A watch? 
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Yeah but how do I get my intervals displayed on my (samsung) watch?
I don’t have a Samsung watch so can’t comment on that explicitly. If it supports pulling in TrainingPeaks and posting to Strava then that would work.
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I haven’t figured out the first part, getting a tp workout on my watch
Yeah, I wear a Garmin Epix, so that’s the answer. I connect my AirPods to it, and it talks to me during the run. Sorry, but I don’t know anything about Samsung stuff as we’re an Apple family.
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Jim personally looked into your case and explained Join will gradually ramp you up in 4 weeks. Ultimately you would only lose out on a few hours and not risk burning out according to him. But you might know yourself better but probably for the majority of users this is the best way
I don’t really want to buy another piece of hardware for like 30-40 minutes/ wk of running 
maybe once join will prescribe actual intervals (for now the workouts are still easy and short enough to remember )
He looked in to it personally and stuck to his guns, but that doesn’t mean he’s right. I’ve had the same issue over and over again in the last year - if you have a challenging schedule, forced breaks and inconsistent training windows, join doesn’t make the most of your available time. It could easily still be conservative in terms of hard sessions and fill the space with endurance, but it doesn’t. It will put rest days even when you have no availability afterwards, it will put a one hour session in a 3 hour window when you only have 8 hours total availability for the week. I regularly get the response that ‘well you can still do a ride or pick a workout from the library’ but then you end up doing all your own planning, which completely defeats the point… and then they’ll give you extra rest days anyway.
FWIW, for the same week TR was completely different. It used all the availability with no red days.
So one of them is wrong…
I have my issues with TR as well (mainly in the summer when the majority of my volume is outdoors) but at least it actually wants me to do some training.
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I do all my workouts just from memory. I usually find that it’s easy enough to remember the intervals, but it can be a bit hard to know how long you have to go, especially with something like 30/30s or similar. So for those I find a spot to do lap repeats, and see how far I get in eg. 30s. Then I just do reps of that distance, instead of looking at my watch.
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After 5 months with JOIN, the app scheduled their 20 min FTP test. 6% increase, which I was very pleased. Signed up for another year. JOIN is still training me for a first week of May race/ride.
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This was one of two main reasons I quickly gave up on Join a long while ago. Join has a very strong bias to detrain someone, every even so small reason is good enough to skip a day. And dare you to train anyways, it will pay you back by skipping the next one or two days as well.
I also discussed it with them and the sad summery is that they either can’t or don’t want to see the problem.
Somehow funny to read they still have not solved this after such a long time.
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Which is completely unlike my experience because Join will keep throwing workout after workout at me but then I just let join do what it wants…
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Sure, if it would happen to everyone I guess they would have 0 customers.
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If you had just stopped fighting the app it would probably have tried to bring you up too way more volume than you would have liked. My volume and CTL went down in my first 4-6 weeks too but after that it went up up up, to so much I had to curtail join a bit because I was just too much on the bike it started interfering with my responsibilities. Anyway Join worked for me. See my power curves from before structure, after 2 years TR and from the last few days
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This is the key point - you do what Join says. It’s when you lack the flexibility to do that, that you get in to issues.
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It is very flexible though some programs always start gradually and maybe join itself starts a bit conservatively for the first few weeks but over months it will give you a lot of load often with no recovery weeks. But you are impatient. I started September 5th 2023 (the new season is set to September 15th), so yeah for 2 weeks my ctl dropped and it took another 2 the be back where I started
I’m not impatient. I’ve been on it for a year. I’m confident it would have worked well in previous years when I could basically train when I wanted, but now I have commitments and limited windows to train, it falls apart.
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Might have to do with cycling level. My wife is using the app. She can only do 4 days max, some weeks 3 days. She has 3 days with a 45 min availability. One day, 2 hour. The app accommodates her fine. Does not hound her to increase hours either. This is with Stamina Builder. I think her cycling level is beginner.
The app doesn’t work for everyone. Circumstances change. I hope you found a workable solution.
Yep, TrainerRoad. I’ll keep my activities in Join to see how it reacts. 2 weeks in now and Join is still giving me rest days saying I’m doing too much - TR has only given me yellow days on my rest days, or a very easy endurance day.
TR is really getting there with the 2024 changes. 2 major developments would really step it up for me:
-
Integrate workouts openly to 3rd party platforms. I use TPV not Zwift, so that upcoming integration isn’t going to help me. Not too hung up on this one as I have a dirty hack which gets the workouts in to TPV.
-
massive overhaul of outside workouts - progression levels and better outdoor specific workouts.
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I guess that’s a big no-no for some people, myself included.
I have enough life reasons trying to prevent me to train, I really don’t need to pay a training program adding to that.
But happy for you about you progress of course!
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