Must mean workout player???
Some of us got old too 
at some point Father Time comes in to play. I’m mid 50s. I bet I could eke out some watts if I really focused but it would be a hard road and I’d really need to go all in on recovery, nutrition, training, etc.
Maybe sim isn’t the best description, especially considering Zwift and the like. I guess what I was meaning it offers a structured ride built around the training rather than simply rollers or a traditional spin bike.
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This stuff isn’t new though… we did this kind of training 30 years ago. I do agree there’s not much in the TR catalogue in terms of “mixed intervals.” But I would also say workouts like this are more advanced and for those with an extensive training history and commitment.
That said, there’s no “magic workout” or training program. I’ve posted it before but there’s a great blog by Steve Mangus on the history of training. There really is nothing new and fundamental training practices have kind of settled the last few decades.
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Agreed. My take on it is….have humans changed much in the last 5 years? If not, why should training? I don’t want to chase the social media stars, I want proven training…and that’s what tr does
Joe
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The vibe I get from your post is that you have gotten a bit bored: Assuming your training has been relatively stable (in terms of time and intensity invested) over the years, I’d expect that the outcomes are similar, too. There are fewer and fewer simple gets that have a significant impact on your power. Or, more accurately, because you are in the flatter part of the S-curve, you should expect to work harder for smaller gains.
At the same time, their product is quite mature: it has a huge workout library, so big that the actual problem is finding the workout you want. They have added RL/GL, a very flexible Plan Builder that is heads and shoulders above what they had before. I no longer have to manually create MV+ plans, for instance. But these features are seen maybe twice a season at most and quickly forgotten. You take them for granted.
Moreover, my impression is that there were few changes that were outward-facing, i. e. on the app side, but plenty when it comes to the algorithms. It’s hard for me to compare training plans, but I did notice changes when it comes to rest weeks especially. I think of the situation similar to Google’s search window: not much has changed on the outside, but the algorithms behind it are drastically different. At the same time the way you interact with TR has largely staid the same as most of these new features are either transparent or used once or twice a season.
I definitely wish they’d add (back) some features to the apps (e. g. adding notes directly from the iOS app and Apple Health connectivity). On the other hand, TR seems to be focused to nail features, i. e. get a feature working really well and think about all the (obvious and non-obvious) tradeoffs and implications. Or how to expose new features. It’d be easy to come up with some “recovery metric” on some arbitrary scale, for instance, but they (so far) haven’t. Instead, they released RL/GL, which works surprisingly well.
You absolutely can … but do you want to take on that mental load? If you don’t mind or like doing this sort of work, go ahead.
You can see this in action with the latest Apple OS updates: I think they felt forced to give their OSes a new look. IMHO some things are improvements, others made things worse (perhaps temporarily) while yet other aspects were lateral shifts — no better, no worse, just different.
I’d hate if TR changed its apps this way, because it is a massive amount of work, but not one that necessarily changes how it works. E. g. apart from adding customizability, I have zero complaints about their workout screen and I wouldn’t want a new design just for the sake of having a new design.
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Let me quibble a bit here: Who is “we”? I reckon 30 years ago, “we” was a very small circle of people, those who were really serious about training. I wish I knew about structured training 25–30 years ago when it could have made a difference.
TR and apps like it have made structured training accessible to a much, much bigger audience, they have democratized periodized training. That’s huge progress we simply take for granted once it has happened.
To give you an analogy: computers were accessible to a much smaller audience when I got my Amiga 500 in 1987 or 1988 — and it already had a graphical user interface! But it was much harder to use than the computers we carry in our pockets. Common tasks are easier for the vast majority of people.
I wouldn’t flatly say “there is nothing new”. The biggest breakthrough of the past 10 years or so in cycling has been nutrition. And we can be more deliberate when making choices, because we have much more data.
I will agree, though, that the biggest unlock is a proper understanding of the basics (e. g. periodization, progressive overload, specificity and individualization), and the S-curve of progress is getting shallower. Nailing the basics has a much bigger return-from-investment than worrying about marginal gains.
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I was curious, so I just checked, and as of now, we’ve got 431 workouts that fall into the “mixed intervals” category. 
@AussieRider, your patience will be rewarded soon! 
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Total tangent but I love the mixed workouts if I’m adding an extra session in. Probably not ideal for training but wish I saw them in the plan.
Great for breaking up training monotony.
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Now @eddie is trolling us too! We’re my shock button!?!? 
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You are correct in the assumption that it was elite athletes that were serious about training. Though it did stretch across continents. Here’s a few examples from the running world (of which I am more familiar).
- In the 1970’s Ron Warhurst came up with a workout he called “The Michigan." This workout has had some variations over the years but at the core it varied between tempo and VO2 with little or no rest between intervals.
- One workout we would do in college (this was the 90’s now) was something my coach called “RE/AT.” 2 x 4 mile on our home cross country course, alternating each mile between tempo and 8k race pace. We would get a 5-10 minute break between sets.
