I’m currently in a 6 month Enduarnce plan and could use some help with the logic behind what “adaptive” really means. Should the plan adjust my workouts and “adapt” with scheduled time off?
I entered into my training calendar a 6 day stretch where I will be out of town. I was scheduled for a rest week the follow week with only easy endurance rides on my calendar. After entering the rest week (vacation), none of my scheduled workouts changed as a result. I come back to another 7 days of either days off or easy endurance rides. I was under the impression my schedule should change as a result of days off, rides missed, vacations, etc. in the end, the next 14 days seems a bit wasted. I’d like to come back not in a rest week because I just rested for 6 days. Is this not part of what is referred to as “adaptive”? In the past, my workouts would adapt / change when I took my dog for a 20 minute walk, but won’t change when I’m off 6 days?
Hope that makes sense. Please let me know where I’m not understanding correctly. Thanks.
You maybe need to give it time, I think the plan tends to adapt as you get closer to an originally scheduled workout. I could be wrong but I don’t think (unless its triggered by RLGL) that the type of workout will change. If it was say, orginally a level 6 Threshold workout, after sickness/break it’ll adapt down to its new estimate of your Threshold PL, say level 3.
I’m dealing with the same issue, and in hoping that the plan actually does adapt. I have a recovery week scheduled for the end of this month which immediately proceeds a 4 day vacation. I was hoping that when I put it on the calendar it would reconfigure the rest days and workouts to fit my schedule a little bit better.
Nothing changes as I previously had to travel for work for 4 days and the workouts never changed for me then and I don’t anticipate them changing for me this time.
IDK. After some years away using other apps I started up again with TR back in Nov to try out the adaptive and AI features. I spent more time reading and corresponding trying to figure how it works and how to work it than I have actually training. Right now, it seems like a work in progress with loosely connected features that don’t behave or do what I hoped or expected, particularly in accounting for and adapting for activities outside of a plan’s structured workouts. TR does admit this and states improving it is a high priority. I firmly believe it can be done and expect they will get there, but it might be a while, IMO.
Seems that plans still get laid out in blocks, 3 week on, 1 off, or similar. If you miss one of your “on” weeks, there’s not real shuffling that happens. Also, workouts adapt based on PLs, but as far as I can tell, TR doesn’t seem to be modulating your total weekly or monthly training load other than as a by-product of your workout levels going up.
I think they’re missing a trick by not experimenting with rules around rest weeks too. More customization would be nice. If you want a 3/1 format, great. If you want RLGL to suggest mini “rest blocks” as and when, that would be a cool option.
Your plan will adapt in the sense that it will know where you left off when you begin taking your time off. Your future workouts will be adjusted based on your Progression Levels and where you left off in your plan.
The plan will be able to see that you won’t have trained during your Time Off note, remove those workouts, and adjust accordingly thereafter. We intentionally don’t, however, adapt away recovery weeks.
While you may be out of town and off the bike, that doesn’t mean you’ll truly be “resting.” Traveling comes with its own stressors that often affect training. Many athletes find that an easier week is a good way to get back into training once they return from a trip.
That said, if you’d like to sprinkle in some intensity when you get back, you could look into using TrainNow – though we’d recommend against making that return week a full-on intensity week for the sake of the rest of your plan. One high-intensity session should be enough for a little kick to get the legs spinning up to higher power again.
Hope that helps clear things up – feel free to let us know if you have any other questions!
Thanks for the reply, but there isn’t any scheduke adaptation that takes place when nothing changes before or after scheduled time away. All the system does is void the workouts during that time and everything else stays the same. Thats far different than what TR generally puts out to the public in terms of advertising how the system works.
I’m barely at any intensity level now, never mind rest days before and after being off the bike for 6 days and coming back to 4 workouts of what equates to low intensity Z2 work.
It’s all good. At least I know now that TR plans really don’t adapt the way that is advertised (at least not the way i understood it). I really think TR is missing the boat in terms of what most people think are adaptive training plans. It’s not just me, but other have similar feedback (above and in other threads about the issue).
For now and as long as I continue with the plan, I’ll manually adjust my schedule. Thanks for the reply.
i get it, but not really what i was getting at. To me, an adaptive training program would adjust for the scheduled days off. I’ve since learned that it does not work that way. I’m hoping the feedback gets to TR leadership and improvements can be made down the road.
Don’t the plans still work from your first A race/event, backward to today, in blocks? If so, if you’re in the middle of the plan and you take a week out of the middle or the end of the current block, I wouldn’t expect that to have much effect on the next week after the vacation even if you want it to, except that it should factor in how much rest you got or how much fitness you lost during that week of. If they gave you a full week instead of the scheduled easy week, that would either risk overloading you for the rest of the block or jack up the blocks/rest weeks going forward. Or are you moving your A race back a week, too?
Ultimately, I see it as they (the coaches who have created this AI) have set up the adaptation to maintain the rest week when you take the previous week off. This has been discussed a hundred times since I’ve been reading this forum, including before they released their AI. They have their reasons for doing it that way. If you want to override it and do some intensity, you have that option. But that doesn’t mean the software isn’t adapting (otherwise there wouldn’t be all the threads questioning why the AI changes their tomorrow intensity to an endurance ride after their 4 hr Saturday group ride/crushfest).
Yes, right now TR has “Train Now” or full blown schedules with goals and dated events where fitness is supposed to “peak”, etc.
For general fitness oriented athletes, I can imagine a middle-ground where TrainerRoad has a overall workout goal like “increase FTP” or “increase endurance”. Days of the week would still be allocated as “workout days” for the accountability a calendar brings, but the workouts on those days behave more like TrainNow but with a focus on the specific goal. This helps get rid of the “what happens after missed workouts” problem because there is no long term fixed schedule to change.
For general fitness oriented athletes, I can imagine a middle-ground where TrainerRoad has a overall workout goal like “increase FTP” or “increase endurance”.
This is available now in custom plans. There’s no need to have an event or race date in mind, you can just select ‘General Fitness’ and then specify the plan length, and goals for the plan as you require.
The issue (at least as I see it) arises because that plan length is still set in stone, as it would be if you had an event date in mind. For example, I’ve got a month of ‘speciality’ coming up with the usual 3wks on/1wk recovery block style. If I add ‘Time Off’ for the first week then the plan adapts to become 2wks on, 1wk recovery - the end date doesn’t change. I’d argue it would be more reasonable to assume, or to allow for, some fluidity in the end date under a ‘General Fitness’ plan type with no specific end date in mind, to allow that block to remain 3 on/1 off.
Further - if instead I add the ‘Time Off’ for the last week (recovery) of build, the recovery week disappears and Speciality just starts as normal. That would seem to undermine the argument that ‘Time Off involves stresses’ often used by TR to explain away why you might still get a recovery week scheduled straight after you’ve spent a week sitting on the beach. Not all time off is stressful!!
Obviously I can move weeks around/add intensity using Train Now, and I’m comfortable doing that - but to the OP’s point, AT will plan/adapt very well based on your workout performance and survey responses, but will not currently adapt a general fitness plan to accommodate life happening in the way that I think it should in order to be truly ‘adaptive’.
My idea was a different and a new thing. Essentially, offer a way to achieve training goals without pulling in the entire training plan mechanism as it exists in TR today. This is a bit of a compromise, but gets rid of a lot of the “TR didn’t rewrite my training plan calendar the way I wanted” type problems.
Yes, the adaptations TR performs currently seem more focused on tweaking workout intensity levels and less about automatically redoing the training schedule, or the chaining the training goal of rest weeks, etc.
