To give some context I have been on HV for a few years now so I knew well what SSB hv entailed and it actually worked for me as I started with TR.
With the standard plans and no AT I had no issue even though with time I realised it was perhaps too much SS.
Last year I was excited to see what this magic AT was all about and well…what I posted above are my conclusions so far.
yeah, progression levels can definitely ramp up and 10.0 is no joke. I think it’s worth resetting them every few weeks because the workouts up there are too hard to do day in and day out.
Have you contacted TR support directly with your experience?
My take on what TR seems to give you at this point in time:
I agree TR’s marketing is somewhat dodgy. That screenshot above is technically sort of true, but I think it subtly gives the impression that there is AI working out what training is proving most effective for the individual and adapting the plan accordingly. Pretty sure that doesn’t happen, but some people here appear to think it does.
TR must know the HV plans make no sense which is why people are routinely warned off them. I suspect TR has checked their user stats and seen that something like 90% of their users spend less time per week training so “fixing” these HV plans is a very low priority.
I’d say that those of us who spend more than 8 hours per week training probably just need to accept that we are not TR’s target market.
TR is warning off people not because the plans are broken, but because most people cannot recover from them. On the podcast, Nate talked several times about future features that would make plans (including high-volume plans) better. One feature I’m looking forward to (and which would directly address the issue you mentioned) is to allow athletes to decide for how many days a week they want to train and how long each workout should be. This way you can pick the volume you want.
Currently, the best solution is to start with a lower-volume plan and then add workouts as needed.
Why do you have that impression? Several pros have used TR, including at least one Olympic gold medalist. Several former pros and semi professionals work at TR, too. Nate has also mentioned that he is thinking of creating a Pro tier of TrainerRoad that caters to more advanced users.
I think you are right, though, that in its current form TR has an increasingly hard to straddling between users who don’t know what VO2max is (no offense to anyone, just saying this is a reality they have to contend with) and literal pros who make a living with cycling.
Maybe they used TR’s workout player at some point but I am rather confident that no pros or Olympic gold medalists use the plans. 
BTW I don’t want to appear too negative here - like I said before we just need to accept that we are not the target market here. That is not easy to do, for myself included. 
How do you know?
I’m pretty sure the guys mentioned on the podcast that their COO Brandon Nied was using TR’s plans, and he’s world championship among amateurs in his age bracket. Technically, he is not a pro, but pretty quick nonetheless and serious about it. There was another instance where they quoted a current world tour pro who used TR to get where he is now. He wrote in with a question that showed his problems were in a different league of ours (I still remember the phrase “cruising at 380 W”, ouch!).
Look, I grant that you are right in that most pros do not follow cookie cutter plans form from anyone, including TR. But that isn’t because TR’s plans are “not good enough” — that’s a separate matter, it is that top-level athletes have very, very specialized needs and are likely working with one or more coaches. They’ll be prescribed custom workouts (or choose custom workouts themselves), because they have (access to) the prerequisite knowledge to do so.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t any issues with the HV plans, but I think we shouldn’t frame it in terms of whether or not pros use it. (I acknowledge my own responsibility for driving the discussion in this direction 
) One of them is that TR doesn’t know what to do with them, only few people are able to handle them and those might have the experience and expertise to go the (semi-)custom route anyway. Then there is the larger share of people who opt for a high-volume plan, but cannot recover fast enough to make it work. I think most see the hours per week and think “I currently ride 14 hours per week, I’m sure I can handle HV.” That was my reaction to mid-volume, too, before my wife and I had kids I’d spend one day every weekend just riding — those were usually 8–10 hours right there.
Perhaps you are an exception, I don’t know, but in my experience, when I did a MV+/HV- plan (TSS-wise it split the difference between mid- and high-volume), everything in my life had to go right. It required a lot of discipline and I had no margin for error. I managed, but when life happened last year, I decided that this takes priority and now I am back on a mid-volume plan that I pad.
In my mind once TR allows us to create training plans with much more nuance by e. g. specifying the duration of workouts for each day and the number of workouts per week, you could get plans that are a better fit for each one of us. Especially for the people fit enough to handle a HV plan today, they likely want more customization anyway.
I think you very much are part of the target market for TR. I’d just say that people like you just might need at least semi-custom plans to make TR work. But that customizing training plans is part of how TR was designed to work.
in terms of hours, TR HV is roughly the same (slightly less) as two masters Intermediate plans I have in TrainingPeaks from a couple of well known coaches. I have no problem following other 8-12 hour/week plans. Those are well designed progressive and structured ~24 week training plans that allow the average person to train, recover, build a large aerobic engine, and get fast. Pretty simple.
That is why they are broken. 
Yes there are many canned plans out there designed for 10-12 hour weeks that are perfectly fine in terms of recovery.
I don’t think that follows.
Ultimately, I agree that TR has a problem, but IMHO it is a different one from what I think you claim it to be.
What I think many people want are plans that allow them to ride more, i. e. they want more time on the bike without the intensity. They think HV delivers that, but in my understanding this is not how they have been designed.
IMHO the issue is three-fold: TR does not offer plans with more riding, especially outdoor riding, at lower intensity. Ultimately, the issue is TR’s roots, where the plans have been designed for time-crunched athletes. Plans where e. g. weekends are reserved for long outdoor rides are not explicitly covered.
