New Feature - TrainNow

It appears they have chosen not to include tempo rides in Endurance TrainNow recommendations.

Hopefully it will be explained why, as often it is not an option to ride Endurance longer for progression, so the increased intensity of a Tempo would be a good option. But I’m not a coach, so maybe it isn’t a good idea!

Faced with a similar scenario as you today, I just ignored TrainNow and chose a tempo workout for 1’45"

Seems to me there is gap in the recommendations if it jumps from Endurance to sweet spot / threshold. (Climbing)

What does one make of this? It’s got me stuffed.

Another suggested set is: Colosseum-2, Jacks and Ansel Adams (all 60 minute jobbys).
It’s the end of a recovery week for me. I’m feeling ready to hit SPB next week so I’m pretty sure TR TN is in agreement?

The bit I don’t understand is the easy looking 60 minute endurance ride. The others look brutal and it seems a little odd that if I choose to hit an endurance ride it’ll push me in this direction.

Would I be better served by trying to stretch the suggested Endurance WO duration if at all possible? If so, it would be helpful to have some sort of guidance from the UI. :+1:

I’m looking forward to playing around with the full feature roll-out when ready. TN is a great tease so far.
Love your work.

1 Like

It’s a great feature but even though my plan builder /training plan scheduled me a workout for today it still says “nothing scheduled for today” in the train now section?

@Nate_Pearson, @SeanHurley Would there be any appetite at TR to add a fourth option to the TrainNow list of suggested workouts? At the moment, the suggested workouts consist of Endurance, Climbing and Attacking. There is a bit of an intensity gap between the Endurance and Climbing suggested workouts. How about a suggested tempo / sweet spot workout called something like Club Run?

3 Likes

I’m “sticking to the plan” so I haven’t used TN yet, but playing around with it I have been really surprised by the gap between the endurance and climbing suggestions. I totally get the desire to keep the options as minimal and simple to use as possible, but I was epecting to see something in between easy all day endurance to full balls out threshold!

Today’s 60 min suggestions for example:

Endurance - Bays 58 TSS 0.76 IF
Climbing - Hilgard 90 TSS & 0.95IF

The Attacking option is Grassy Ridge -2, only 59 TSS and 0.77 IF

Maybe it will start to make sense when the ML / AI rolls into town.

2 Likes

That is an interesting selection! Trying to reverse engineer from what’s been said, I’d guess your plan has a lot of endurance and/or sweetspot, and you’ve done well at those efforts, perhaps building up to lots of threshold. Guess number 2: either your plan has little VO2max, or you haven’t completed those workouts for one reason or another, or done one recently.

Are you a triathelete or time-triallist?

Just guessing!! I’m really interested to see what I get pegged at. My TrainNow workouts are all pretty similar to the ones on my current (SPBLV) one, although I’ve been doing some extra longer Z2 workouts, and it’s now recommending harder Z2 workouts e.g. Polar Bear.

Good guess - rolling road race and just finished week 5 SSB 1 MV so no structured VO2+ for a while … but, I have been doing the weekly ZRL race with one of the TR teams with plenty of VO2+ so as expected those won’t have been picked up as they’re not workouts.

hi,
in the Train now feature, I don’t get the “productive”, “achievable” thing I heard about.
Is it because I didn’t complete enough workouts recently ?
If not is there a know reason for it to not show ?
thx

https://i.imgur.com/P4YRW2j.jpg

You won’t see those classifications until you have AT. If you look in the main Train Now thread, you’ll see screenshots from other people without those labels.

2 Likes

Mine all say “Unachievable”.

:weary:

1 Like

@mcneese.chad

1 Like

A couple of screenshots for anyone interested in what happens as the system adjusts to a solid ramp test result:
-TN immediately afterwards.


Compared to yesterday’s suggestions these were next level terrifying.
-Half an hour (or so) later.

Back to the reality of being an average cyclist.

Wow!

2 Likes

That’s interesting! Part of the puzzle that’s missing for me is seeing what TR thinks the relative difficulty of each of the suggested workouts present…and what ‘level’ TR supposes that you are at in the different ‘zones’. And I’m not sure that TrainNow detached from Adapative Training fully considers those things or not (even though such information has probably been explicitly mentioned in this thread!)

