🎉🎉🎉 Introducing Plan Builder! 🎉🎉🎉

" What if I need to add events later?
When new events are added after a custom plan has been applied, we’ll ask you if you would like those events to be accounted for in your plan."

I added an event to my custom plan, but the plan remained the same as before.
A bug or what?

Does plan builder care or change anything for a week long stage race vs a single day A race. I selected Stage race , but it still only shows a single day event in plan builder. Does PB change any of the training days to accommodate this or is it no matter.

Not sure why the plan builder doesn’t allow any TSS/CTL positive ramp after the first 2 months. After chatting with support they are saying it is limited by hours per week, which makes sense. I just don’t understand why there isn’t any option to ramp up TSS beyond the initial limits (limited to 300 TSS per week with the Low Volume Plan).

Why would anyone want to have a stagnate CTL for any time period after 2 months? I understand the reasoning behind not getting blinded by CTL values, but it also seems like a waste of effort not to ramp CTL beyond the first 2 months.

Do I really have to mash together different plans based on the training volume to positively ramp CTL/Weekly TSS? Seems like a major bottle neck for this feature.

AIUI, plan builder is very much a v1 offering aimed at helping people fairly new to structured training work backwards from a goal event or two and build out a plan. Most of those people are going to be constrained by the hours they can spare each each week. If you build out a plan some months ahead and later find that you can devote more time, you can re-run plan builder (increasing the time you have available) and back date it so you don’t “lose credit” for the training done so far.

There are lots of directions they could take plan builder next - witness the threads with requests for Masters-oriented plans that build in different work/recovery week ratios.

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Honestly, I’m getting the sense that the coaches behind TR don’t support CTL values in the same manor that the TP program does.

But I still feel as if there should be some middle ground behind a scientific CTL ramp rate and TR’s effectively 0 ramp rate with this tool. But what do I know haha

Where is your evidence for ‘scientific CTL ramp rate’?

I would hope they didn’t pull these numbers out of thin air…

“Typically, a weekly ramp rate in the 6 TSS neighborhood (+/- 2 TSS) works well for most riders, so a weekly ramp rate of 15 TSS is not recommended but still useful for our needs here.”

TR recommended vs ‘scientific’ is different. I’m not aware of any studies supporting TSS, or metrics derived from it, as being predictive.

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Not sure I understand…

Maybe you are saying the science behind TSS ramp rates isn’t translatable to actual practice?

Call me crazy but the term science doesn’t have to specifically relate to a publicly published and peer reviewed study…

“Helping endurance athletes stay current on the science and art of training”

There is no science behind TSS and CTL - it is simple, descriptive model that describes what you have done. There is no sctrict corellation between CTL and performance and definitely you cannot use the model to predict performance. Someone with 120 CTL not necessairly will be better than a person with 80 CTL. This is only a descriptor of a training load and tool for monitoring training volume that helps you with this.

EDIT: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328186541_Relationship_Between_Various_Training-Load_Measures_in_Elite_Cyclists_During_Training_Road_Races_and_Time_Trials
Research paper about TL models and you can see basically everything works :wink:

If you use the Performance Management Chart (PMC) on TrainingPeaks.com, the mobile app, or WKO you are probably familiar with Chronic Training Load (CTL). It’s a rolling, daily average of how much training load (measured in daily workout Training Stress Scores—TSS) an athlete is managing.

Statement of what it is (a metric (CTS) derived from a metric (TSS) derived from a metric (FTP) and a questionable metric (Normalized Power)).

The more stress you can handle the greater your fitness is likely to be.

Jumping to a conclusion that is weak enough that you can’t really disagree with it.

If CTL is rising then fitness is likely rising also.

Jumping to a conclusion based on accepting a weak premise while introducing the weakly supported metric.

So CTL is a good proxy for “fitness” in the PMC model.

Tying the weakly supported metric to a weakly supported metric used by their software.

I see marketing. Where is the science?

“There is no science behind TSS and CTL”

What?

The definition of “science” is very wide.

EDIT:
If anyone is curious, I don’t really have an outstanding question regarding the Plan Builder.

This was main concern, “Do I really have to mash together different plans based on the training volume to positively ramp CTL/Weekly TSS? Seems like a major bottle neck for this feature.”

Seems like the answer is Yes. I think I should be mashing together different plans as I expect to move away from LV plans.

More of a conjecture, isn’t it?

Ok it is scientific parameter describing the training. It is the same as “I was training for 10h last week and have burned 8000kj, my average RPE was 6/10”.

What do you mean by ‘science’?

The post above has a good example.

It’s starting to sound like you don’t think there is conclusive/useful science behind training based on TSS ramp rates. Which was part of my original post/question about 2 weeks ago.

Thread resurrection :grin:

I’ve used plan builder and AT to create a plan and am 6 weeks in. However due to a few issues last week and a few trips comeing up I want to delete next week and pull everything forward one week, you used to be able to do this.

Al I can see now is copy week or move week which then gives a warning everything will be offset and I’ll not longer be able to edit my plan.

Do I have to delet the whole plan and manually re-create?

Hi,
as far as I know, yes, you delete the plan and create a new one with the same starting date as the old one (that bit is important).
It will pick up all the events and also the past training you have done, give you the option to add new events or “time off” for trips and incorporate those. It sounds daunting to delete the whole plan, but it actually is pretty straightforward and just takes 5 minutes or so.
Cheers!

I wish we still had the push/pull a week as doing some things in the plan are cumbersome. Getting extra recovery weeks takes some messing around if you are trying to schedule in 2 weeks build and 1 week recovery. Tweaking plans to do 4 days of workouts means tweaking each week again. Still some adjustments to make life easier would be appreciated.

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Have I gone mad, or has the “time off” option gone from the plan builder setup? It was definitely there when I used it last time (as I was quite impressed I didn’t have to do it manually)… but now it seems to have gone missing.

I really don’t want to have to try and sort it out manually. :frowning:

Edit - Ahh, it came back when I turned on Adaptive Training again.