YES! I agree that there needs to be more resources available on this change, how to effectively use annotations, and how they differentiate between push/pull weeks.
I’ll bump the team for more educational resources. 
Thanks, @IvyAudrain. I ihave made this comment before, but it seems the default TR documentation is text. For those who are visual, please ask the team to consider graphics such as flow diagrams of steps, or a grid where different alternatives might be compared – @mcneese.chad 's post three above this one shows different situations which could lead to different actions on the part of the end user. And back in June he showed an example of how to think about easily showing comparisons.
In situations with several variables a picture/chart/graphic can be worth 1000 words…
Thank you for all the feedback Ivy, much appreciated.
I guess the main difference in this discussion is that we’re coming at it from a different perspective. Your explanation of the new functionality takes into account the use of AT or ready plans, whilst the users in this thread are ‘‘manual’’ planners that don’t use AT. Feels like we’re discussing past each other.
I can work my way around it, and I will simply because I really like the product and TR.
Wow. I’m totally confused. Three things:
- If I get Omicron, which seems to be coming like a freight train, I’ll be sick for 3-5 days and then OK. How do I handle that in TR/AT? A push week would allow me to do that fairly easily and AT would be able to assess whether I lost fitness and would back off my program, right?
- If I start feeling a bit overtrained and need an extra day off, how do I handle that in TR/AT? I am using a plan that has no racing days (A races) so I could care less about how the plan ramps me into some day months in the future. A PUSH DAY would do this easily!
- If I just want to ride some long outdoor rides and push back the program, how do I make that happen without inserting a PUSH WEEK and then filling in workouts manually?
These are all real things that I encounter all the time. I used to always do a push week to leave next week open, allowing flexibility this week to move rides ahead, do outdoor rides, etc. I did not create a bow wave because I always brought things back into the flow, either by pushing things into the next week or just inserting a few easy days and starting up again with the program. Now I can’t have any of that flexibility. AT has been very good for me so far. But eliminating this scheduling flexibility increases my anxiety about completing the program because if things get a little crowded, or I have a bad night of sleep, or I drink too much, or have to work all day, or LIFE happens, then the program just keeps marching on and I have to eliminate workouts rather than just pushing them off. Hope that helps programmers understand how actual TR people manage the program. Thanks.
This is what ‘Add Annotation’ > ‘Time Off’ or ‘Illness’ > ‘Accept Adaptations’ will do.
Skip your workout completely if you need a day off, or select a Workout Alternate for a shorter workout depending upon how you’re feeling.
Since you haven’t started your plan yet, just edit the start date for a week later.
Other than that, to achieve push week currently, using Annotations will achieve the same outcome, perhaps better within AT considering the way we’ll adapt workouts if necessary to maintain the proper training progression following days off/irregular training.
If you’re on a stock plan with no event date, a current workaround is to manually move everything down a week with the ‘move week’ function.
@IvyAudrain
New to posting on forums (not to using TR), not sure if jumping in after the post is quiet for > a month is okay, but wanted to give a perspective of having flexibility for plan adjustments.
One aspect that I encountered is having a week of travel that I knew I’m not going to ride. This week falls in week 4 of LV SSB2. I’m using AT, and scheduling time off for the week did not push out my plan, it just skips the Thurs & Sat workouts (I could fit the Tues workout in). I think normally, I’d be ok with it, but due to circumstances, my base training between SSB1 and 2 was interrupted by illness and taking time to recover and ease back into things. So I feel like my base isn’t as solid as following the typical progression, and I’d prefer to lose a week of Specialty and keep the week of Base (or even see what that would look like to decide which I’d prefer). However, normally, I’d probably prefer to keep to the plan and skip the Base workouts. Perhaps when adding an annotation it could give an option of how to handle the missed time…AT recommended or manual decision: skip or push.
What would be really cool is if AT could realize that I took time off in wk 4, that I have one week of workouts in week 5 before hitting another rest week in wk 6, and adjust the plan somehow from the original week 6 rest week. I get mentally and physically fidgety having two rest/easy weeks so close to each other. Even the normal plan of Rest week, Ramp test and slight reduction in PL/TSS for the first week of the next block just feels too light for me. It’s not enough to work off all the extra energy/stress I have, so I end up with some longer rides that don’t quite stay in EM at the end of rest week, and at the end of the first workout week. Thinking about it now, maybe I should cut the rest week a little short and Ramp test on the weekend, and then figure out a few workouts to get to week 1…
Anyway, I think what I’m ultimately looking for is something that becomes much more individually cutomized from the standard TR structure. Something much more longer term, if ever, I imagine. But to start, having a little more input on how to adjust for time off would be helpful.
FWIW, I have been enjoying the Adaptive Training features…really enjoy that my SS and Threshhold intervals don’t reset back down to ~5-6 min when starting a new season, after buildng it up the previous year. I felt like I was losing aerobic fitness each season in Base. I also appreciate that the plan is less cookie-cutter and has the flexibility to adjust to our individual situations.
Sorry for the long post, I don’t get much time to read the forums, much less post something to it. I do like to spend time playing around with the plans to see different scenarios and see what might work better for my situation, and have all these “wouldn’t it be great if…” thoughts that I don’t get a chance to suggest or support someone else’s request for.
Thanks for the feedback!
