It’s interesting to know that my affinity to Join, it’s mostly due to confirmation bias, their program has a lot of the elements I like:
To improve but not dealbreakers:
@oldandfast this is great. I’d also like them to show what each notional plan looks like, even knowing they will get adapted. I think that would go a long way in helping choose the right plan.
I’m going to have to self impose a couple of recovery days. I’ve known it was coming, but the LSRF plan does a great job of encouraging me to keep my hours (and TSS) up while never bringing in any lower volume weeks. I have felt that familiar tiredness and difficult sleep creeping in, but thought I could get through this week.
Today I suffered! I slept like crap last night, and woke up wayyy too early. Had 3 hours on the schedule, but only 40 mins of it was supposed to be SS/Tempo, with all the rest Z2. Man, between heat and fatigue, I could not even hold Z2 without focus! After the hard work section, I had 60 mins of Z2 left. I decided to take a coffee stop and load up on sugar and caffeine, but even that couldn’t save me. The last hour of Z2 became Z1 and the heat kicked my butt.
Posting for accountability, but also as a reminder to others that sometimes you need to listen to your body and back off. When it comes to training, be the tortoise, not the hare!
@Pbase thanks for the reminder! Looks like you had a challenging ride and some adverse weather. Good job making it home!!
I pushed the hours up this week and am starting to get that tired leg feeling. A while ago I made Sundays one of my rest days and, since detonating seven weeks ago, have maintained a second day off each week, too. Hoping for a long day tomorrow and another solid week, then some lower volume the week after to recover. 
Difficulty sleeping and crankiness are the tell tale signs for me. After just 2 workouts on FTP builder plan I’ve already ditched it and changed to single day gran fondo in June 24.
New plan looks to be exacty what I am looking for to combine with gym. One hard workout with the remaining 4 on the easy/moderate side.
Wow, for a much smaller company compared to TR, it’s awesome to see they already have a solution for “unstructured” rides. Thanks for the heads up!
It’s not really much more than they did before, they already looked at those numbers to update the training plan, but now they show them to you too.
What I find great is that they seem to have listened to the feedback - when they rolled out the “workout score”, a lot of people said it would be good to see how the individual components scored, so they added that. And now they seem to have done the same for the unstructured rides.
Regarding the ramp test FTP - I know you took the TR ramp test, but I was just looking at the Join ramp test protocol, and noticed that they do 25W steps and tell you to set your FTP to 250W before the test. That makes each step 10% of FTP, while TR take 11% of your actual current FTP. Both then say they calculate FTP as 75% of your last minute power. Not quite sure why, but maybe the assumption of a different step size threw the Join calculation off?
I’m trying out Join and keeping TR. To be clear, this update doesn’t do anything new that TR doesn’t already do. You can analyze an unstructured ride in TR to look at time in zone, IF, TSS etc. What JOIN has been able to do for a while is adapt your plan based on unstructured rides. But that’s not new to this release.
My guess is the TR could release something similar and just make rides harder or easier based on your unstructured rides. But seems like they are trying to make all this work within the framework of Progression Levels and having a very well tested and data based approach to changes. I do like the fact that Join makes rides harder or easier based on unstructured outside rides. But I don’t know how much better it is than just manually adjusting a TR ride to be more “achievable” or more “productive” or “stretch.”
Join also seems to change the energy zone for the workout and duration or even schedules extra recovery days
Even though it came off that way, I can’t say Join is way better than TR. I do agree with what you mean by evaluating rides. I just think that Join has been more focused on fully adaptable plans that help keep people consistent. TR has progressive levels which help users with consistency also, but in a more static way.
They both have their own pros and cons IMO.
Lately I’ve been enjoying using join. I don’t feel like I’m stuck doing over unders every Saturday for 4 months. I used to follow LV SSB, LV sustained power build plus endurance and if I did a group ride I would skip the first interval of the week. I could go on and on with modifications I’d have to make. I have to do less thinking with join, so far, I’m still fairly new to using it.
I don’t want to take shots at TR but if TR and Join combined I think it would be the best training app out there.
TR’s: Aiftp, workout player, calendar, ftp tests.
JOIN’s flexibility, showing events to train for and no complex warmups (although could be useful for learning a workout) and a bit of surprise for the next workouts
I’ll add that I love that Join accommodates people looking for high volume but low intensity far better.
It does it both ways, if you scale down availability it increases intensity but also nudges you to train more (and also warns when training too much)
JOIN thinks I’m over doing it and need a rest day. 1 x 30 @ threshold was on the calendar tomorrow until JOIN updated the plan after today’s ride. No complaints from me!!
I’ve been in and out of this state this year.
I’ve managed to avoid it for the most part but last weeks Vo2max followed by threshold pushed me over the edge. Tried to be a decent person and contain the crankiness until it passed, which it has now.
One week of solid Z2 has me back on track.
Really liking what I am seeing from JOIN so taking the plunge and committing to a plan. The daily feedback on eFTP and join levels can be depressing this time of year at seasons end but when looking at the forecasted levels makes it palatable.
Tried all the training platforms and JOIN suits me best as someone with 8 - 10 hours available and prefers outdoors when weather permits.
Where can you see the forecasted levels?
If you select “Your plan” from the main screen then select the filter “Levels”. I am currently 33.5 and dropping. The 300 plan will get me to 36 for the event apparently.
