I can’t offer any advice since I don’t use the Join workout player. I really don’t like it. BTW - I clicked on your link, but it’s not available for Safari or for iOS. Their comment is pretty clear though, “Please note that iOS is NOT supported at all, regardless of browser” 
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Yeah the JOIN app is awful and I gave up after the support team basically said ‘level / slope mode is never going to be supported’ just use erg or go outside.
Auuki failure is an apple issue - they have banned the protocols to keep people on the app store for obvious financial reasons.
The dev is putting together a native iOS app. The web app is probably the best workout player I’ve come across on any platform, and even has a workout builder that works in the app or can draw from anything you schedule in intervals.icu natively
Nice. I do those things with TrainerDay. I love the text based workout builders. Much better workout player than Join too.
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Has anyone tried ictrainer? Apparently you can also upload your own gpx routes and ride them.
Yeah I tried it before i found Auuki. It’s pretty awful. The workout builder crashes a lot and is really unintuitive, I was forced to restart it multiple times during workouts because it would get “locked” out of erg mode and then lose all resistance and nothing but a reboot could get it back. I’d swap erg to slope and it wouldn’t remember what % or wattage. Sometimes you’d go from slope to erg and the slope % would become the Watts (e.g. 9% = 9 watts on erg) and then I’d have to click the + button 20 times to get back up. Sometimes on switching it would go to negative watts e.g. -150 and the trainer would stop providing resistance.
It’s neither pretty nor effective and if there was nothing else it would be cheap but auuki is free.
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I have been using join for a few months now. My long power (>3h) has increased massively. However, my FTP not really, it just caught up to where I was last season. I am still surprised by how they do progressive overload, the intervals don’t get harder/longer but I am definitively ride more and at a higher power (feels like first threshold went up).
I am starting now the plan for the Tour Des Stations in August. I checked a bit the workout library and I don’t see longer Tempo/SST/Threshold intervals. I was a bit surprised that there is basically nothing over 2x20’ at FTP. Isn’t that a bit short for an event where I’ll be climbing most of the day? For those who completed a plan for a mountainous Gran Fondo like the Marmotte, did you feel that the plan was specific enough for the event?
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I know we’ve all talked about how Join seems to have a 3 on / 1 off pattern in the past. Just wanted to share that for the last several weeks, since I added in 2 runs per week, it has consistently given me a 4 on / 1 off structure. .
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So far, your long power has gone up. I can’t think of anything more useful for your event than long power. You won’t be riding at FTP on the climbs because otherwise you’ll blow up.
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I’ve been using JOIN for the last 6 months, and unlike most people I’ve not progressed at all, and am about to just abandon it. Tried three different plans for three different events and each one seems adamantly opposed to giving me any intensity. For background, my FTP is a little over 3.0W/kg and can do a 40k TT in just over an hour, so it’s not like I don’t have fitness. I also do a single 75-minute running track workout with a coach each week. I also commute about 1.5 miles each way by bike at a pace that ensures I don’t stink when I get to work–like 10-12 mph max.
The gravel plan over 12 weeks was just constant 1-2 hour Intensive Endurance intervals with the occasional tempo workout. Rode on the trainer almost exclusively except for a single recon ride the week before the race. The race was 50 miles with 2400ft of climbing with several steep, short climbs. Felt fine on the flats but felt completely unprepared for the climbs, so nothing different than last year
Had a duathlon coming up so I wanted to try the TT plan. Did 8 weeks of it and it was again constant 1-2 hour Intensive Endurance intervals with the occasional tempo workout–no efforts longer than 10 minutes. Did an FTP test midway through and my FTP increased by 2 watts. Did BikeMS in Texas at the very end of the plan at a reasonable pace and didn’t feel all that fatigued. Took a week off before my race, but had dead legs. Not really blaming that on the plan since I did 200 miles the week before, but my run was stronger despite a relatively poor bike leg.
