I’m a TR retread and have been enjoying the new features as well as the AI. However, I often ride a bike that doesn’t have a power meter, but the ride will be a pretty solid workout.
Do you have to have a power meter for the AI to make adaptations? I had a ride with 200 TSS and saw nothing. Forgive the ignorance, but I’m a noob.
Thanks.
Brandon
Was it a TR outdoor workout (do those even work without power?)? Or did you just go out and ride hard/long? The TSS I think can be computed with heart rate data (an estimate, obviously) but won’t contribute to your various PLs unless you link it to a workout afterwards (which is what I think you’re talking about “ai to calculate adaptations”). Outdoor rides without power but with TSS might contribute to ai ftp detection… not sure.
It won’t affect your Progression Levels, or how Adaptive Training schedules workouts in your plan. From what I could see in their FAQ, you do need power. → https://support.trainerroad.com/hc/en-us/articles/4415864080155-How-to-Use-AI-FTP-Detection
For AI FTP Detection they need power but for Outdoor workouts or rides matching them AT doesn’t at this moment analyse power. Impact of outdoors rides on PL’s and adaptions is based primarily on a pass/fail and secondly on your survey response . If your ride is matched to a work out (or was a workout) it may cause the plan to adapt but I’d be conscious of matching an unstructured ride to structured workouts, resulting in a bump up in PLs in a certain area you haven’t actually improved in. Causing you to struggle indoor. I tend only to match unstructured rides to Endurance ones which are unlikely to trigger any adaptions I can’t manage indoors.
thanks @HLaB - I had been matching outside workouts to planned indoor workouts and was thinking that maybe this wasn’t the right thing to do as the structure of the outdoor ride didn’t match the profile of the indoor workout very well
This is exactly why TR says it’s a bad idea, if the outside is not an actual closet attempt to perform a dedicated outside workout.
Until they release Workout Levels 2, we should leave these “unstructured” rides unmatched.
Thanks everyone. So if I ride outside and don’t follow a structured workout, I don’t pair it to TR. I always have a HR monitor though so I would have thought that would possibly trigger so type of adaptation. I still trying to figure out exactly how the AI feature works at the same time, I’m trying to maximize all of my efforts on the bike.
Some days I just don’t want to watch my power. Hell on some rides I’ll even put my computer in my pocket.
At the risk of spamming for TR’s support site, there is plenty to read on the topic. Here are some leading ones in the order that I think makes the most sense to read:
https://support.trainerroad.com/hc/en-us/articles/4404060687387-Adaptive-Training-Overview
https://support.trainerroad.com/hc/en-us/articles/4409099184283-Adaptive-Training-Help-Guide
Awesome! Thanks Chad, I’ll study up.
You can sync the ride with TR. Just don’t link it to a prescribed workout (if there is one that day). Even if you had power outside, that would be true - you should only link outdoor rides to workouts if the ride was an attempt to complete the workout.
Yesterday I did a 4hr gravel ride, with only HR, linked it to Parbat, and saw a 0.4 gain, so presumably the answer to the q is ‘no’.
Correct, in a purely mechanical Yes/No question…
No, it is not necessary to have power data included with imported rides in order to associate it with a TR workout applied to the TR calendar.
However, as is covered above and elsewhere, doing this is open to errors from inappropriate associations between outside rides that have little if anything in common with the workout on the calendar. Some people apply this hack with better results than others, and it should be used very cautiously for anyone taking that road.
Yes, this works. However, if the ride wasn’t ~50 min blocks at 55% and 64% of FTP, then you didn’t really “do” Parbat, and taking “credit” for it might mess up future workout recommendations.
For me, on local gravel, it’s basically impossible to do a workout like Parbat - there’s too much short punchy elevation to stay within the prescribed power band.
Fair points made by both you and Chad.
The ride was at pretty moderate HR and I would imagine that the vast majority of it was between those numbers. That said, I’m not too fussed about progression levels on endurance rides (nor am I as bothered about precise power numbers on those rides), not least as I know that 4hrs at that intensity is comfortable.
On more intense rides (say above ~0.85IF) it would be a different matter. Others may have a different approach. As Chad noted, it was a ‘you can’ response, not a ‘you should’.