- Early 2000’s a Swiss runner I trained with introduced me to a workout he did with the national team in preparation for a half marathon. In this workout they would alternate 1k @ 10k pace and 2k @ 1/2 marathon pace. This was continuous and without breaks. The goal was to do at least 10k in which he then knew, “I knew I was ready.”
- Other examples… Jack Daniels has emphasized putting intervals during the long run since his book came out. Bill Bowerman had the men of Oregon do alternating 200’s (30-40’s). Brother Colm O’Connell did varied speed workouts with Kenyan marathoners.
There’s plenty of other examples of mixed intervals being done historically. My co-worker talked about how when cycling in the 80’s they would alternate “power-poles” between a hard pace and even harder. I guess to your point the internet was just getting started then so you would need to be in those “circles” (or buy a book). But that doesn’t take away that people are saying these ideas are “new.” They’ve been around for decades.
I thought we were talking training but I do agree that the emphasis on nutrition and eating during training has been huge! But to “quibble,” one could also argue that again, it’s nothing nothing new. It’s more popular now for sure, but cyclists have been pillaging convenience stores forever! 
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You can create a triathlon training plan and they’ll give you swimming and running workouts. Not sure if you do triathlons. Even if you don’t, you could just make a fake plan and use it to follow the bike and swim workouts
Yeah I’ve kind of reviewed those and also I have managed to add runs to my calendar, but I guess what I’m looking for is structured run workouts pushed to my watch. What’s currently available seems to be pretty light and requires me to manually build my workouts based on some other plan.
Obviously, running isn’t necessarily somewhere of focus, but I feel like I can’t be the only person who likes to run a little on the side and it would be really cool if TR could somehow merge that load in with my cycling.
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If fasted rides are a thing, I’d say nutrition is definitely a part of training. My impression is still that the insight that fueling well in excess of 90 g/h is indeed new. Although if I had to guess, this insight was known much earlier to e. g. triathletes.
In any case, I don’t want to belabor that point, just emphasizing that we are still learning, but building on an increasingly solid foundation. On the other hand, when I talked to our exercise scientists at my uni (who are also training Olympians in certain endurance sports), there were still rather fundamental gaps in our knowledge and existing knowledge isn’t universally distributed amongst coaches — at least in those sports.
Maybe our wires got crossed somewhere: I did not claim mixed intervals were new. While I don’t have experience stretching back decades like you do, I came across various workouts you could consider mixed in discussions on this forum and they were not treated as some sort of revelation, but as a standard tool in training. The first time I remember them coming up was in the context of endurance-to-induce-fatigue + intervals (say, sweet spot) combo workouts.
However, let me mention another advantage of democratizing knowledge: there are no “secrets”, because secrets get shared eventually. That means that nowadays even amateurs like myself can have a decent-enough knowledge of structured training to train themselves effectively. I can only imagine that professional coaches have an easier time to acquire a very broad overview of very different training methodologies, and can try them out quickly.
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The Cyclists Training Bible by Joe Friel was first published in 1996. I think I got the 2nd edition which was released in 1999 as a Cat 5 who just wanted to get faster. Has most all the same components as a TR plan. So yea, when it comes the training prescriptions, not much is new.
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Yeap… printed media.
It is just the media and accessibility that has changed. That cant be denied.
I’ve got plenty of magazines from the 80s and 90s that had the training plans and included the mixed sessions you talk about.
Nothing new… claiming new methods which arent is ignorance of the past, imo, which you can easily look up now. Things just come in and out of fashion thats all.
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More swimming than cycling for me but the number of times adult me says damn if 15 year old me didn’t goof off so much what could I have been is too many to count. I train harder and more seriously at 45 than I did at 15 in the pool. Rode natural talent a little too hard and basically just assumed that the guys coming in first to my second or third just were better, not that training had anything to do with it. Definitely had no structured training back then when I was going from bmx to mtb, but since I didn’t have anyone telling me anything I put more effort into it than swimming, but certainly 0 structure.
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Haha that was my first thought too
It does suggest that something good is in the pipeline though! Very exciting 
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Yawn….
It’ll be the 2026 season soon…
Interesting! In the three years I’ve done TR I don’t recall ever being assigned one!
Also didn’t know there was a way to search for them quite like the way you did. Thanks!
Which leads me to a few things I think we could find helpful.
- A better way to search for a type of ride we’re looking for. Say someone wants to do a longer hard start before settling into threshold to really replicate a race start. Like 5-10 min @ vo2 straight into long SS. How would one find that?
- Have rides auto adapt for change in extreme altitude or heat. If I do a workout at 6000’ I’d like TR to give me an option to adjust while still keeping PL’s. Or
- Or if I manually reduce the effort triggering a survey from TR provide an option for heat/altitude as to why I didn’t do the prescribed effort.
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