So I e-mailed JOIN to see what they thought about what was going on and why my plans never gave me any intensity. Get a reply saying that JOIN’s AI model is designed to prevent me from overtraining and I don’t follow the plans closely enough because looking at my workout history I do unstructured rides far more often than actually do prescribed workouts. We go back and forth a couple of e-mails and support tells me my bike commutes are adding too much stress for it to add intensity, and I should add volume if I want to see any gains. I drop the conversation because at this point I don’t even know how to respond to the fact that bike rides that don’t even have power data and are marked as a 2/10 effort are enough to remove almost all intensity from the plan.
I’m giving it one last shot with the Improve Short Climbs plan for 3 months, and this time increased the volume to see what happens. Getting 1-2 days with intensity per week, but apparently adding volume just means adding huge blocks of monotonous Z2 on either end of a workout–like 20 minutes at 150W sandwiching a 50-minute block of Intensive Endurance intervals. This past week it gave me 50,40, and 50 minute Z2 blocks in a 150-minute workout with 2 sets of 5 30-30’s. Needless to say I’m not impressed with what seems to be an extremely simplistic AI model.
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Join isn’t ai, it’s just a set of if then arguments that checks when you last did x, y or z type of workout and then fits this into the limitations you give it.
Because of this it poorly handles stuff done on ‘rest’ days, extra volume (eg I did a couch to 5k warmup 15min run on a rest day and it cancelled my intervals the next day).
In general I would say that it handles the allowable hours per week in a way that is often unhelpful. You have to effectively give it more availability each day to accommodate for any extra training otherwise, it will assume that anything else you do is taken out of that time availability.
What’s even more frustrating is that it also has an idea of how much volume you need in order to improve at a given fitness. So unless I give it 20 hours a week it consistently tells me you need to do more (at 5wkg), but I’ve never averaged more than 10 in the last 5 years.
It does the same thing with strength training. Every time I would log it would just take away any intensity for several days. I suspect the algorithm is heavily tuned to take actions that it thinks will reduce injury or overdraining risk, even just a stupid extent.
The solution I’ve gone for is that I simply just don’t log the extra stuff because it’s not came to meaningfully change and or I don’t want it to meaningfully change the plan.
So in your case if your commutes are so low intensity that they would have no impact on your training then just delete them from join and log them somewhere else like intervals.
Let’s be honest, the only reason to use this app is because it’s cheap
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I understand what you’re saying, but we’re all aware of at least one other app where people are constantly asking why it thinks they’re overextending when they’re not, and often it’s due to logging things like walks, commutes, strength, etc. I’m not saying you’re wrong, just that this is not unique to Join.
Like you, I’ve taken to not tracking these things within my workout planning apps. I do track them in other places though, because while a long day of walking around the city or an easier strength workout don’t usually impact my ability to knock out a hard workout on any given day, they do contribute to my general feeling of long term fatigue.
Good on you for sticking with it this long, but to be honest I don’t think Join works for you, and I’d just pull the plug now and go to an app more suited for indoor work, like TR.
I think Join works best if you train outdoors, and have a lot of time to increase volume. It’s a “high volume plus efforts” training principle. It basically creates a high base load through lots of volume, and then sprinkles in some specific efforts. If you limit rides to 1-2h, you can’t get to a volume high enough for that to work, at least not if you are at a relatively high level of fitness already.
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I mean sure - there are loads of training apps that don’t seem to manage load particularly well.
I wonder if with JOIN a lot of the issue at the foot of not having a really really limited workout repertoire for the algorithm and the algorithm not really understanding or being told to prescribe progressive overload in interval duration or intensity. It only understands overall workout load and workout type and so it really doesn’t seem to be able to select within a type for progressive overload in any way other than increasing total load.
If you have one hour to train vo2 a very basic app could quite easily prescribe a progression of 3x3, 4x3, 3x4, 4x4 etc. A more sophisticated app might try and offer you the same intervals at a higher intensity, or with less rest, but if the library literally only has the option of 8x2min, or 8x2min with 2hrs of Z2, or 8x2min with 3hrs of Z2, and you say ‘sorry I have an hour’ all it will do is give you another random 1h vo2 workout and tell you you can’t get fitter.
