Outside workout, Adaptive training, Extending cool down

How does Adaptive training deal with this? If I do a 1 hour outdoor workout as perscribed, but then carry on riding for another 30 mins? Will it sync properly and mark it compleate, or does it cause problems? Am i better off finishing the ride at 1 hour and starting a new one for the final 30 mins?
Thanks for any help.
David.

AFAIK AT ignores the warm up and cool down parts of a workout. Some of my hour long workouts turn out to be 90mins because there’s no way to get to a suitable start point within the allotted four or five minutes (I live in an area with basically no flat roads so have find suitable sections to “lap” meaning a ten or twelve minute interval in one direction followed by almost ten minutes getting back to the start.) Some workouts fit in OK and I can roll/pedal back to my start point within the allotted time.

Edit: When you get to the end of the prescribed cool down period the workout text just says to “Ride until the lap key (is pressed)”. Once you press the lap key the recording ends, i.e. it’s the same as pressing “stop”. Thus I assume that the first hour would be associated with the workout as intended and the extended cool down ignored. All my outdoor workouts have synced properly without problems.

I’ve even headed out on five hour rides at the weekend and the system has just associated whichever workout was scheduled with that ride.

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I believe you can do it as a single workout, but things can and do change. Send an email to support@trainerroad.com and ask.

I haven’t had any problems extending outside rides, you can hit lap to complete the workout and then the rest of your ride is just another lap. I’ve done like an additional hour of riding after some workouts. Someone can correct me as I’m oversimplifying, but there’s not a lot of analysis being done with outside rides and AT, I think. I think you can fail spectacularly on an outside workout and it’ll still count as a pass and adapt you positively at this time.

Based only on my experience, you have significant latitude to deviate from the prescribed power profile of an outdoor workout without impacting Adaptive Training. You can be well over or well under target power without triggering any adaptations.

Also, whether indoors or outdoors, whatever you do in the cooldown has no AT impact. I’ve done some pretty spicy stuff in my cooldowns & AT just ignores it…or at least finds no need to adapt anything. In general I add 20 to 30 minutes of medium intensity work during the cooldown of a significant portion of my workouts. AT doesn’t care one wit.

So don’t worry about it. Extend the cool down, it’s ok. Start a new ride, it’s ok. Either way it’s probably not going to matter to AT. That’s been my experience.

As far as I can tell, TR can not tell if your workout was successful at all in your workout. So you have to be honest with yourself on the survey whether or not you even did it.

I do mostly outside workouts right now, and I get credit for workouts I didn’t do just on my commute. I have to mark them as “unplanned” just to not get credit for them.

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I believe that is correct, starting when TR enabled automatic pass (July?).

However this week I’m seeing PL updates that appear to indicate that is no longer true.

Before TR threw the automatic pass switch, it did appear that TR’s algorithms were analyzing outside workouts and I received some fails when workouts were not completed to target (mostly traffic interruptions during an interval). However since then, up until this week as mentioned above, the automatic pass meant you could do anything outside and automatically receive PL credit.

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Thanks guys. Sounds like AT is a bit pointless with outdoor workouts at the moment which is a shame as I like to do most of my training outside. But I guess it’s always changing and adapting so I’ll see how it goes.

Thanks for sharing your experience.

Nothing has changed this week - the Progression Level issues you linked to were related to a separate bug our engineers are working on.

Currently, Adaptive Training automatically treats any outside ride associated with a planned workout as a success, and adjusts your Progression Levels and future workouts accordingly. Long-term, we’re working on a more complete and comprehensive system for analyzing and crediting Outside Workouts. But for now, if you successfully complete an outside workout, simply associate it with the relevant TrainerRoad workout on your calendar and Adaptive Training will incorporate it into its recommendations.

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I wouldn’t say it’s pointless. I’ve only ridden outside since March and have had several sets of adaptations. Of course would I have had any more, been more compliant, whatever if I’d done those workouts indoors? Dunno.

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My coach gives me workouts. For last 7 months all workouts have been completed outside. In TR world I can manually match and rate, then I receive PL credit (I’m not using TR plans or AT portion). You don’t have to match/rate, and if you do match you can rate it a fail (TR import automatically rates it success). Working fine from my point-of-view, and if you are honest on success/fail then AT should work fine.

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Agree it isn’t pointless and while not comprehensive, is pretty easy to adjust. For my outdoor workouts I pick the WO closest to my plan - in duration and intensity, beforehand. This also allows me to align with my PL goals - achievable, productive, stretch, etc., just as I would in an outdoor workout.

Then I follow the outdoor WO and when I return assess how I did vs. prescribed. If I did higher/lower intensity or duration for intervals and/or extended the ride I look for a different WO that more closely matches. Doesn’t take too long and gets my PLs where they need to be.

For AT you simply use TrainerRoad. And it should work fine.

With a coach I’m using TrainingPeaks as the hub/master, and running TR as slave. That means auto-syncing TrainingPeaks workout to my Garmin, and TR’s TP sync to import the workout. Then after the ride, manually match and rate. Easy to make workout changes in TrainingPeaks, during the ride it uses sensible defaults on Garmin workout screen, and after the ride you can view actual against outside workout targets.

Works well and the entire experience is better than TR. Even without a coach I would use TP, for all the reasons above (and for things like data archiving, because TR deletes data from Garmin workout files).

I wouldn’t say it is worthless at this point. I am in my “off season” mode right now so I am not really training. But once I get back into it I will continue using AT, even with mostly outdoor workouts.

Now that we’re out of beta, does anyone know if TR has found a way to accurately assess unstructured workouts (or extended outdoor workouts as the OP asked) and incorporate them into adaptations?

According to the Q&A session they just held, not yet

(although thats what they said in feb as well)

Our engineers are actively working on it, and as Nate mentioned in the podcast today we have an internal alpha of this feature currently in testing. It’s worth noting this is a completely different feature than the one mentioned in Februrary. That incarnation never lived up to our high expectations and we scrapped it for a wholly new approach that we’re really excited about, and working very, very hard to finish!

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For extended outdoor workouts, previously it was possible to change my custom workout to match the actual workout. However that feature was removed a few weeks ago :frowning_face:

What should still be working is to find the closest TR workout, add to calendar, match, and rate. Thats the workaround that support suggested to me back when I reported the custom workout regression.