Any chance you could post some pictures? It sounds interesting enough. It certainly didn’t look as effective as that when I looked at the sign up page.
(Maybe start a Join App Thread?)
The founder of this company does a podcast with a former Dutch pro on cycling and training. Podcast is called live slow ride fast, but unfortunately it is only in Dutch.
Anyway in one of the episodes he described how once a user had filled in a goal with a date 300 years in the future. That then overloaded their system because it was trying to optimize the schedule over that entire period. That’s when it clicked with me that they must be doing some fancy adaptive calculations, considering your training response and where you want to go.
Was a bit hesitant of posting a separate post on a competitive product in this forum?
Looks interesting, would you have a picture or snapshot of a plan generated by them to see in base for instance what they would recommend?
Also, to control an indoor trainer with TR and their workouts I understand you’d need to use training peaks? Would another subscription be required in this case (I have a free account with TP as I never use it really).
Alternatively, does it export workouts to the wahoo app (also barely use it 
)
Thanks
The founder also developed the training plans for the Tacx Training App. He also wrote a number of articles on training for Tacx.
Tacx/Garmin have done nothing with the training side of things since and the implementation was poor, but the plans were solid.
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There is no control of trainer from the app. You can export workout to e.g. Garmin, Wahoo and Zwift.
So I plan to let my Garmin head unit control the trainer for ERG mode or just do a free ride and use Garmin unit only to show the intervals. You do need to get your ride to Strava as that is how Join reads in the data.
Below are my next workouts. I am in base this week and program favours a polarized plan.
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i do nearly the same with Der leistungsstärkste KI Coach im Ausdauersport in einer App.
since some weeks, here you have AI too, different to join you can do running plans too, so if you want, you have Duathlon Plans in AI for ~119 EUR/USD yearly.
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There is already a thread for join here JOIN cycling app
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Thanks for the attention and related link. 
I’ve merged these into that thread for continuity.
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Live Strong Ride Fast is Laurens ten Dam’s brand for those who were curious.
I love the availability slider idea here.
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I don’t know the first thing about coding…but from a user’s perspective, it’s crazy a smaller app like this can adjust availability by day and we can’t in TR. I know alot of folks (myself included) would love that option.
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Agreed. For some reason, I had it in my head that an availability and intensity slider was coming with the new V2 release, but Nate recently said it’s not. It would solve many of the long outstanding wishlist items like Masters plans, plans with less intensity but ramped CTL, and the ability to do long workouts (on any day of the week).
I think the bottom line is that we’ve come up against the wall of a company trying to produce plans that please the time crunched young professional masses and gamification to compete with companies like Zwift, versus pleasing the more experienced and quite finicky user that, to be honest, is always going to want more specialization for their specific use case. I get it, that’s where the money is.
In the podcast way back when Nate first talked about all the things in the roadmap, he mentioned giving the user base the ability to help red light/green light upcoming features. I’m still hoping that comes to be reality.
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Wait, so you can export out of that app and into Zwift solving all the two things controlling stuff problems? And it looks like it’s just a file (.zwo)? Why can’t we do that in TR? Or is my zwift-newbness just missing something here?
In part we have this with the alternates function.
I guess the challenge for TR here is that the progression logic (ramp rate etc) is tied to the pre defined plans and not a flexible generic day by day logic. This is also eminent in plan builder putting plans together (and in some edge cases leading to suboptimal results).
So with TR you lose a bit flexibility but you are put in a solid progression and can use alternates to change duration (while keeping the progression intent like “productive” etc).
I’m pretty sure TR will evolve like this:
- offer time flexibility by weekday when setting up a plan and then automatically/internally just use the alternates function to match the user defined duration of each workout.
You’d think that would be pretty easy and quick to implement and I think that’s on the roadmap (based on some old comments of Nate). - skip the dependency on pre defined plans and use a more general, dynamic day by day progression and ramp rate approach
Does that speculation seem valid @Nate_Pearson @Jonathan ?
The problem with too much flexibility might be (take that as a personal anecdote) to prefer volume whenever possible (time slots available) over linear continuous progression.
Obviously both are important but if only one criteria can be met in some situations then which to prefer over the other…? Seems individual and not easy to pick.
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Yup, you’re right. I’m totally fine with this approach, but I could see how it’s a harder sell to someone new to the TR world.
Considering plan builder can spit out your whole plan for up to 24(?) months with a few clicks, and AI can adapt your rides as you progress, it’s counterintuitive from the end user’s perspective to manually change each workout if they only have 1 hr on Tuesday but 2 on Wednesday (for example).
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Kind of, yes. But, there isn’t always an alternate available.
Also, what if I want to ride 6 days a week, and I want a hard workout on Tuesday and Thursday, but want the rest to be Endurance work at varying lengths based on availability? We currently don’t have anything like this in PB. It’s “choose a LV plan with too much intensity and delete one of the workouts and add your own endurance work and manage your own CTL ramping”. Or, go for the Traditional Base plans that Plan Builder doesn’t recommend. That’s a hard sell to a newb when you’re telling them to buy a subscription because there is a wizard that automagically manages all this.
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In Join the progression path it puts you in is dependent on te available time you put in. And it shows you the projected level over the next 3 months. You can even add 15 min here and there and see what impact that would have on the projection.
That is where the maximization up to goal event comes into play. So not the entire available time is used if resting is more beneficial.
Does a Workout on Garmin provide a specific target? Or a range, like outdoor workouts?
Would you be willing to share a week from a “Build” phase?
I find this interesting, and there are a lot of components that I have expected to be amongst the upcoming TR features so it’s interesting to see them implemented, and implemented quite well by the looks of it.
Yes, if you use the Garmin inside, it works just like as if you were outdoors. You see the same as with a TR workout that is exported to Garmin. There is a workout screen with numerical power range, color bar showing current 10s power in relation to range and a graph with instant power/target power.
You can only see detailed workouts for the next 7 days. Next week is labeled as training, which sounds more like the Build phase. It looks like it is going to be fairly polarized, I can’t see the 2 long workouts I have available for the weekend yet, but during the week I can see 2 workouts with intervals alternating 80%/70% and 80%/65%. And there is one where the main block consists of 6x 40s all-out with 10 min recovery.
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I quit Trainerroad half a year ago because they kept postponing their V2 release (and the ability to include unstructured outdoor rides) for way too long. I loved Trainerroad and had a hard time canceling my membership, but I was so tired of spending time matching my outdoor rides and gran fondos with workouts. Been using JOIN for a few months now and like it a lot. I kept progressing the same way, and it’s taking my long and intense unstructured outdoor rides into account as well. I miss FTP auto detect though…
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