Has Adaptive Training Plateaued My Progress? A Data-Backed Review (With Help From AI)

Training
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@huges84 thanks for taking the time to challenge the post. You’ve raised some fair questions, and I’ll do my best to respond.

  1. Personal Experience ≠ Universal Truth

No, I’m not suggesting my experience applies to everyone. But there may be corollaries for others with similar training backgrounds. My observations are based on my own long-term experimentation and response to different training blocks.

  1. On Intensity and Sweet Spot Load

Sweet Spot work has been a uniquely effective stimulus for me, especially as a time-crunched athlete. It delivers the best bang-for-buck, and I’ve built up to higher volumes slowly and incrementally, with careful attention to rest and recovery.

If I have ~10 hours/week to train, I’ve consistently found that the old SSB plans offer the most reliable path to fitness gains.

Before Adaptive Training, TrainerRoad coaches advocated this exact approach. There’s a great back catalog of early podcasts that discuss it. If you haven’t seen them I’d recommend a watch\listen. eg. How Much Sweet Spot Training Should I Do Per Week? (Ask a Cycling Coach 284)

On a lighter note I can’t help but smile thinking back to the early days when Nate Pearson was training he and the coaches were all vocal proponents of the Sweet Spot Base plans.

One thing I didn’t mention in the original post is my training goal: general aerobic fitness, targeted toward Gran Fondos and long, hilly endurance events. For those kind of events SSB adaptation and bumps in FTP are really helpful.

  1. Are the FTP Differences Meaningful?

I agree, average FTP isn’t a great metric. I used it to provide a quick snapshot, but what matters more are the trends and context. I tried to highlight those in the table I shared.

It’s early days since returning to the older-style training, but the results already look promising. After ~4 years of following Adaptive Training + RLGL, I was either flat or slightly declining.

For context, I’ve always kept:
• TrainerRoad Aggressiveness: Max
• Masters athlete setting: Off

If I followed current TR guidance to the letter, my CTL would be half what it is now, and I expect I’d be regressing.

  1. Role of AI in This Post

Totally fair point AI can be terrible with numbers. I used ChatGPT to help structure the post and organize thoughts, but all the data analysis and interpretation is my own. AI helped make the post more readable, not draw conclusions.

  1. PD Curves and More Meaningful Metrics

Agreed, those would offer a much deeper look, especially for performance modelling. I’ll aim to compile my Power Duration curves across seasons soon.

A concern I have with the current model is that it seems heavily geared toward optimizing the bell curve of compliance across the entire athlete base. That’s great for new users or those struggling with consistency. It risks leaving well-adapted athletes behind.

For those of us who’ve already built up to a higher training load and have our nutrition and recovery dialed in, the system pulls us back toward the middle. It’s a one-size-fits-most model that may be suppressing gains in the upper end of the athlete spectrum, not out of bad design, but out of over-conservatism. It’s for this reason that personally I’ve retaken control of my training plan. I’m sure the AI models will eventually get to where they need to be. Perhaps TrainerRoad AI v2 will truly take over from the humans.

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Yes, I have seen similar. RLGL and AT never believe that it’s possible to ramp up training more than a very conservative amount. Which for some people prevents burnout but for others holds them back too much.

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I think there are some pros and certainly a lot of super fast amateurs……so it’s kinda gotta keep them going fast.

Joe

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Are there any actual pros that use TR? I don’t mean have it as an app or are sponsored by them (I don’t think they sponsor anyone but not positive) but actually just fully follow what the tr ai spits out as their training plan. I would expect that number to be 0.

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I’m not quite following the logic since all your numbers pre and post are within 2% which is the margin of error of most trainers. I would say all those values are equivalent. Clearly you hit a plateau for the last couple years so yeah I agree with switching up your training. Those old SS plans were hard especially if you over-tested on the ramp, so that should be interesting to see if you can get a big boost out of it.

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Hmm…I assumed so. I mean, I thought they talk about pros using it on the podcast but I might have filled in some gaps there…

Joe

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Welcome to accelerating aging between the ages of 40-60. From ages 40 to 60, telomere shortening is believed to play a central role in the biological aging process. As cells divide and telomeres wear down and tissues lose regenerative capacity. We can try to slow the process down by carefully eating, training, recovering etc but we can’t stop it. Who knows maybe if you had stayed on the traditional plan your FTP would have gotten worse.

As you don’t have a proper control (a twin of yourself staying on the old plan while you used the new adaptive training) you can’t really blame the adaptive training results on the FTP during this time period. True true unrelated. Furthermore I would love to see your power curve for the interval before during and after used as a better measurement of how the adaptive training affected your overall fitness.

But congratulations on maintaining/recouping those FTP numbers in your 50’s.

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Hey @sbright,

Thanks for your feedback!

There’s a lot going on in this discussion already, but we wanted to share our two cents. :coin:

First things first, you’ve maintained an incredibly steady fitness over the past few years with your FTP only swaying ~10 or so watts throughout each season. That alone is a solid accomplishment to be proud of! :muscle:

After looking at your training history, we found that this is less of an issue where one plan structure is simply better than another, but rather one more closely tied to plan execution. The lack of major progress that you’ve noticed around late 2021 seems like it is more likely to be driven by struggles with consistency in key workouts.

