Sbright - you said adaptive training didnt work for you, trainerroad came back with receipts that you skipped half the workouts which any reasonable person would say didnt come close to following the plan and now you are just saying that youre pretty sure that if you followed the plan it wouldnt help.
why not try the plan for 6 months and keep it to 90% and see what happens? i dont think your criticisms are unfounded but you arent in a great position to make them.
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To prove TR wrong you need to accept their plan for next 6 months, do 95% of the workouts and see what happens. For me this is the best scientific approach to decide where the problem lies.
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Also… at age 51, maintaining FTP, for most people is “gaining”. It sucks, but as we get older (I’m in the same demographic), raising FTP gets harder and harder if not impossible, especially if we’re reasonably well trained.
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No thanks, not going to happen. As far as I’m concerned I’ve already run that part of the experiment for the last four years. I blame myself for believing the hype.
- Get faster on less volume - didn’t work for me
- Outside rides count, AT will recommend the “perfect” ride to promote adaptation - there’s a hidden path here with no feedback loop. Until you arrive at your destination and the AI navigator announces that you’ve driven to the wrong location.
I get it, I’m choosing to continue trying to squeeze some more performance out. I’m maintaining the rage for another decade or two. 
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Only here too add that anyone who remembers the old plans, that if you could complete Wright Peak with a slightly overstated ftp, you knew you made it!
I developed my best diesel self on that plan.
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I’m back doing it and being rewarded appropriately. Did you see my post above comparing my progress doing Wright Peak -2.
Now you’re just throwing shade and refusing to take accountability for not following the plan after getting called out on it.
You obviously know better, so go do your thing.
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I don’t really think there’s a need to pile on. Jonathan showed us the data that makes it clear OP didn’t do a great job following the plan, but OP also says he had great results with the old plans and is seeing improvements by going back to them. We’ve all heard many times that the best plan FOR YOU is the one you will follow with the most consistency, so whether that’s a TR AI plan or the old TR SS HV plan, I think OP is just choosing to follow the one that he sees as the best TR option for keeping him consistent and delivering results. I feel like that’s a great learning.
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I think you are missing something here. You can follow the AI plan and still adjust your volume up. If you think the Ai workouts are too light, you can choose an alternate that offers more stimulus and still stay with the plan.
The most important part of the plan is going to the progression of intervals and the periodization. If you want to tack on extra endurance riding when you can, you are welcome as you are the coach.
I believe part of that is also going into the TR settings and tell it how much time you have to ride on each day. It’s never going to give you a four hour endurance ride if the settings say you only have two hours on a particular day.
There’s a middle ground between “the plan doesn’t provide enough volume or stimulus” and “I need to 100% roll my own” based on the old SS high volume plan.
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Typically, people becoming faster with less volume means that previously “their eyes were larger than their mouthes”, i. e. they were less consistent when they opted for a training plan with more volume and/or intensity.
After all, most people forget to add the important proviso to “if you can recover.” to the adage “Increasing volume will make you faster.”
I don’t quite follow, what do you mean with “no feedback loop” and “AI navigator?”
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Sorry for being cryptic. I was referring to Jonathan’s earlier analogy.
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This is the one that stands out to me: https://youtu.be/8DzbI1S01u0?feature=shared
Alex doesn’t go into too much detail in any tweaks or adjustments as he followed what it said quite closely leading into his UCI world title.
The Successful Athletes Podcast has many examples of how high level athletes have used it, with some racing professionally either prior to or after their recording, but much of that is dated. The product has evolved a lot since then. We need to do more of these!
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No internal dashboard used in this scenario. Just lots of reviewing 
This is something we regularly discuss, and hope to build for. Whether it looks like a dashboard, a metric, or it’s just built somehow into the training experience remains to be seen.
It’s usually quite easy as certain athletes are very good at following the workout prescription, while the rest seem to be at the other end of the spectrum. But in a situation where you were really getting specific, you’d want to see power targets adhered to within a tight range (including work and rest intervals). I don’t want to share a specific +/- figure as that could vary depending on the scenario, but fair to say the range provided by your bike computer is a good benchmark.
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In my opinion. Coachcat is rubbish, It is anything but intelligent
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I think the criticism of TR original SS base plans was misplaced. The problem was actually the ramp test.
TR claims that the ramp test mostly underestimated FTP. This is probably because there were a lot of new/inexperienced riders trying ramp tests that just didn’t know how to really dig to the finish. All of the newer cyclists I referred to TR admittedly left a lot on the table in their early tests.
On the other hand, cyclists with more experience digging super deep in structured training tend to see their FTP overestimated in ramp tests because they’re on the other side of the ramp test accuracy bell curve. This is true for me and many other experienced cyclists I know. These are also the athletes more likely to choose high volume plans. Thus they end up doing huge threshold blocks rather than SS blocks and burn out.
I think the old plans would work much better in the age of AI FTP detection.
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I think it’s that cyclists with better than average anaerobic capacity can easily game the ramp test. ISTR that the original ramp test researcher said that ftp was a range (like 70 to 80% or something) but most applied applications just took 75% thus half under test and half over test.
I also think sweet spot plans sometimes attract a certain type of hard man rider that likes to suffer in longer intervals. People never figure out that sweet spot should be a 6 out 10 effort, not a 7 or 8 out of 10. They grind out those intervals at 8/10ths because the fatigue feels good until their training falls off a cliff.
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I am not sure how it would work but some sort of weekly feedback to athletes to indicate level of overall compliance may help people understand where they are falling short. It could be weighted for the key workouts.
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Neither reason needs to be mutually exclusive, but depending on the cohort, one may be dominant over the other.
When my wife did her first cycling workout, her max heart rate was 143 bpm. It was a guided Apple Fitness workout where she was asked to “give it her all”.
Now she has been running regularly, and her average heart rate exceeds 143 bpm when she does interval training.
@patrickhill’s reasoning seems solid in that regard, and since the people on this forum skew more on the experienced side, we tend to forget that this other cohort exists and that the ramp test systematically underestimates the FTP for them (and hence, statistically speaking, also for the average user it seems).
I don’t even think the claim makes sense: you cannot use RPE to identify the power zone, because it is all about duration and/or rest interval. You can make Z2 rides really hard. Try to do a 5-hour Z2 ride on the trainer (or whatever is a really long endurance trainer ride for you). Likewise, sweet spot can get hard if you extend the duration and minimize rest in between. Conversely, very short high-power efforts can feel very easy.
Whether you like e. g. sweet spot is in my experience just a combination of what your body tends to be good at and personality traits mixed in. I like sweet spot, because that accentuates my strengths and I have been historically be very good at sweet spot workouts. I prefer steady state threshold workouts over over/unders, too.
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Let’s just say that I disagree with your disagreement.
Anaerobic capacity is the physiological reason. Refer to the original ramp test literature. You are supposed to go all out.
Your wife’s HR change is a sign of fitness and has nothing to do with any of this. If anything noobs will under test. I was talking about over testing and the reason why.
Lots of coaches prescribe intervals by RPE. Five hour trainer rides has nothing to do with the conversation at hand.
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No, it isn’t just fitness, it is that my wife never got to threshold. A fitness Youtuber had his wife do a gas exchange test untrained. Same there, she never got to threshold even though she went as hard as she could.
That’s what @patrickhill and I were talking about. Your point on anaerobic capacity is exactly what @patrickhill wrote in his paragraph that starts with “On the other hand”. There is no disagreement here.
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