The second issue as I see it is that its HV plans fit “almost no one” in the sense that people who can endure and recover from this level of intensity are invariably advanced athletes who likely want or need more customization (IMHO through no fault of TR, it is simply that these few people have more specific needs and know what they want/need).
Lastly, TR in its current form does a poor job of communicating that and steer people away. For Plan Builder, they should include the possibility of people riding outdoors on the weekends and e. g. offer a mid-volume plan (in terms of TSS) that adds outdoor rides on the weekend, say, one endurance ride and one free ride. Time and “TSS-per-week” (as a proxy for intensity) should be configurable, but with sensible defaults.
My solution so far has been to stick to mid-volume plans and add on workouts, e. g. indoor rides during winter or the rainy season, and outdoor rides on the weekends. I had to shift the schedule by one day (Tuesday —> Monday, …, Sunday —> Saturday). My time on the bike is mostly limited by how much time I can spend on the bike on the weekends. With two kids and a wife who is a gym rat, this ain’t easy. But honestly, I am looking forward to a version of Plan Builder that allows me choose how many days per week I want to work out, how long and to some degree what kind of workouts those should be.
I heard the description by Coach Frank when he explained how he prescribes endurance rides on the weekends: you start with two hours and then extend the ride each successive weekend by 30 minutes until you are at 5 hours. On some of the plans, you have to take that times two, apparently. That really sounds like something I’d want to do if I had the time (no matter what platform I am on). Now I just gotta wait a few years until the kids are older, I guess
I think what most people do is LV/MV plus outdoor riding. Certainly I average 10+ hours a week off an LV plan.
They need to incorporate outdoor work better for sure. Hopefully PL 2.0 or outdoor PLs or whatever it is called will help there, if it is ever released…
This has been discussed a million times, but I think the reason the “typical” long rides on TR are SS is not because they deemed it best, but that no-one did the long rides and a shorter SS session was something that achieved similar adaptations and people actually completed.
Now that TR is not just an indoor training platform alone, I believe that there is a lot of scope to add back those long rides. As @OreoCookie says, it’s down to target market and percentage of users. I believe that the coming updates to be able to say you have 6hours on a Saturday instead of 90min for example will allow them to open more opportunities in that regard.
I have completed SSBHV 1 and 2 this year with additional volume and found it pretty good. Tiring but good. It works well for me though as I don’t really ride much on the weekend.
I hate to use anecdata from myself, but depending on the race I was mid-field Cat 1* equivalent (I’m living in Japan), and I just did mid-volume (so about 400–500 TSS per week, I guess). I’m not sure if you need 500–700 TSS/10–14-hour weeks to be in Cat 3.
(*) I just did one race where there was a combined Cat 1/2/3 field, and time-wise, I finished mid-pack in Cat 1-equivalent.
Same here. My feeling is that they need scoring of outdoor rides before they can implement these features. Once they do, you could just ride outdoors at your preferred endurance pace rather than follow a workout (if you wanted to) and have it be scored correctly. It should also make things easier if you e. g. want to use natural features rather than times for some of your intervals. Before I joined TR, I’d do hill climb sessions, essentially 4–5-minute long VO2max intervals. That feels much more natural to me, and if I knew that TR wanted me to do a workout like that, that doing hill climbs at that hill would be a good fit.
I don’t think it is remotely reasonable to make a direct link between TSS/wk and race cat like this (mainly the bit about 5-700 TSS to be in Cat 3).
Some people are naturally going to do better than others. Some people will naturally be capable of racing Cat 1 off 400 TSS a week and others will never get to Cat 1 regardless how much TSS they put in…
I imagine there would be some correlation but the R0 for TSS vs race cat will be pretty low.
If the correlation was that high then we could all make pro if we just did enough TSS…
They do. I honestly can’t count the number of times they’ve recommended doing group ride to get the skill of riding in a pack. They mention it all the time. They also suggest swapping a weekend workout with a weekly race. Not to mention the hours upon hours of race analysis videos they have going over race craft and skills. Or the various pro athlete interviews discussing skills and races. I can say I’ve personally used skills from those videos in races with good success. So not sure what you mean by they skip over skills.
I’m confused, do TR not have these plans? That’s literally any Low Volume plan. Which they’ve said probably 1,000 times are what most people should be using.
Are you wanting TR to do group rides or skills camps? I mean, I think that would be cool but kind of hard. Or are you saying that we should forget the podcast? I don’t think I get your point. If you’re suggesting you should ignore the podcast and YouTube videos, you’re missing a huge portion of their training. You have the actual coaches giving advice, and how to race, and how to adapt the plans to get the most out of them, and you’re overlooking that saying, “but the plans say this!” You’re missing out.
In my mind, that’s purposefully closing your eyes to the whole picture and then claiming it’s lacking. Those are part of the TR training system. You can’t just choose to not include them. That’s just silly.
They literally link the podcast, forum, and YouTube videos on their home page. But if you want to continue ignoring that, I can’t stop you. Maybe because they’re free to access outside the plans by anybody, you think that makes them not integrated and somehow bad? I don’t get it but we can agree to disagree then.
Again, you can lead a horse to water…