We can see that you’ve historically struggled with Threshold workouts, which are a key part of many of our training plans. When using Plan Builder between last fall and February of this year, you either skipped or cut short well more than half of the prescribed Threshold workouts. Given that those workouts made up a third of your total hard rides in a week, you were missing out on a major productive stimulus.

There were also a couple of skipped VO2 workouts, and a few Sweet Spot as well. Generally speaking, your compliance with your training prescription was much lower during this period. Part of why we think this was is due to all the unstructured riding you were doing at that time. It wasn’t uncommon to see quite a few hours of unstructured riding in a week, which didn’t play well when you stacked them up against your hard workouts. :grimacing:

Since then, we’ve improved how TrainerRoad recommends workouts after unplanned/unstructured activities to keep your key workouts at the right intensity so you’re more consistent in completing them.

As of late, you’ve been really consistent with your training, which certainly plays a big role in your current fitness, but I’d be curious to see what would happen if you applied the same discipline and adherence to one of our current training plans. :eyes:

Your FTP has jumped up 7 watts higher than it was at the end of your last training plan, but alongside your consistency, you’ve also increased your training stress quite a bit. Consistency and productive training stress are how you get faster, but it also has to be sustainable, and the type of training you do affects how your fitness develops. Additionally, recovery weeks are a critical part of this process, so don’t forget about those! :chart_with_upwards_trend:

At the end of the day, you need to do what works for you, but we just wanted to reach out because we genuinely think that you’d be better served with what we have to offer if you set up a custom plan in a way that works well for you and followed it with the consistency and quality that you’ve recently shown you can.

We’d be happy to chat some more if you’d like, and help you get something in place that we think would bring good results at any point. Otherwise, stay in touch and let us know how your current approach works out for you down the road. We want to see our athletes succeed and enjoy their journey regardless of how they get there! :handshake:

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I got exactly the same feeling. When started cycling, I used just the plans from the Hunter Allen, Andrew coggan, and Stephen mcgregor “training racing with a power meter” book, and the gains on FTP were considerable higher than those using training road. I am talking about more than 5 years ago. Later I switched to trainerroad just for the convenience that I don’t have to think about it when establishing a training plan, but my gains are not that good, despite I followed most of the adaptation suggestions, and just using the AI FTP to avoid those horrible FTP tests I did before. Some times I struggle to complete some of those threshold workouts, some times I don’t, and when I am almost finishing the workout sometimes I just increased the intensity 10% just to take advantage that I was feeling good on that workout. Have you tried that? increasing intensity just after 4/5 of the workout?
Some times I question myself if it is worth to keep my membership with TR with the slow and small progress, but I think I still believe theses guys can make it better. I think the work AI is overrated here with the adaptive training, which is more of programing logic made buy a human instead of more AI work on adapting to our specifics conditions and scenarios.. like for example, if I am going a week off because travel, the only adaptation I can see is just taking off those scheduled sessions, when In reality I was expecting probably extending to hard work session before the resting/low impact week. Still a lot of work to do, hopefully I don’t lose the faith on TR sooner.

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Gains when you first start any structured training are often great. But as we all know they trickle off and once youve been doing structured training for a while big improvements will always slow no matter which plan you follow.

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This is what you get when you have AI analyze AI… From what I’ve read and experience, this plateauing of FTP is normal. OP went from 200 to 326 w FTP in 6 years which is actually pretty phenomenal. That’s 21 w increases year on year or about 10% annually for 6 years! Most people after a couple years of structured training can eke out 2-5% unless they’re doping. Not many people could handle SSB HV but then again most people don’t train over 6 hrs/wk. so to be doing 9-11 hrs of a lot of SS is pretty incredible esp as a 50 yo.

TLDR FTP plateauing is normal. Not everyone is Tadej. Focus on consistency and durability.

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did you notice any gains in power output in longer efforts despite the FTP drop?

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@eddiegrinwald thanks for sharing your two cents (or more), much appreciated.

Thank-you for the kudos for my fitness, I couldn’t and wouldn’t have done it without TrainerRoad. :handshake:

Whilst I’m keen to focus on my plan moving forward, I do feel the need to respond to the comments on my plan execution. I’d agree that I do find the Threshold workouts tough and no doubt I’ve failed a couple of them over the years. I suspect that some of the ones that are marked as skipped, were skipped as I had a long hard ride planned for the following day.

The other consideration for me skipping or failing workouts could also be attributed to an ineffective build phase. A build phase that I maintain did not have enough TSS to adequately prepare me for the upcoming work.

Great to hear that you agree, version 1 of Adaptive Training had its failings. I’m not convinced that version 2 is superior to pre-adaptive training. Would be interesting to see some data analysis from TrainerRoad on this. I don’t mean showing a bell curve of all cyclists. For it to be relevant to me it’d have to show the before and after AT benefits for the top 3% of your athletes. Which according to my 60min power is the band that I fall into.

