@Nate_Pearson
Thanks for the update, I love the transparency.
IMHO the traffic light feature, which keeps an eye on fatigue, will ultimately be much more useful than workout levels for many users.
Setting time limits for training days is a great feature and I am glad you will allow us to ask for longer endurance riders in the near future. That was the only thing I would have wanted.
I would advertise Master’s Plans more broadly: in the past I had to reduce intensity (without reducing volume) for one four-week segment to deal with fatigue. That worked well. Now I have to toggle the Master’s Plan slider to get the same thing. (Sort of like accessibility features will often be beneficial to people without any impairments.)
I am glad the calendar gets some attention, especially that you can browse different workout (alternates) without having to switch tabs.
Things not mentioned that I would find important
Apple Health integration is a big one. Do you realize how frustrating it is when my iPhone reminds me that I haven’t made a dent in my exercise ring even though I spent 90 minutes on the bike? Plus, think of all the relevant information that you are missing out on. I reckon that sleep data would be relevant for the traffic light feature.
Calendaring on mobile apps, functionality is, hmmm, very rudimentary. The only thing that currently works better on mobile as far as I can tell is browsing and picking alternate workouts.
Thanks for suggesting RunGap. I hadn’t heard of that app before.
Regarding the other solution, I don’t own any Garmin devices. The lack of Apple Health integration is not just about getting credit for workouts, but also about feeding back important info to TR (weight is a simple one, sleep another).
Got it, Miro post-its may not be the most solid foundation for jumping to conclusions. But this is the internet!
I totally agree about the usefulness of the Masters plans. If it’s just an option flag that’s getting set, I’d even suggest having it pop up for anyone over the age of maybe 35 or 40. I re-subscribed to check out the plans and I think I’m going to give them a try with some modifications. I’ve been mostly off the bike for a few months because life, but things are starting to settle down now and I should able to get more consistency.
Also, my five year-old walked in while I was watching the podcast and said “I want the woolly bear on that guy’s lip for my nature collection!” so the mustache is coming along nicely. As a sometimes user of TR but a regular forum type, I really do appreciate the transparency here. Being able to get a good sense of the road map and see some concrete progress is a huge help, and takes away from the feeling of everything being a black box where we have no idea what’s going on.
Will the newly rebuilt calendar allow adding annotations further back in time? I tried to add an annotation for 2017, and I’m getting the following error:
One question… when creating a plan it will ask what kind of course the race is… “big climbs, flat, rolling,” etc. But where would a “punchy” course be categorized? Thinking of a race like Sea Otter or XCO kind of races where it is tons of little punches and 1-2 minute climbs.
Are we focusing on the right thing here in calling it “Masters”? Nate, you mentioned lots of other scenarios in which this would be applicable and a sliding scale of what is masters in age terms.
Why not simply label them as More Intensity & Less Intensity? With an explanatory label. You can use a checkbox to direct to the lower intensity with age being the first and most important determinant. Espcially if, at the moment, it’s a fairly simple split between 2 and 3 intense workouts?
In the longer run, will a combination of AT and Redlight/Greenlight actively adapt the plans by adding or taking away intensity days automatically?
This page confused me. The slider suggests that it is possible to select stuff that would result in a range of volume loads, some of which are detraining, maintaining and overtraining. But the only things I can manipulate are days of the week I can train and the max mins per day and Non-masters/Masters (which directs 2/3 intensity days?). I haven’t said I must train on each day and I haven’t said I must train at the max number of minutes each day.
So if I select two days to train and 60mins each (with a history of 5x60mins), I will get a detraining or maintenance warning.
But how can I select an overtraining warning? Shouldn’t the system (with reference to my current Progression Levels) automatically set some of those workouts to 0 minutes or 30mins recovery? Therefore, limiting me to 4 workouts on the six days I have selected? This would seem like a sensible approach. The counter argument would be that I should have control over my own structure. But I can always do this with picking alternates, extending cooldowns, adding endurance and many other tools in the TR toolbox.
If I should be allowed to select overtraining options:
The earlier page selection is Max Availability which sets the overall constraints.
This page has a TR recommended starting volume & distribution.
Below, I can trigger:
Masters/Non Masters to change intensity.
Select starting volume (up to max minutes previously set) and days and move them around in the calendar.
You then tell me how this compares to your recommendation TSS/my history. I can ignore or change as appropriate. Perhaps you have some feedback on appropriate distribution of intensity days.
Clarification/labelling here - is the TSS reference the starting point or average or max?
An open question is whether the user understands what timeframe the Plan Builder is using as reference for recommended volume. I.e. how much history with TR is required to constrain/inform the Builder’s recommendations and how recent. Can I have done a structured plan 3mths/6mth/12mths ago but had a recent period of unstructured outside riding or time off? It would be important for TR to communicate the basis of how this works.
If this tool will apply to Triathlon plans as well, you’re going to need some structure to allow split day availability - Session 1 max duration. Session 2 max duration. It might make sense, but add complexity to allow this for your cycling plans too. So people can add two 60min sessions per day with Builder filling in e.g. endurance into the second session appropriately.
It continues to be confusing and hard to access my existing plan and edit it.
In >Career, I can edit the name and delete it but not access/see a summary/edit the specifics.
In >Training Plans>Plan Builder I can create a new plan but not see or access my current plan.
In >Calendar and click on the plan name at the top, I can select AI FTP/Ramp tests and delete the plan but do nothing else.
