I‘m 34 years old and startet with sports a few years ago. The last years i was running/trailrunning and only get on my bike for recovery rides.
I worked with running plans from Training Peaks an it works very well for me. The most time i spend time to trailrunning and in winter some months of flat running. I usally run about 3500km with 100.000hm / 490hr the last Year.
A half year ago i startet to cycle seriously. It makes me a lot of fun, but its very hard for me to find the right plan. The standard plans from the net are not enough or to much, mostly not balanced for me.
I tried to follow the training advices from Garmin, what works at the beginning good, but at sone point i get a lot of recovery Sessions and dont know why because i was feeling fit and good.
Since its getting cold outside i ride on zwift, its quite fun and i follow some structured workouts, but thats not a really structured training.
So i feel i get stuck a litte bit. I make a few FTP tests and startet in May with 270w, at the end of september i was standing at 301w, then i was a bit unlucky and get 2 colds, so i stand actually at 285w.
Now i look at a few apps like Enduco, Join and also Trainerroad.
TR seems the best platform for me but i‘m a bit in struggle because 25$ (with Tax) is a proud price.
So i want to asked specially the advanced athletes:
Is TR worth the money?
How increased TR your abilities?
Is it not getting worse to stare at the Screen without animation?
It would help my decision if you would tell me a bit of your success stories.
That’s up to you, I’ve been subscribing for 7 years and just renewed for 2025.
I’m faster for less training time.
The blue graph is surprisingly inspiring. And like other sports it helps keep you present and attentive to what you’re actually here to do. But TR integrates with Zwift now and plenty of us dual run with MyWoosh, Rouvy, FulGaz or watch TV while keeping an eye on the Blue Graph.
I’ve just had my coffee and I’m heading into a subzero pain cave to knock out 90mins of quality work because I know it will make me faster.
That sounds good what i read in the success stories.
Of course Trainerroad could be used with Zwift, but for me will Zwift be history if i subscribe at Trainerroad, both would be 45$ so i would do my training without the visual component or maybe use Mywhoosh. But at least i watched Netflix while zwifting so i think i will survive without it.
How the training sessions look like on TR?
I tried Join now for one week and every Session is 90min long, it doesn’t matter if there are Endurance Intervalls, SST or vo2max session, the warmup and cool down will be so long that the workout reach 90mins. That not really make sense for me, especially the vo2max workouts should hit hard and would be shorter then endurance rides.
Hmm i dont know why this decision is so hard for me.
If you want to pay for TR, but save money on cycling in virtual worlds, TrainingPeaks Virtual is like Zwift and is currently free. If you are a paying TP member, it will stay free. Some people even prefer it to Zwift.
In Join, you set the time you have available every day. If you tell it you have 90 minutes, it’s reasonable to assume it’s going to give you a 90 minute workout. If you set it to 60 minutes, it will give you a 60. There are lots of shorter VO2 workouts in their library. If you don’t like the one it gives you, you just choose an alternate, just like in TR.
I noticed that TR don‘t record kilometers is this right? How look such a activity at Strava?
If thats right its not fine for me because i like the overview at the end of the Year, so i had to find a solution to track that. The Easiest way would be to track the distance at my Whoosh, but then i got the data not on garmin because my Whoosh doesn’t sync with garmin.
Thats getting a bit complicated.
P.s I hope my english isn’t to bad, i try without google translate
TR is a steal for 20bucks a month in my opinion. I can only recommend it. i was paying coaches up to 200bucks a month before and honestly they were not worth 10% of that money.
TR has polarized plans nowadays and the custom plan builder can be configured to produce a polarized plan too (2 high intensity workouts per week, the rest easier).
Also, if the workout suggested to you isn’t to your liking, you can swap it for any of the other 4718 in the catalogue
We max out hard interval workouts at three a week.
When building out a custom plan you also have the option to switch to two a week if you’d like. For many athletes, that’s where you start and only move up to three a week over time.
Also, just to clarify, your volume can definitely increase over time when using TR plans.
