Join puts more emphasis on volume. Most workouts are endurance plus “stuff”. It is a more traditional training approach, where you should try to ride a lot.
Quick-ish update on my progress with JOIN: this past weekend I had my 3rd event of 4 this year (Grateful Gravel, a new, small event out of Warren, VT that’s 64 miles with ~8k feet climbing). I’ve been doing the JOIN gravel plan, and my focus has basically been “As much volume as I can manage time-wise, with as much intensity as I can recover from” with JOIN providing guard rails and direction. Basically, I’ve been using it to ramp weekly volume and it’s helped carry me from 5-7 hours/week to 10-12. I’m probably 50/50 about doing either the planned workout or some approximation of it, or doing something else entirely. That said, I generally stick to the overall volume and hard day/easy day structure. Workout compliance hasn’t been a particular priority, but volume generally has been, with a few breaks for illness and floods.
Here are my numbers. It’s worth noting my best 5/10/20 minute power records are all from this year, while I’ve been using TrainingPeaks since 2018.
5 min power:
10 min power:
20 min power:
Xert and intervals.icu both bumped my FTP up from 300 to 318 and 319, respectively.
Feeling pretty good about the gains, if even a little surprised. 
Basically, it’s been volume, volume, volume and a break from highly prescriptive plans. My gravel events are basically the same terrain that’s right out my front door (hilly, typically 1000 ft of climbing for every 10 miles, with lots of time in threshold and VO2Max), so I’ve been getting my specificity by just going out and riding. I’m sure I’ll plateau at some point, but I feel like I’ve got plenty of room to grow in the meantime.
Trying to think of a good takeaway here, and I guess the most beneficial thing has been moving away from indoors and ERG mode and highly structured plans to a lot more volume and just going out and riding. It’s more fun, which encourages more volume, and I think a lot of the highly prescriptive workouts can artificially cap efforts when you’re capable of more (e.g. your indoor workout in ERG mode feeds you 120% of FTP when your body is ready and willing to do 150% over the same time to get you up that hill quicker).
JOIN has been great for supporting that, and I think the biggest thing for me has been that I benefit a lot more from general direction and support while going out and having fun than I do from locking myself into a rigid plan that’s less fun in the hopes of future gains. I’m feeling a lot fitter, so I’m happier and want to spend more time on the bike having fun, which helps inspire me to do more volume in that nice, happy feedback loop.
For some perspective, I’m 51, 6’1" and 208 lbs (94.5 kg). I raced mountain bikes from the late 80’s to 2000ish.
Similar experience and gains from using a coach to slowly lift volume with my big 4-6 week blocks ending up at 10-14 hours, and then back to 8-10 hours. Nothing but gains and I’m a decade older and on my 8th season of training. More volume and less structure has worked very well for me.
Has anyone completed the FTP Builder plan? I’ve started the plan a month ago as a rebuild after recovering from illness, but I feel like it always stays the same throughout the weeks: endurance, a vo2 max workout, a bit of tempo. Usually I do 5 days a week for a total of 14hrs.
I’ve improved a bit, but I feel now it’s time to move on with the intensity!
Is it ramping up in the second part?
I’ve done the FTP plan earlier this year, but to be honest I went a bit off the rails towards the end in prep for a long ride I was planning. But I can’t remember it changing much in structure.
If you’re a bit bored with it, I’d simply swap one of the workouts for something more appealing.
Does Join ever change workouts in the short term based on your training feedback? It seems that no matter what I respond, including “way easier than you predicted” or “way harder than you predicted”, nothing visible ever changes.
I recognize it’s probably changing things in the long term, but does it ever, for example, change Friday’s ride based on Tuesday’s feedback?
The reason I care is because I find myself looking at the next several days out every single day because I want to make sure I have the right rides loaded into TrainingPeaks for my upcoming workouts.
It has for me in the past, though it’s not a regular occurrence.
The only time I have noticed what it changes is when I rated a vo2max workout higher than it thought. I didn’t get another one that was as hard. But because there was only one vo2 workout per week, the change wasn’t that obvious.
