I would love an explanation to why thy the AI gave me a red light! Might have been a logged strength workout (that was upper body) or the long slow skiing yesterday? To be able to adjust my training and (whether to) trust the AI I need to know the reasons why I got the light.
4 hours of Nordic/cross country skiing absolutely is the reason for your read day
28 Likes
Shortest mystery story ever!
30 Likes
Thats my point. Iām not able to know or correct the algorithm. The skiing was slow, zone 0/1. If I wuold have gotten a calculated tss (or a pionted reason for the red day) i would be able to evaluate the AI advice and also give feedback.
If they completely give us the algorithm for it, then any competing platform can just steal it and use it as well. That wouldnāt make a lot of sense for TR. It seems pretty obvious to me. It can only use what it knows about you, not what you know about you. Iām looking at your weekly graph and thereās not a ton of volume there. Then yesterday you have a four hour workout (that doesnāt have a TSS value associated with it). That seems like enough of an outlier on your training history there to trigger a warning. I mean, look at your week. You did one tiny bike ride and a bit of weight lifting. Of course itās going to think a four hour workout is a big deal unless it sees that you do that regularly.
10 Likes
You know that you can ignore the warning, right? Thereās no need to correct the algorithm.
5 Likes
Half hour bike rides and multiple days off into a 4 hour nordic skiā¦Yeah.
1 Like
Welcome to the forum @SveinWS! 
It seems like everyone here has the right idea. Any four-hour-long activity is likely viewed by the software as stressful.
Every once in a while we get a report that an activity is being weighed more than maybe it should and I think we could likely find a solution for this type of issue down the road at some point.
Iāll pass this along to the team as an example.
Thanks for the feedback!
1 Like
I also do Nordic Ski regularly, and it often triggers a yellow day (less often a red day).
I wonder how TR takes these into account, and also if and how I can help TR take it into account. Like the person who created this post, I have the impression that TR over estimates the effort in Nordic Ski. In the ski week attached, apart from Jan 3 my ski tours were āeasyā for me. No problem to do it several days in a row, but I got yellow and red days.
Few questions / remarks :
- TR always says it is a āskiā activity : it does not seem to make a difference between downhill ski or Nordic ski (the activity comes from Garmin Connect or Strava, in both of them the Xcountry activities are tagged Nordic Ski Stating in Garmin, and Nordic ski in Strava. If you look at my ski week in January, on Jan 2 I did downhill in the morning and Xcountry in the afternoon. Both appear as āskiā
- To help TR adapt my program following ski activities, I could enter a TSS, but I have no clue what TSS to enter? To me Nordic Ski effort is somewhat similar to mountain bike : myheart goes much more up and down than in road bike. Itās different from running as you rest much more on flat parts, but not as much as on a bike. So should I enter a TSS similar to an equivalent duration Mountain Bike ride?
- If I enter a TSS, how would it be taken into account ?
- I wear a heart monitor when I ski. Is this data taken into account in any way ?
- In some of the activities, I stop often to watch scenery, discuss with friends, ā¦ it makes the activity feel easier. Is rest time considered ?
And did the ski week have an impact on the AI FTP detection done just at the end ?
1 Like
I wear my garmin and heart rate strap while skate skiing. TrainingPeaks TSS calculation is probably the closest as you can set up your pace (similar to running rTSS) and use that to get a gauge on your TSS. Whatever TrainingPeaks says, I usually manually edit my skate skiing effort based on pace. More times than not, 90 mins to 2 hours of skate skiing results in at least one red day. hrTSS isnāt a bad backup for calculate the tss to input if you want.
1 Like
Thanks for your reply. Iāll give it a try. For me after a 2 hour ski session, I can definitively train the next day on TR, even for a rather hard training. (even if Iām almost 60)
1 Like
Iāve skied (downhill) every Friday and/or Saturday for years during ski season. Typically I do my prescribed workout either before or after skiing. I recently looked back at my history that now shows the Yellow/Red days. I basically lived in red or yellow every ski season yet havenāt ever noticed issues in the past. Iāve definitely had tired legs in the past but looking back I had a lot of breakthrough workouts and PRs on yellow and red days. I think that TR overweights the skiing effect.
1 Like
I completely agree that I think TR is overweighting the effects of downhill skiing.
I find myself often deleting my ski workouts, not because of the yellow/red days showing up on the calendar, but more because the AI keeps downgrading my workouts.
IP
Iām sure someone from TR can chime in but I wouldnāt delete the ski workouts, that just makes it harder and harder for the modeling to figure out what it needs to do in those instances. Keep the workouts, ignore the adaptations and prove that it can be done. This should not just help you specifically with the adaptations going forward but it is also feeding the machine to learn how to handle these sorts of things.
3 Likes
@mrtopher1980 - Probably the best course of action to help the model. My reservations remain the same: The AI recommends downgrading all of my workouts ā because of the yellow/red days. So do I āskip adaptationsā to maintain the workouts? How do I know if future changes will be based on yellow/red or my perceived exertion at the end of the workout?
Give it time.
Last summer I started doing longer and longer Z2 rides. Initially got red day after 7h ride. Did similar rides twice a week and it took 6 weeks for RL/GL to give me ājustā yellow day after 10h ride. 6 months has passed since then, yesterday did PL10+ Sweetspot workout and RL/GL didnāt even blink an eye. Havenāt had any colorful day this year, although have done only hard days (anaerobic, vo2max, long suprathreshold, sweetspot).
EDIT: looked up, since last September, there have been in total only 2 red days.
I skip adaptations all the time, especially after an activity that is not related to cycling. I didnāt actually get a yellow/red day this weekend but expected after a 5 hour āhikeā around DC with my tot on my back. This will just come down to your own judgement though. Like I would treat 4 hours of cross country skiing and 4 hours of downhill entirely different, but the modeling is probably treating them similar and even similar to my āhikeā.
How much time is showing in TR for your skiing activity? 4 hours or an hour? IF you just entered I did 4 hours manually then it might treat that differently than 4 hours of elapsed time from say a Garmin that is also showing laps and only 1 hour of active time since the later watches can detect altitude and therefore rest vs active time. Similar thing seems to be happening on people strength workouts. Hitting start and not recording work sets on a garmin will show 90 minutes of working out, when in reality if they were hitting lap to record sets it would be like 25 minutes.
Most real red days that you will see later you probably will also be able to say, oh yeah this is a red day. So I wouldnāt worry about that aspect of it too much, especially if it is a non cycling activity that triggers it.
Weād recommend keeping the skis on there indeed. 
Also remember that RLGL isnāt a āreadinessā tool, but a fatigue prevention tool. One may feel good to train on a yellow/red day, but doing so increases the odds of burnout.