In >Calendar and click on the Phase name I can change volume, move workouts around and select max duration.
Why do I have to go to so many different places to do these?
If I make changes to volume or max duration, my phase “start” moves in the calendar. Which loses traceability of my actual original start date.
If I want to add a race beyond the initial length of the plan, I need to delete the plan and start again. I have to manually remember my actual original start date.
If I make a significant change to A events, the plan recalculates and forgets my selected workout day distribution and duration limits.
If I want to add an A race within 8/10 weeks I just cannot. I know this makes sense from the logic of periodising. But for me I have to select a Triathlon event as an A event to get a triathlon training plan with some allowance for run and swim distribution. If I selected an earlier or later cycling event as an A, I wouldn’t get any triathlon scheduling. So it would be really useful to be able to purposefully “break” the system occasionally.
To edit my plan, I have to find an A or B event in my calendar to edit or add a A/B/C event to my calendar and allow AT to adjust my plan.
What I want:
Edit my plan from anywhere it is listed - go directly into the plan editing flow.
Show my original plan volume and structure summary.
Let me go see my current plan overview page - the green bars view with phases listed out. I can’t even find this now. Can I see my training plan 'overview' page? - #9 by bobw
In short, please tidy up some or all of these niggles as they really do detract from the useability of the system. Within the constraints of coding./complexity etc I know you must have.
Then please document it. Beef up the FAQs and information on your support website for new and existing users. Some people will be using these features regularly. But some features are edited once or twice a year. We forget how it works!
(clearly TR should know what devices most users have based on the workout data they already get to know how to prioritize which devices to support, mentioning multiple platforms as if TR builds out support for only apple provided data and doesn’t take other platforms into account refactoring code later could be hard like adding running onto the platform)
While many of them claim to measure the same thing (sleep for example) I don’t think there is any universal definition of any of the data in the way biking at 150 watts for 10 minutes should be the same on any trainer so all the data needs to know what brand its coming from, and I’d argue which device the user is currently using as newer devices will probably measure differently from older models (hopefully better)
But in the end, it would be very useful if TR could factor in other data than just activities it currently knows about. A high-stress day going by my watch wouldn’t be known by TR now but if TR could know about it it could help factor into how it sets up workouts for me. I know these devices aren’t perfect but seems like the low-hanging fruit of collecting automatically data that is already there about time off the bike. Seems like for many people red light/green light without factoring in off the bike stuff might be off by a good amount. Thanks.
I agree this infor is important, but hope its not an apple only feature when other devices can feed similar data as apple can to TR.
Anything on collecting HRV during exercise? (i.e. doing alpha1 calculations in the background)
BTW I liked the rest of the presentation too with the direction you’re going, but easier to pick on the parts I feel are missing :-p
Yes, but supporting the preferred platform solution is important, especially since the Apple Watch is by far the most popular smartwatch. Everything else syncs to it, and e. g. TR could get info on my weight automatically.
That said, I’m always super_curious about the data driving some of these changes. I understand that’s the ‘secret sauce’ but I hope you could reveal a little more.
More specifically, I’m curious about the change to 3:1 plans vs 5:1. Personally, I was struggling with 5:1 so it makes sense but I’m curious about the larger picture.
This one is easy, TR was the exception as most cycling plans and coaches schedule 3:1. Though I’ve had success at multiple years doing HV 5:1 Base, I will admit it wasn’t ideal.
Preferred platform? I don’t think Apple platform is that popular in the cycling community where rushing to support that and not factoring in other platforms would be worth it if it made future support for them much harder. I also don’t think making the platform generic would be that huge.
If Android has something similar to Apple Health, TR should support also as well. If it doesn’t that’s on Google. (I am sure there is something similar, I just have no experience with Android. All I have ever used was iOS and Windows Phone 7.)
Device vendor specific apps are not a (good) replacement: my Withings scale will never directly integrate with TR. Garmin’s software platform may be really great, but I am not going to replace my Wahoo headunit with a Garmin for that. Today’s solution is like writing app-specific drivers as opposed to OS-specific drivers. Platform-specific solutions are clearly the better path. Yes, that means that sometimes some platforms which lack features will have less functionality. But the other path is to code for the lowest common denominator and not implement important features.
Supporting platform-specific features does not have to be at the expense of other platforms, it is not a zero sum game.
TR’s reluctance to adopt platform standards has been detrimental to athletes and its users. TR lacks sleep data and HR variability data from its users to name one thing.
I don’t like race since it’s a repeating category. How many athletes have a race that always repeats on a certain day? Even if you did, I bet it would just be for a shorter time period.
Can ya’ll check the options you think you’d choose for outside rides? Choose “Other”, if you’d like us to add an “other” choice that allows you to type it in yourself.
It would be possible. I think the extra work isn’t worth the squeeze right now. You could just type in the distance and click an image of the hills.
That’s like a couple days work, vs the many weeks (months) of work of doing it from the file. Plus I think a lot of people don’t have files for the races they are going to do.
Yes, I just told the team that I want a simple activity page with some of the high level stats. Even if it’s just a list of things like duration and time.
Then we can auto match planned activities. This would also allow athletes to estimate their own TSS, but we’d do our own first.
Our team is going to work on this after we get the stress in from other activities for redlight greenlight. We’re going to put in stuff like sleep and HRV into our RLGL ML model.
Totally agree. It’s a big job, I’m not sure where it’s scheduled at the moment.
