Thanks.
Yeah that seems to be the solution.
Now I’m wondering what the value is of TR is for me. For all the adjustments I made season to season (FTP testing, in workout nutrition, etc.) And all the “improvements” by TR with plan builder, AI, etc., nowhere was it mentioned that “hey these plans have too much intensity in them and you should swap some workouts for Z2 stuff.”
The advice in the podcast, blogs, youtube videos, instagram posts was “follow the plans” then it was updated to “use the planbuilder and accept the changes from the ML.” I double checked this morning and all the posts i found where essentially, “our plans are structured appropriately to ensure you improve and get enough recovery.” I get needing to make adjustments on my end (which in my effort to avoid going into 7 years of training history, I didn’t get into) but if TR makes the claims it does and adds the workout it schedules, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think that is what I should strive to do.
Why should I pay for a service/knowledge where it’s expected going in that about half the time, its going to be the wrong workout? Why not just go with something else that’ll be closer to reality going into it?
The past 2 weeks where I’ve been riding Z2 or doing mtb rides with friends has been the closest I’ve felt to how fit I was before starting TR. I really didn’t get into this trying to bash TR but after all the comments and some thought, I’m really having a hard time trying to find the value in it anymore.
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For what it’s worth, I’ve had fairly similar experience over the past 5 years, and came to a similar conclusion earlier this year. I’m still using TR just a way to control my trainer. From what I understand there are better ways to do that…so after CX season and an off season, I’ll be looking elsewhere as well.
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To be fair to TR, every plan you find out there will need modifications. The basic modification is to insert some rest or load control into the plan.
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I’ve had great success using Join this past 6 months, I feel that TR is over priced, the workouts are more complex than they need to be, the plans have two much intensity, and a general encouragment that “the workout is King” you must drop all else in order to do the plan and the workout
I signed back up for TR today, the reason being, these things are just tools, and like all tools you have to use them right, Join has shown me the advantage of just adding in volume, I want to have something that will select me the workouts (2 a week max) I won’t be using the plans, as I want to ride more than once a day (to add in more volume) and have a little more flexibility with time (although I thing alternatives is a little over rated)
I totally agree, however TR does make the claim that it gives you the right workout every time, which causes a little confusion IMO
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I give up on the tri plans and then they change something like adaptive training so I try them again but I also find I seem to peak way before my events and just end up destroyed. There is some evidence that suggests people can only handle 2 or 3 workouts a week that are above aerobic (zone 1 or 2) so both TrainerRoad and TriDot recommending 4 to 5 workouts a week above LT1 is likely unsustainable.
TrainerRoad seems to consistently blame this on the athlete saying you aren’t recovering enough but I have to question the quality of any program that can’t progress athletes appropriately and consistently over cooks the progression. You can’t always blame the athlete. TR’s AI doesn’t seem to account well for running or swimming or any workouts that aren’t following the TR workout so it is actually missing a majority of what most people are doing. Makes no account of resistance training at all. So with the inputs being so much less than your actual stress it’s not surprising it mid-calculates. But it’s so consistently off that I question if they really do use a data-base of actual people to adjust progressions. They don’t really show us how it works or explain to us how to use it. Instead of TR ever saying, “yeah, we could make this better” they always blame the athlete for doing things like going outside to ride your bike the way you want to or the way you think you need to for your upcoming event.
I’m hoping version 2 might improve on the calculations for outdoor workouts but that still leaves a lot of room for improvement for including resistance training, running, and swimming.
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Agree completely. I’ve had a couple chats with TR and while admittedly, there is definitely user error on my part (not answering post ride surveys as AI defines it), my goofs don’t explain everything. For example, this happened even before the AI.
I have to lay this at having essentially 4 VO2 workouts (2 on the bike, 1 run, 1 swim) over the span of 3 days as TR has it prescribed in the build phase of their plans. This doesnt even include the threshold bike ride or the long swim/runs (which to their credit is finally Z2).
There are other weird quirks to the base/build plans that are weird too, like the 6 week span but the recovery is at week 4 so you start the next phase already fatigued, the fact that VO2 work starts at week 5 of the plans and then is carried through all the way to the A race (total of 20 weeks assuming no repeat phases). After looking at the tri plans much more critically, it really seems like these were just cobbled together so they can say they offer tri plans.
I even experienced the “you aren’t following the plan” thing as well.
Everything I’ve ready, listened to, people I’ve talked to keeps leading me back to the same answer. There is just too much intensity in this plan for just about anyone to complete without substantial changes to/skipping workouts.
It does seem like there are enough workable features and the plans give a decent blueprint to follow (with lots of changes to specific workouts though) that I’m thinking of sticking with it and just making my own changes.
That is NOT user error. As there are no instructions given other than answer honestly, the fault is with trainerroad for not matching the definitions to YOUR definitions.
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Yeah, the mid volume Olympic plan this year has been rough. High intensity nearly every day. The low volume doesn’t have enough stimulus. I don’t really want to write out an in between plan, that’s what I pay TR for.
