your calendar

[Sam_M]

Amazing stuff !!
Will the plan gradually ramp up volume ? By example, every day I have 2hours time to train. That is too much volume for me now, but will the plan work towards that ?

[roudeelferink]

No, not automaticly, but you can change the time available for each day and ramp it up manually…

[ming]

@Sam_M

Will the plan gradually ramp up volume ? By example, every day I have 2hours time to train. That is too much volume for me now, but will the plan work towards that ?

Right now, your Progression Levels will make sure your plan properly ramps in intensity.

And we’ve got even more updates coming down the pipeline to solve the exact thing you’re talking about!

[WillS]

@ming

You can still add individual training phases to your Calendar if you’re looking to self-coach. And you can change your customized plan to be a Masters plan by choosing 2 days of intensity. You can edit your plan to be a Masters plan at any point.

I understand this, but It’s nice having plan builder help decide which phases to repeat, extend, or shorten. Now it seems like I’m entirely on my own or completely locked in to Plan Builder. From what I’ve seen the timing of the phases is good, but I’d like to change the specialty phases to something else.

For example, my first “A” event in April is a gravel race, but the efforts in it match really closely with the XCM plan. The new Plan Builder has me doing Gran Fondo specialty, which is’t very specific to my race. Since there’s no way for plan builder to know the specific demands of an event it would be nice to be able to edit this ourselves while keeping all the other good stuff that comes with plan builder.

My next “A” event is another gravel race in October. Again, plan builder has me doing the Gran Fondo Specialty Plan. The Rolling Road Race Specialty plan would set me up really well for this one, so I’d like to just change the specialty phase and keep all adjustments Plan Builder makes in the background to help with timing.

[talltill]

Plan Builder suggests I do 4 short workouts a week. If I change the settings because I want to train more, I get a warning. What I do not understand is, why PB not only ramps up the frequency as requested, but also the duration of the individual workouts. If there is a potential for overload, why not keep the duration down whilst adding easy rides?

[talltill]

BTW switching to 2 hard days per week, only swaps one hard day for an endurance day of the same duration.

[Brevet2023]

Thank you!! As everything get more and more expensive, I’ve been cutting out all those subscriptions that don’t really bring value to my life (Bye-bye Apple TV, Crave, Flo Bikes, cooking lessons and craft beer). But TR consistently provides value for money in my eyes, and the only deficiency lies with me and my consistency. With the ongoing effort to innovate, I can’t see myself ever not having this program. Now to see what these changes are all about.

[berto2cj]

Tried it…got numerous ‘something went wrong’ errors…selected balanced…got a recommendation to ride 7 days a week…closed it.

seems off team

[ming]

@berto2cj

Tried it…got numerous ‘something went wrong’ errors…selected balanced…got a recommendation to ride 7 days a week

Could you let us know some more details so we can look into this? Did you add events or select a specific goal? What type, how long?

Thanks for the heads-up, we want to get to the bottom of this one!

[ming]

@WillS

I understand this, but It’s nice having plan builder help decide which phases to repeat, extend, or shorten.

In the case where you know a race is going to have demands that are different from the norm, I would change the event type on your Calendar to match the discipline to the demands. So for you, I would change the April event type to XCM and the October event type to Rolling Road Race. That would give you the optimal plan.

That said I do hear what you’re saying, Will! This is something we are going to make a lot easier and intuitive in a coming update. Thank you for the feedback!

[mrtopher1980]

I like the new goals part, I always just did like rolling road in the fall through new years before starting a tri plan around the first of the year but it was never clear if that was doing the right thing for me. Since my new plan started last week and I’ve been sick, will rebuild and give this new stuff a try.