I am hoping someone from trainer road can help me out with this question. Recently I have started doing some strength training using a 36lb kettlebell. Two times per week I am doing 3 sets of 10 reps of a couple lower body exercises (reverse lunge, sumo squat), kettlebell swings, a few upper body exercises (push ups, rows), and some core. Trainer road instructions say to enter strength training in sets that are “taken to failure.” I am not really taking any of my sets to failure at this time as I haven’t strength trained in years except maybe the pushups because my upper body is pretty weak. My question is, how do I record this in trainer road and should I be doing so at all if I am not taking all of my sets to failure. Thanks for the help!
Don’t record them if you’re not taking your sets to failure (which nobody is doing these days). Otherwise you will be constantly triggering nonsense yellow and red days.
Even if you record it, TR doesn’t always adapt your workouts. I’ve tested it out by putting 100 sets of lower body workout and future workouts stayed the same.
I would suggest self coaching if you are strength training and riding. Adjust the TR workouts as needed based on how you feel before the ride.
I find the way TR has implemented recording strangth training quite baffling, and would like to see the science behind this approach for endurance athletes. They’ve even had Derek from Dialed Health on the podcast a couple of times who advocates an entirely different approach to strength training whilst training on the bike.
If you are following a TR plan as well as strength training a couple of times a week, I’d keep an eye out for excessive fatigue, signs are elevated resting heart rate, muscle soreness and lack of motivation. If you suffer from any of the above, you would probably be wise to adjust down the intensity of your workouts, so maybe swap a threshold for sweetspot or tempo, a sweetspot for endurance for example. If you are having to do this on a regular basis, it could well be a sign you are over reaching a little.
If possible schedule your strength training on your interval days, so your recovery days are actually recovery. It would be worthwhile listening to the podcasts with Derek on them, even if you don’t follow one of his plans (I’m not sure where he is anymore) the general advice is excellent.
One last thing, I use the Hevy app for tracking my strength workouts, it’s great at logging actual volume and weight, if I start to feel like I’m carrying too much fatigue, I keep two strength sessions a week, but reduce the load to about 60%, having a proper record of what weight I’ve been lifting recently makes that easier to understand than sets to failure.
If you’re not taking sets to failure or pushing yourself hard enough to have a fair bit of soreness or fatigue, you don’t need to share those sessions with TR.
Maybe I can help clear things up. Let me know what you’re baffled by. 
If I do a strength workout, quite often I’m tired or even a bit sore afterwards, yet I rarely go to failure. My difficulty with the TR system, is that I’m not certain whether or not I should be entering my sets. The work I do is obviously having an effect on my fatigue and you’d assume therefore my ability to train on the bike (this is very real, as I found out recently struggling round an hilly audax with romanian deadlifts in the legs 
) nearly everything I’ve listened to and read about strength work for endurance athletes, is that there is no need to go to failure, particularly during build and peak phases.
FWIW, I have been logging my strength in TR, but only putting in the last couple of sets that felt hard, but again I didn’t go to failure, but I’m sure the previous sets I did, have had some impact on fatugue surely?
I agree that our recommendations for logging sets could use some work. 
I think that if you’re feeling fatigued from your gym work, then send it to TR.
I’ve personally never done leg work to failure, but what I’ve done has been hard and fatiguing..
Since there is such a wide variety of what people are logging as “strength work,” it’s tough to find a way to make blanket statements to help our athletes know what’s going to help TR with their training and what’s going to hinder it.
Many of our athletes are doing work in the gym that likely doesn’t negatively affect their performance in TR, so those athletes don’t need to send us that data. At the moment, we’re looking at all strength work the same, so it’s hard to draw a line as to what “counts” as strength work and what doesn’t. Early on, we made the call to say sets taken to failure are what we’d log, but I think you’re right that most endurance athletes aren’t doing sets to failure.
Let me know if you have any suggestions!! We’re always looking for feedback!
I’d like the ability to log my actual sets , reps and weights. I get that there’s a gazillion different exercises out there, but you could slim that down to more basic options, such as squat, deadlift, lunge, overhead press etc, you don’t really need to know the exact variation, but I find it motivating to be able to see that I’m improving over time, and I also need help remembering week to week what weight I’m at for a given exercise.
At the moment I use the Hevy app for logging my strength workouts, but I’d absolutely love to be able to have my cycling and strength all in one place rather than switching between the two. On the subject of how to best input the effect strength work has on ourselves with regards to our cycling training, maybe adding an RPE score for our strength workouts would help the AI better understand (and also help those of us for whom strength is an additional activity rather than a main interest to better understand how to log it) the intensity of and the fatigue cost of our strength training.
I get that this is quite an individual thing, everyone responds differently and there’s so much contradictory advice out there, which does make it quite difficult for a one size fits all approach, but anyone who uses TR is already familiar with adding an RPE rating to their cycling workouts, so it shouldn’t be too difficult for people to get their heads around doing it for strength work.
Good suggestions!
I’ve just shared this with the team.
I do 2 x “strength” workouts a week but in reality they are just some stretches and bodyweight exercises so nothing significant.
However, I like the accountability of having sessions in the TR calendar (if its scheduled in on a Thursday morning I’m more likely to get it done then simply making a mental note). For this reason, I just add-in the sessions as an hour each but log them as “0” reps and “0” sets.
This also has the advantage that the sessions count towards the TR summary of how many hours a week I have “trained”. I appreciate that in the eyes of TR the 2 x sessions I record as above are not “training” but for me personally I am often just looking to hit a target of 10 hours a week doing something productive and in my mind the stretching/bodyweight sessions count towards the weekly total in this context.
Anyway, unless I’m mistaken I’ve noticed that the sessions still sometimes trigger a yellow light when entered as “0” reps and sets so my question is, am I somehow adversely affecting the TR AI calculations even when logging the sessions with nil values in this way?
I just did a test on my strength training from yesterday quicky in basement 35min… had a 9 sets upper and 2 sets lower set. Changed TSS from 10 to 55… nothing updated in my plan (not even a sparkle). Then changed Sets to 11upper and 12lower and todays workout updated to be a yellow day. So Definity seems set dependent . Who knows lol
Also really just like an FTP test, it’s about using a consistent method , logging strength work or running TSS is similar… just do it consistently so that hypothetically TR knows you do lower body 6 sets per workout, twice a week… should then adjust for that baseline load eventually (or at least in future updates…lol). So for me if I do a 3x sets of planks… they are hard and to near failure… so I put 3x for core. Would do the same for any other type of exercise. if I did a warmup set for say leg press, i wouldn’t log that. And DerekT is just one strength coach… just like doctors, teachers, coaches, experts… they all have their opinions and methods.