I will probably try an 80/20 plan off training peaks next year
How is it TR’s fault when they give directions to “answer honestly” and the user chooses to NOT answer?
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I don’t think the user choose not to answer, he said
I took the as AI defines it to mean that his answers didn’t match what AI was expecting, so he was answering honestly, just not the same honesty as AI was execting, which is not use errror, as it’s isn’t defined … well it wouldn’t be if wasn’t for the user Chad
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Yeah, I had this problem too. TR says “just answer honestly and AI will figure it out”, but that just lead to ramping up too quickly for me. Once I started rating everything one higher than my “honest” answer, things improved. I understand what they’re going for, but clearly my moderate is their hard, etc.
Right, I did answer just never the “right” answer.
Ultimately though, I could have answered every workout was “all out” but the AI was never going to give me a true recovery workout, which is probably what I would have needed.
Gotcha…thanks for the clarification.
At this point, it won’t….nor is it designed to do so. It will only adjust the level of your next workout, not replace it with a completely different workout targeting another energy system (or recovery).
This goes back to the “listen to your body” advice.
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I’m just telling you how the AI / system works…if you feel that TR has misrepresented the system’s capabilities, that isn’t my department. 
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I want to address this comment directly. I’m super bummed that we gave the impression that we are blaming others and not taking any ownership. 
We have the perspective that TrainerRoad is not and never will be perfect, but it will constantly improve.
When we get feedback that TrainerRoad isn’t working for somebody, our sole focus is to get all of the information so we can learn where we can improve. There are also cases where TrainerRoad is misrepresented, so we need to do our due diligence to get to the bottom of each scenario.
Part of this is fully understanding the context of the athlete, as each situation is unique and if not fully understood, can lead to misunderstanding for everybody, especially in a forum environment like this.
This lets us know what they did and did not do so we can fully understand how the product can be improved, and then we act on that.
Sometimes that action looks like a quick fix, and sometimes it looks like educating ourselves with data on the scope of the issue and learning more about it, but in one way or another it leads to us finding opportunities to improve and owning that.
Recent examples of this:
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Based on feedback and data we’ve recently made changes to how Adaptive Training adjusts workouts after unexpected outcomes that will do a better job of getting you back on track (ie: appropriate difficulty and good improvement rate) with your training. This has taken a lot of research to fully understand and ship, and we’re collecting data on its performance with the intent and plans to improve it further.
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We used data and feedback to ship the new “micro-adjustments” functionality for AI FTP Detection for athletes that find themselves at the top or bottom of a progression. This helps athletes when they are struggling to complete what should be easy workouts as well as those that are “running out of runway” at the top of a progression. With this also came the unique functionality of AI FTP Detection in Specialty Phases.
In other words, we view every one of these situations as an opportunity to do better, not as an opportunity to blame.
On the other side of the coin (and from a coaching perspective), if our goal is to make people faster, it wouldn’t be fair for us or any athlete to disregard when a training prescription is not being followed, or when the product is not being used as designed.
This would lead to all of us missing crucial pieces of information that would help us to improve the product, and that would help athletes in their training.
The reason we do this diagnostic process out in the open here on the forum is to help others get full context when they come across a thread. If our goal was to just blame others and not improve, our approach would be totally different and we’d just delete threads where people bring up issues with TrainerRoad. That would be dishonest, and that’s not how we work.
Just as it would be unfair for us to ignore our opportunities to improve and cast full blame on others, it would also be unfair for others to ignore their opportunities to improve and cast full blame on the product. I think it’s best when we adopt the perspective that we can all improve
Last note: I want y’all to know I’m meeting directly with @kevshoes to gather feedback and better understand what lead to their fatigue.
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Oh Jonathan, you always win me back. To be fair to TrainerRoad, I’ve used it since 2012 and ignoring the inaccurate FTPs from the early years when I had power match on a Kurt Kinetic trainer I hit my highest FTP ever this year at age 48.
I would love a podcast or series of blog posts that would tell us ways to adjust training plans. For instance, Joe Friel believes for older folks like myself a strategy of 2 hard workouts for every 7 total workouts is the receipe. He puts 72 hours between hard workouts and the 5 easy workouts are all aerobic. It’s actually very similar to 80/20 in distribution.
No idea how that would work for triathlon with three sports but would there be a way to still use AI FTP detection and maybe even have AI recommend adjustments to training plans depending on how workouts were going but with athletes having more control over the “rules” of the training plan.
I have a stressful job with longer hours and can’t really do more than an hour long workout on weekdays. I would love to be able to put in my events, the days I can work out, the time constraints, etc. and have Plan Builder build me a plan. And then I’d love to be able to adjust it. It might not be the “best” plan there is for making me as fast as possible but I’d be super happy with a good plan for me that fits my life while giving me structure and progresses slowly and is very manageable.
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You’ve been with us for the long haul–thank you!
I want to be careful with this, but some of the points you mention have been direct focus areas of ours recently. 
Thanks for training with us!
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Please be regarding triathlon plans 