I get this, and I think our current annotation > time off > Adaptation model works for folks who have a set ‘end date’ event in mind that is rigid, where NOT all of our athletes need to abide by that timeframe at all.
Will pass this along to the team! Cheers.
Interesting that when I started this, I was anticipating potentially getting Omicron. Well, I got it in mid-January. I wanted to maintain my program with some push days to see if I could get back into the groove right away. Well, didn’t have that option. In any case, Omicron has been my downfall. It appears I have a weird version of Long COVID in which all I can do is endurance/tempo rides. Anything more intense and I cannot recover sufficiently to do repeated intervals. Prior to Omicron I was crushing an AT Build program with very hard intervals. Now it’s been four months and I still do some endurance rides but no program and I reduced my FTP manually by 30 watts and probably still isn’t low enough. All that happened in basically two days. Really great threshold interval session, Omicron, easy one hour rest day (didn’t know I had Omicron but felt weird), another interval session where my HR and legs simply did not recover at all between first and second interval so I pulled the plug. Haven’t been back to that intensity level yet. I have no other symptoms other than just now picking up a weird vertigo when laying down. So I have some sort of anti-cyclist Long COVID that thankfully allows me to live normally with zero symptoms except one: my cycling fitness went in the toilet and doesn’t appear to be coming back soon.
And I STILL think a push day and push week is needed…again, I want a day off which Annotations allow, but it eliminates the workout for that day instead of pushing it. I used the push week to open up the following week so I could manually drag and drop workouts back one day. Manually. Instead of the easy push. A push day wouldn’t affect AT to the best I can tell having ridden that program prior to Omicron hamstringing me. FWIW!
So do we have an answer on this or is the team still thinking about it. We have been waiting for clear instructions since February.
Thank you.
I just want to be sure I have clarity on the further instructions you’d like, regarding how to modify plan if you dont have Adaptive Training enabled?
Let me know so I can check with the team and try to provide more context!
I thought there was going to be a push or pull option or something brought back for those of us on AT. Life comes up. I would like to be able to push or pull and have the plan adapt to it. I would like to still have the option of doing that weeks training a week later and not just miss it.
I guess the annotations is all we have. I must have read the thread incorrectly.
It sounds like you’d like to move a particular week of training a week later, even if this week of training isn’t best for you. This was the issue we built for with the new annotations.
We were finding push/pull was getting people’s training off track. Annotations make sure we give you the right workout after your time off so you continue getting faster.
You may end up getting the exact same workout(s) when you’re back from your time off OR Adaptive Training may find a better workout based on fitness changes. 
The only thing that has ever happened to me when I add an annotation is that the week’s workouts go away and nothing is adjusted. I added a week of vacation before a rest week and I came back to a rest week. Maybe it’s because the end date is static so the plan doesn’t feel it has room to adjust? But I’ve never gotten it to do anything remotely adaptive with multiple attempts. I end up manually copying and pasting weeks so that full training weeks don’t end up getting skipped.
Editing to clarify I’ve added annotations in other weeks of training blocks as well and it has never changed any workouts following except if my PL score degraded. I can get that just by skipping the workouts so I don’t see the point of annotations if that’s all they really do.
Definitely agree there should be some baked in adaptive wizardry if adding an annotation for rest, travel, or sickness adjacent to a scheduled rest week. There should be a question, do you want to adapt the rest week, or leave it in place.
My experience as well. Would love to hear from others who have seen changes in the workouts following annotations for things that take us off the bike as perhaps my annotations weren’t significant to trigger future changes.
Ivy, do you also USE TrainerRoad or are you a coder or product manager? It does not seem like you are hearing your vocal users. No one is saying “explain annotations better for me.” We’re saying fix what you broke… It doesn’t matter HOW you do it, but please put back the push week. Make the button do it however you need to do that. If it needs a “why push” question to allow you to grab text to insert into an annotation that actually then goes and moves everything out 7 days, DO that. If there’s a hard event at the end of the plan, ask the question “do you really want to do this or do you just want to delete everything this week”… Just figure out how to push the whole darn schedule out by a week and make it happen.
Listen to your users.
For the record, I deleted the duplicate post that I presume was made in error or as a result of edits to the original one.
was trying to fix some typos/missed words. Bottom line is that there’s far more “normal” people that use the app versus full time racers. That user base is what built TR. Don’t throw out great features that many users rely on in the name of progress or to cater to a niche of the userbase or simply because that’s how the coder decides to implement a new feature/function. Add the features WITHOUT scrapping the old.
That’s a bit aggressive isn’t it?
Anyway, I guess it’s not so easy to just listen to the users. If I “push” a week, I would want to adapt the subsequent weeks (i.e. don’t have two rest weeks now a week apart), but not push the end date out.
Some nuance is required.
Not aggressive, but the complaints from users have been going for months with only “we’re trying to come up with what we think is the best way for you to now do what you used to do easily”
to your point about adaptation WITH a push, so let them adapt AFTER the push. Push it all out, and then run algos and adapt as necessary. But let the push happen. If i am traveling for a week and I don’t have an event locking the end, push then adapt. if there’s a locking event, ask “do you really want to do this or do you want to just skip training this week”. Either way, adaptation can run on the plan and suggest changes. but if I am doing SSBII, and i want to get all 6 weeks of training, regardless of whether i travel/get covid/get kidnapped, let me push… It’s just software and nothing is impossible with a little bit of code.