First of all, I am excited to see how the update will make me faster this year so I’m looking forward to it. I’m a long-time TrainerRoad user, and seen a lot of progression since subscribing a few years ago, but I have two main queries that are bugging me.
Why does TrainerRoad AI give me so many red days so far in advance; and
I want to increase my volume steadily, but I keep getting red days that effectively reduce the volume from five rides down to three. How do I resolve this?
Here is a screenshot of my upcoming schedule w/c 9 February. I have chosen a specific base block (General Base – High Volume II), rather than a customised plan, which should give me six rides per week.
But here, it gives me effectively three.
My TSS since coming back has been: 220 / 287 and 143 / 242 (pending a Threshold workout tomorrow). After that it is expected to rise to 316. I have done a run and some gym sessions here and there but I would not expect it to give me three red days three weeks out from the start of phase two of my base training.
What’s going on here?
Increasing volume
To my other point, I want to eventually get to 8-9 hours per week on the bike. I’ve been a long-time listener of the podcast, and while I have heard about the mid volume plan being effective for most cyclists compared to high volume plans, I still want to give the high volume plan a go.
Yet because of these red days, my hours per week are effectively being capped. For example, I can’t go out on that long Z2 ride on Sundays because it recommends a rest day instead. But I would end up doing three rides per week at 5 hours per week, compared to four or five rides per week at maybe 8-9 hours per week.
How do I increase my volume while adhering to the fatigue detection? Or do I need to turn it off?
Curious to see a screenshot showing more of your calendar, including the TSS chart at the top. Only reason I could see a 113 TSS ride triggering a red day is that your TSS is typically lower than this.
What’s your training approach set to? Unless you were doing massive sweet spot workouts before January, this seems like a fast ramp in intensity. My guess is this is way more than you’ve been doing recently and that’s why it’s showing red days.
The 90 minute sweet spot is 120 tss which is about half of what you’ve been averaging per week. If you complete the three workouts on your calendar it’s 360 which is significantly more than you’ve been averaging.
You may be better served by using the plan builder and doing a 4 day plan with dynamic endurance on one of the days. It will still take a while to build you up.
It’s set to Balanced but I feel like I could easily do a little more than this. Even with a medium volume block, I’m still given red days on Sundays when I could do an easy Z2 ride?
I think it’s just a case of the model trying to make judgments based on what it’s seen you do recently, so do those endurance days anyway so TR can learn from that. There’s limitations to this system, it can’t have a conversation with you so you’ll just have to show that you can do more. That communication will happen via the RPE surveys after the fact.
Or follow its advice. It is still letting them ramp pretty aggressively. He is trying to do three plus weeks of historic TSS in one week. It’s holding him back to about a 60% increase in training load.