I know that today I checked the TrainNow suggested rides…then uploaded two rides I did this weekend (~7 hours of riding)…then checked the TrainNow suggested rides again…they were the same. Based on the parts of this thread I HAVE read, that is consistent with what TR says TrainNow currently does.

It’s an interesting feature. It is still a useful feature. But it has a long way to go.

2 Likes

No doubt about it. I’m only looking at it for a bit of fun.
My workouts are still following the plan generally.
Were your 7 hours of rides TR rides? If not, I don’t think they’re taking that into account yet.
I know I got SFA change in suggestions after riding around outdoors on the weekend. My take was that the workouts were changing ever so slightly due to perceived “freshness” within the TR platform. I’d taken a few days away from the trainer and it looked to me like the workouts were aiming to push my fresh legs somewhat.

1 Like

Yes, I think you have it exactly. Base on the excellent advice TR have provided on this thread TrainNow doesn’t (YET!) consider outdoor rides. So my little experiment only serves to confirm their excellent commentary.

I guess I’m thinking the average TR user probable does some outdoor riding every week. So TrainNow shows a lot of promise but it’s got a ways to go.

It’s still a novel feature, though. I’ll probably be checking it every time the TR programs is launched now.

1 Like

I think it’ll still be a bit of a novel feature into the near future. It’s always going to be a suggestion and will rely heavily on common sense.

TR can’t fault you for checking the TN suggested WOs everytime you launch. They asked for it.

That is what I heard, too. But I also heard that they are intending to analyse and take into consideration workouts that are done outside BEFORE they analyse and take into consideration outside rides that are not TR outside workouts.

Part of the issue with classifying, analysing and taking into consideration outside rides is that a person or a machine [“the intelligence”]has to identify the purpose of the ride – is it just an endurance ride with perhaps a few hills thrown in? Or is it intervals as the main purpose surrounded by Z2? That’s the kind of problem that the intelligence has to resolve.

What I have started doing since the AT podcast is putting a TR workout onto my calendar when I do an outside ride. Eg, if it is simply a ride with a group of friends, nothing too hard, no testosterone-fuelled sprints, then I put a Z2 ride of an appropriate duration from the workouts onto the calendar. The when I have done the actual ride and it appears on the calendar, I associate it with the TR outside workout. This gives the outside ride a purpose that the intelligence does not have to discern. And the ride is likely be be taken account of sooner in the rollout of AT features.

That might help the ML software to learn what we are up to faster?

4 Likes

Thought about doing something similar but then worried that if I didn’t comply to the workout very well then that might actually work against me. E.g. let’s say I’m going for a 90 minute Z2 cruise with a friend, I stick Townsend on the calendar but end up pushing 10-20W less than the target, not because I can’t but because that’s the pace he wants to go - does that mean TR marks my endurance rating down a bit because it thinks I “failed”, and then TN will only offer me really entry level Z2 rides next time around? Guess we won’t really know until getting on the beta or AT going live and being able to actually see both our ratings in each of the 7 power zones and the workout categorisation that was talked about.

Do think TN will be a great feature for me personally, as I tend to do my own plans and at the moment if I want progression in a certain type of workout (SS, VO2, etc) then I usually do so by picking the relevant workouts out of a TR plan. The way I’m hoping TN will work is: instead of picking workouts in advance I just schedule particular days of the week as being for a particular type of workout e.g. at the moment Thursday is my VO2 day. When Thursday rolls around I can simply see what TN has to offer for the amount of time I have available (which varies a bit week to week). And then pick a workout depending on how I’m feeling. E.g. some days you just wake up feeling great and that might be the time to push things and try a break through workout. Other days you feel tired and heavy legged and can be dreading a tough session, so being able to pick a workout that’s at your current level rather than stretching you might be perfect. Fingers crossed…

2 Likes

This is exactly why they include the question about how you felt during the workout. You can tell the ML that it felt easy. I assume they would do the same thing for outdoors workouts and rides. Similar to how they ask for RPE for outside rides without a power meter to estimate TSS. And they could also tell from HRTSS that you weren’t working very hard.

2 Likes

Climbing is sweet spot or threshold.

So we’re just missing Tempo in here. We could add tempo under endurance, but as of now we’ve left it out.

3 Likes