Been bouncing around training road for a while off and on. For pure cycling I have found it great but I’m having some issues when I implement running and strength training.
Right now I have it set up for 5 days a week cycling on a masters plan. Weekdays are 1 hr rides and weekends are 2-3 hours. I also run 3 days a week and strength train 2 days a week.
I’ve been doing this for a while outside of trainerroad and been getting stronger but I wanted something that would help with targeted goals and event prep.
The issue is when I do my running and strength stuff TR tells me I am going too hard (overall weekly TSS) so it reduces my cycling time and intensity.
Will this negatively effect my overall goal productivity? I feel like it does but I don’t have enough TR experience to know for sure. Should I be setting it up differently? Should I just not be using TR for what I’m trying to do?
So, it’s hard to answer “will this negatively effect my overall goal productivity” without knowing what your overall goal is.
It’s also hard to answer whether adaptive training is stifling your progress or keeping you optimally balanced without seeing your training data. However, for myself, I can say that I think AT responds too heavily to other workout modalities (I do running, strength, and light swimming). To compensate for this, I adjusted AT’s “Training Approach” to “demanding” instead of “balanced”. Even at that, I’ve been pushing through some yellow days without issue when I have a planned rest day the next day.
TrainerRoad and Adaptive Training are machines using algorithms to find averages. To paraphrase Dennis Morton, it makes suggestions—you make decisions. A lot of us have difficulties recognizing when we’re at an optimal balance and think we can push harder, but if you’re confident that you can recognize overtraining in the early stages, try pushing yourself harder and see what happens.
Finally, Red Light Green Light (I think) weighs novel activities as more impactful, so if you’ve just started to add your running and strength, it might think these are more novel stimuli than they actually are. This should work itself out over time.
Thank you! I appreciate what you said. It mimicked what I was thinking. I now need to decide if I think the positives will outweigh the negatives in the long run or should I figure out a plan b.
So if I read this correctly you are doing 10 workouts a week over 7 days, with double days of cycling and running?
How old are you, are you training for a triathlon? Are you doing running intervals on the same days as bike intervals? How often are you taking rest time, doing easy Z2 runs/bikes etc?
I took a look at your Calendar, and it looks like right now the only training days that are getting changed by Yellow/Red Days are Wednesdays by your interval + lower body strength training on Tuesday.
I wanted to note that in TR, your Working Sets refer to the number of individual sets from your Strength Training sessions, not including warm up, with each working set going within 1-2 reps of failure. This is important information to know when recording your sets on TR, as lower body strength training will have a bigger impact on your cycling training, especially now since you’ve started recording sets.
Spread your training a bit. For example, you can do interval training on Monday and your strength training on Tuesday, then follow everything else as normal the rest of the week. I think this will soften the recommended Yellow/Red Days.
Keep the current schedule and reject the adaptations for your Wednesday workouts, as these are easy Endurance workouts so it’s safe to do so if you’re feeling good.
Accept the adaptations and let our fatigue management system progress you into higher training loads.
I’ve been struggling with this for the last couple of years, since I follow the triathlon plans and also lift weights. I have found that I watch RLGL and take it’s feedback into account but I don’t always follow what it says. For instance, because of my work schedule I take Tuesdays as a rest day. This often means doing a long run Sat, a 2-3 hr bike sometimes followed by a short run Sun and then having a swim and run Mon. RLGL almost always tells me to rest or take Mon off. However, I don’t think it takes into account that Tuesday is a complete day off. So I go by feel. RLGL is a cool tool, but it’s not perfect. If you’ve been training for some time and know your body I would listen to that first.