Honestly I think JOIN probably works great for a load of people. Turn it on, roughly follow the workouts, most people will achieve something, because most of the time doing something is enough. It also makes consistency easy because the workouts are largely not that intimidating (compared to something xert or tr offers up). It might also work if you have 20hrs a week to train, but i wouldn’t know I’ve never had 20h a week to train and if I did I would probably want better programming.
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I went back in this thread and saw your posts, and my experiences seem to mirror my own–even down to the constant cycle of 3 days of low intensity then a higher intensity day followed by a rest day. I don’t mind an app or coaching program having a philosophy behind their training; I wish that I knew from the beginning that it was so conservative and how polarized they design their workout plans to be. It would have adjusted my expectations and left me far less frustrated.
Also I agree with what you said upthread: what’s the point of a dynamic planning app that adjusts based on your workouts if you have to constantly hide workouts from the app because it will overreact to anything other than the prescribed workout. For instance, I did a planned workout yesterday, and today I was supposed to do 3x5 30-30’s. I did a 1-mile run with my kid last night that was 11 minutes. It adjusted to give me a rest day until I moved the available time to 2 hours, and only then it was a 5x5 min tempo interval ride. I don’t get how JOIN doesn’t see this as an issue if there’s several people like us mentioning it in various places online.
Their viewpoint when you question them is always ‘JOIN attempts to keep you to a schedule to not overdo it and progress, if you want to progress more schedule more hours’. The problem is that the only metric of progression is total TSS.
It also can’t tell the difference between ‘i have an hour a day to train because I have a job and a kid’ and ‘i have an hour to train because my body can’t handle more’. It does not have any kind of sophisticated way of looking at your training history.
Which is why I said it’s generally a great app for people who don’t have a robust training history and who aren’t that fit (especially as it’s so cheap). If you’re sat listening to bent ronnestad talking about combining heat adaptation with altitude, it’s not going to give you much satisfaction (but then I also promise you, neither will many other apps).
I’d suggest anyone in this position try the AI endurance trial. If it was only a bit cheaper…
I’d also wager that if you’ve outgrown join you should know enough to schedule your own training on intervals.icu and a Garmin or auuki.com and just get on with it.
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Again, this is not just Join. I understand your complaint, but I can’t think of another app with “dynamic planning” that doesn’t do this.
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I’ve realised I probably sound a bit derogatory in that last post - I was and still am in some ways relatively content with it and was eyeballing trying to finally crack 400 for 20 using JOIN as a supplement to outdoor rides and heat training.
I also learned a lot from a period of using it. I like low cadence work. I like scheduling 3on1off.
It’s just very quickly very unsatisfying if you take training seriously and rely upon it for all of your prescription. You can be plenty fast on JOIN, but it just doesn’t deliver progressive overload sufficient to get you anywhere near to your own peak fitness.
But it is cheap. Oh lord it’s cheap.
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I’ve just started using it, out of curiosity mainly. It seems to be built on the philosophy that long term consistency is the best approach. Therefore promoting flexibility, adapting to last minute decisions to ride with a friend etc. are built in. For me, that’s what I want so I’m going to give it a go. It seems to give an appropriate mix of intensities so far. Perhaps one day there’ll be a setting where you tell it that in two months you really want to be at your peak and it produces something more rigid and harder that realistically you wouldn’t be able to do long term. That would be cool too.
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tried join for a while. Came running back to tr. Workouts were ok and its plenty adaptable.. but my main gripe with it is in TR I have a web app, pc app, mobile app and I can look far far ahead. In join there’s only the app and you can’t look past 7 days. (there’s a hours a week schedule further ahead, but not much detail). And the workout score often makes no sense to me.
Came running back straight to TR
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