Regarding consistency and wondering what would’ve happened had I followed TrainerRoad guidance and AT plan. I’ve done that experiment for the past four years. Those results are in the books as a lesson learnt, not as effective for me at this stage of my season.

I’m absolutely interested in your views on what a custom plan might look like, thank-you for the kind offer. My current thinking is to basically stick to the SSB HVI & II plans but swap in VO2 and Threshold work on the 2nd and 2nd last day of the week. Essentially what I did last week. Now don’t go giving me a hard time for failing the VO2 max session last week, I was crushing it so hard that I busted my chain. :flexed_biceps:

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No replacement for a real coach if you’re this serious about developing your FTP further especially if you think AT isn’t working for you

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Which I think after a few years of TR, or any other pre written plan, will inevitably happen (I just left TR also for this).

There’s not much really adapting to your needs. The basic structure of a plan remains overall the same.
What the platform offers is to make single workouts harder/easier (which might or might not be worthwhile) but it doesn’t know if you now need more vo2, threshold or a mix etc.

Other platforms might be more advanced on this matter and I might take a look at those now.

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I basically experienced the same (but did leave TR ages ago so not sure what the new stuff would do for me if anything) where for a couple seasons I had great gains but then those same plans stopped working.

Worked with a coach and made some good gains again before going the diy route and making more gains :wink:

I would hope that plans would adapt but have yet to see that work long term once people get past the initial gains that come with structured training and need to get more specific event work or adjustments to break through plateaus.

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Hey @sbright, first I wanted to thank you for training with TR for so many years!

I want to address a few things here to make sure clarity is reached.

When I read your forum title of this thread, it seems that you followed a TrainerRoad plan and it left you plateaued.

However, in your posts in this thread I also see statements like the following that indicate you weren’t actually following the plan:

This caused me to take a look at your training calendar in more detail, and what I found is that your statement that I’ve quoted above more accurately portrays reality.

I can see a not-insignificant number of occurrences where the following occurs:

  1. You skip Sweet Spot, Threshold, and VO2 Max workouts.
  2. You struggle with a workout and mark the reason as fatigue or intensity, but then you do big rides that weren’t planned in the subsequent days, only to cause you to struggle on the next hard workout.
  3. You swap out the scheduled workout with another one from a different zone, usually trying to do more than what was scheduled, and subsequent workout performance suffers.
  4. You mark an outside ride as a completed workout, despite not following the workout profile with compliance.

Here’s what I’m seeing in terms of plan compliance while following a TrainerRoad AI-Driven plan from 2023-2025 (most recent time frame while following a plan driven by TrainerRoad’s AI):

  1. 67/110 Sweet Spot Workouts were completed as prescribed. The rest were either skipped, not executed with compliance outside, or cut short. That means only 61% of the prescribed Sweet Spot work was completed as prescribed.

  2. 21/45 Threshold Workouts were completed as prescribed. The rest were either skipped, not executed with compliance outside, or cut short. That means only 47% of the prescribed work was completed as prescribed.

  3. 19/28 VO2 Max Workouts were completed as prescribed. The rest were either skipped, not executed with compliance outside, or cut short. That means only 68% of the prescribed work was completed as prescribed.

While you are consistent with being on your bike and doing workouts, your average consistency with Sweet Spot, Threshold, and VO2 Max workouts over the past couple of years is 58.7%. For an athlete of your very high level, compliance in these zones is crucial to drive meaningful changes in fitness.

All of that said, I just want to make sure we are operating on a basis that represents reality. When a thread is titled in such a way as to imply a failure by TrainerRoad, we take it seriously and search for ways to improve. But in this case, it seems unfair to lay the blame on TrainerRoad as only 58.7% of the prescribed work was completed as prescribed.

I don’t want other athletes to lack that context and misunderstand when coming into this thread.

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Yes, I remember someone in the pro peloton asking a question in the podcast about the product and that they trained with TR. I vividly remember the phrase “cruising at 380 W”. And an Olympic gold medalist (road racing) was active on this forum.

I reckon a lot of pros might find use in the workout catalog and player. It doesn’t mean they necessarily use AT, but you don’t need to use all features of a product.

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There is a reason for the whole text.. As I clarified what I meant by using TR.

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The first pro credited TR for getting him to the peloton. Not sure when/whether he stopped using TR’s training plans. Typically, this discussion devolves to “what constitutes using TR”, which is hard to know for us since most accounts are private. My counter is always that all of us who don’t get paid for riding a bike also use TR in a myriad of ways.

Moreover, depending on the era, TR’s capabilities were different from now. For years I based my training on Mid-Volume+ plans where I added workouts to a mid-volume plan. Was I using TR’s training plans in that case? Nowadays Plan Builder allows me to dynamically adjust volume and max training time.

In my mind I was still using TR as intended. And I can imagine people building their own training plans starting with a Plan Builder plan or by using e. g. PLs for custom ramp rates. Or by using RLGL to judge training readiness.

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