- I think it’s great that you are here and answering questions. It’s great to see and hear about the various app & service options outside of TrainerRoad, and having such direct info is as good as it gets, IMO.
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Armando. Impersonations of Scott and Stephen are still being worked on. 
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Hey Baron!
I have been playing with it since (I don’t give up easy, love pushing buttons and there’s some cool features in Xert you don’t see anywhere else).
But I’m wondering what I would get out of it if I’m planning all my own rides (which would be almost exclusively outdoors as I’ve moved to a fantastic area for riding) and planning all my own recovery and progression and even inputting my own freshness.
What can I take from Xert to make me get faster basically?
To be more specific, I’m about to do a second polarised training block. Just finished one. But will repeat it, of my own design (similar to what I did with TRs experimental one) because the one here has no ability modify the hours per week.
What would Xert add to that?
I shouldn’t be saying this on a TR forum but when you think about it, Xert technically should offer me what I want. I can add hours per week through the ‘Improvement rate’ and I should be able to make up XSS with recommended workouts that should see what I’ve missed and need to catch up on.
Essentially I think I need a love child between TR and Xert and you’d have the perfect training platform.
Recommended workouts should work as intended every time surely.
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The Adaptive Training Advisor is always adjusting your training (not necessarily workouts) targets and this is what you can use to monitor your volume and ensure you get progressive overload, i.e. you improve. If you assign a target event date, then Xert will also periodize your training so that you will see increasingly focused recommendations as your target event nears.
Everything is adaptive so if you decide to change your improvement rate because you have more time (or less time). That’s ok. If you decide you want to focus on a different weakness leading into the event, that’s ok. Just make the change and everything adjusts for you. You can experiment with it too to see what it’s doing. This will allow you to do your own thing and adjust with a greater awareness.
During this process, Xert will adjust your fitness signature and capture your improvements, either via Breakthroughs or if you choose to change the decay option, you’ll get predicted signature values without having to do breakthroughs.
You can monitor things more closely by instaling our Garmin datafields on your Garmin or if you have a new Hammerhead Karoo, you can watch things happen there using our new EBC app. These can help you train or perform better with a greater awareness of your own abilities. It’s also fun to see your improvements come to life in real time.
So there is a lot there if you’re not doing workouts to help you see and manage your improvements. Our workouts are just one part of the suite of capabilities there are and not something you have to use.
Hope this answers your question.
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Thanks Armando.
I do get that. I understood that a few years back when I first tried Xert.
So for me my training is entirely my workouts and my rest. That’s the output from any targets or model, and that’s what I’d need a good application or coach to be able to prescribe.
Twitter, Instagram etc all have data and very clever algorithms behind them, and you can see some of that offered as part of the package - but the product is being able to Tweet or post photos. The model and data that comes with that helps inform you to Tweet or post photos better.
But the main consumer product is clear - Tweets, or in our case here, workouts. Training is reduced to jumping on your bicycle and doing X amount of work.
Pick any tech example you wish. If those analogies don’t work.
So clearly Xert has tried to use the model to populate workouts, and the concept is excellent - you can choose progression rate, weekly hours (though I would separate ‘Improvement Rate’ from weekly hours, that would be deeper when you think it through, it’s more flexible and suits different styles of training approaches).
If I populate 1 workout on Xert or 3 - there should be no need for workout 3 to have adapted if I met the prescribed workout and I haven’t changed any other metric like Improvement Rate or my Freshness.
Xert working well would of course automatically rework all future workouts I’d populated if I started missing targets or it detected I was struggling or finding the workouts too easy.
Whether I populate a workout one at a time or an entire month makes no difference here. An adaptive training app would always be adapting those scheduled workouts when it saw fit.
The latter scenario where a user can see their plan ahead of them is massively beneficial for obvious reasons - people have lives to and they like to plan their training, fueling etc around that. It’s also interesting to see it all mapped out.
That doesn’t mean those workouts need to be set in stone. No-one wants that anymore - the market sees the need for adaptive training, but the output is workouts and rest. If a user doesn’t follow the populated workouts and goes and smashes it for a whole week around Majorca, that’s no different to a user missing the last interval of a set workout because they were fatigued - the model simply reworks the populated workouts. If users want to use the workouts in Xert or from somewhere else - no different to Xert’s innate ability to populate a workout as required.