Sometimes if I have a race and I’ve added it as a planned ride (intensity 10, whatever time I expect it to take) join will put a hard session the next day and only remove it after I confirm I actually did the race and it was as hard as expected. I think I’ve also seen the next days session change in other situations but I can’t remember when, maybe if I ride significantly longer than scheduled?
It’s a 12 week block right? Maybe the first month they’re testing the waters with what you can handle.
At least that’s what I’m telling myself, my first couple weeks have been moderately challenging but this week and next week definitely have some hard-
very hard workouts.
@Pbase my workout scores have been around 7-8 and I’ve seen the same thing you’re talking about. The rest of my week is mostly long rides with some tempo and short sweet spot efforts. Nothing crazy so I assume it figures I’ll be recovered by next Mondays scary Vo2max workout.
New guy here, been lurking in this thread and pulled the trigger to download JOIN and start my trial today… out of the gate, i’m running into 2 oddities… may be “operator error”
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When creating my profile, I entered my birth year, and when clicking done, it changes it to the previous year. Is this normal behavior? To circumvent that issue, i simply changed the year by one, so when it saved it was correct in my profile.
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Finding some difficulty in changing the current days “suggested” workout. I go to the “Choose Workout” option, then I choose a workout that fits my availability for the day, then click “Choose Workout” button at the bottom of the screen. When the app goes back to the chosen workout screen, a popup comes up that says “training plan updated”, but the current days suggested workout doesn’t actually get updated to the one I chose manually. Am I correct in thinking that you are unable to swap out a workout for the CURRENT day? The app will let me do it for other days.
If it matters, I am running the app on iOS.
Re 2 if you exit the app and go back into it, is the workout updated?
@jcolp nope, tried that several times, including multiple attempts to force close the app.
EDIT: I just tried to also adjust my availability on the slider to 0 and also via “no availabilty this day” button as well. Neither of which took the days suggested workout off my plan even though the app popup said that it would.
Did you choose a workout from the workout library (menu at the bottom), or did you change the day’s suggested workout (“refresh” icon in the workout picture)? I think if you simply pick a workout from the library, it just adds it to the day, because you might want to do more than one workout in a day.
@splash I tried to change it via the refresh icon…
EDIT: How do you “add” a workout. If I go to the workout tab in the app (which is where I would expect to do this from), my only option is to start a workout from that screen. Doesn’t seem to give an option to add it (to do it later potentially)…
Erm, seems you are right, I can only export workouts from there, not add to the day. I can’t remember if that was always like that?! Obviously if you export it, you can do it from the other app whenever you want.
Also, re-reading your post above, yes, I think you can change a workout on the same day. You can’t “plan a ride” on the same day either. Not sure why thats blocked.
The way to do it is to just load a workout from the library, or simply go for a ride without planning it. Then later add what you’ve actually done to the plan, and say that you’ve “skipped” the suggested workout.
Also, regarding the year of birth. Pretty sure that just worked for me. Maybe contact their support?
OK, so I ran across my first interesting anomaly (at least from my perspective) with JOIN. Monday is usually a day I can ride and JOIN had me scheduled for 5 x 1-minute all out efforts. I couldn’t ride on Monday and when I adjusted my availability JOIN gave me a bunch of 2-min VO2 intervals on Tuesday (today). That didn’t fit with what I wanted to do so I manually selected and did the 5 x 1 all out efforts. Now for tomorrow’s workout it is giving me 6 x 1-minute strength intervals. These strength sessions are designed for low cadence, but I find it odd that the day after doing 1-minute efforts JOIN is giving me more 1-minute efforts. I would have expected longer threshold or tempo.
Maybe this is a “rest week?” It is my fourth week of LSRF, so maybe three on / one off? The next workout also doesn’t have much intensity. Next week has a 1 x 30 @ threshold, though, so maybe this is a rest week. 
Maybe I’ll try for a 25-min KOM tomorrow instead.
I have the app and there is visualisatie of the periodisation and growth in Join score… hope this helps…