So the other thing is that the market is clearly moving to different styles of training and the debate is become as polarised as some of the models themselves. No doub you can see this as your forum has this request coming up too from looking around.
Your model being able to populate workouts based on user preference to a polarised, pyramidal, sweet spot style will bring Xert into a market that understands these things as concepts and allows users to experiment with different approaches.
If you want Xert to be flexible and empower users to do what they like, then this is more the way to do it than simply outputting recommended loads etc.
Yes. With workouts! It’s all about the workouts.
I think you’re in one of two situations. Either you know there’s a ton of work to be done to make workouts and structured training consumer ready and so you’re pushing the other aspects of Xert, or, and I pray this isn’t the case - you’re just not seeing the end goal here.
If you do get the output of Xert sorted, specifically the workout and ability to build a training plan that changes on the fly - then you have a killer product.
The best product on the market. Hands down.
You’ll also need money to reskin the UI. It’s honestly not 2021. There’s no room for that in the consumer space these days when everyone’s used to the polish of iPhone Apps etc. People have been conditioned to a slick and simplified user experience.
Other thing I’d be careful of here and this is me taking my cyclist hat off now - be wary of cheerleaders around you. You need to finish the job at Xert or it will be a wasted opportunity and you’ll kick yourself for it once the market for adaptive training matures. Happy ears and all that.
Good luck with it and thanks for taking the time to pop in. Once you get this to where it needs to be, you won’t need to be doing damage control like this in random corners of the internet - you’ll have masses of customers going this is the best thing ever! rather than a small bunch of data hungry users enjoying an extra degree of depth.
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Very much appreciate the time you’ve put into your response and feedback. It shows an appreciation for our software and understanding of what many athletes are looking for.
Firstly, Xert has been an ambitious project, essentially re-inventing training from the ground up - MPA analysis, multi-dimensional strain, dynamic/highly personalized workouts and adaptive training advice - all of which had never existed before we brought them to market. We’re just a small group of enthusiastic engineers, scientists and athletes. Much of what has been done has been experimental in many ways, not really looking to cater to mainstream audiences but more about following where the math behind MPA, at its core, leads us. Adaptive training can be linked directly to how much power you can produce interactively. We think that’s really cool and luckily for us, we have many athletes that agree and that have achieved new levels of fitness with the tools we’ve managed to create.
Secondly, except for the pre-population of multiple weeks of workouts (which we don’t have for a reason), we have essentially everything you’re describing. Indeed, seeing a calendar full of workouts that the software is prescribing feels assuring and like there is a plan for you and that you have something of value. We had recognized this and had considered adding this feature. But we haven’t yet gone this route because, frankly, it’s a massive amount of work and also a bit of a step backwards and antithetical to the goal of optimization. It’d be kind of cool to use but not really not all that useful in the end. Every workout you do will not likely be exactly as planned. In fact, unless your schedule is down to the minute, it won’t be. For example, if you’re in the base phase, and your schedule has you doing a 1 hour endurance workout but you have 1.5 hours available, what do you do? Follow the plan or do 1.5 hours? With Xert, you always do 1.5. Seeing a 1 hour workout pre-planned is just a placeholder not a prescription. This is what people who use Xert learn. You can adjust and adapt every day. Ultimately, the “plan” should really be a “program”, i.e. a set of rules you follow to optimize training results. We talk a lot about programs vs. plans in our podcasts. Once understood, you sort of see why there’s no need to plan more than a few days out.
Lastly, the methods are novel and very complex. We’ve done our best to offer access and control of things through the user interface. It’s more functional than polish at this stage due to the complexity and having a small team. Many users that have come from different systems expect the polish though. That’s fair. In recognition, we have improved many things over the years. Expect more improvements to come. But do recognize that many of the complaints you read are from those that expect things to be a certain way and don’t get Xert. Sort of like complaints from the driver who’s used to his Toyota Camry that drives in one-dimension that gets into a new Xert car that drives in 3 dimensions and complains about it not being simple and asks why have all these new acronyms and different metrics. Another driver complains that it doesn’t have power windows and seats. They haven’t yet had the “aha” moment that many Xerters have that they’re in a new type of vehicle that’s pretty amazing. We’re not too worried about this sort of feedback at this moment but recognize that we need better education and an improved UX for new users to help them understand and appreciate Xert. This should also help us reach a more mainstream audience. All in due time…
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