Red Light Green Light is now available to all TrainerRoad athletes! 🎉 🎉 🎉 🎉 🎉 🎉

[ming]

We’re so excited to release Red Light Green Light to all TrainerRoad athletes today! It’s been in Early Access for about a month, and athletes all over the world have been loving it. And I want to give a big thank you to all of our Early Access athletes for their feedback.

Let’s talk about Red Light Green Light and the improvements we’ve made since Early Access.

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What Is Red Light Green Light?

Red Light Green Light (or RLGL) is the next generation of fatigue management designed to prevent you from burning out. It predicts fatigue before it happens based on your athletic potential, knows how much recovery you need, and offers smart adjustments to your training to keep you on track.

Another impactful benefit of Red Light Green Light is that it considers all of your training, inside or outside. So you can do all of your riding outside and still get training recommendations based on your performance.

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How Does It Work?

Keep training as you normally do – inside and outside. You’ll notice that some days on your TrainerRoad Calendar take on a new color: yellow or red (days with no color are “green”). These yellow and red days will show up in response to your training, cycling and running. And if you scroll back in your Calendar, you’ll see all the times you’ve been yellow or red.

Yellow days show on your Calendar when your training is moving into the “potentially unproductive” zone. That’s not necessarily a bad thing! A training plan could bring you into the yellow. That said, your training becomes unproductive when you consistently do hard workouts on yellow days.

TrainerRoad workouts (indoors, outdoors) and runs and swims associated with TR triathlon plans will adapt to Endurance/Recovery workouts on yellow days.

Red days show on your Calendar when you’ve gone really deep. At this point, more training stress isn’t going to be beneficial–it may set you back. When you’ve gone into the red, it’s time to rest.

TrainerRoad workouts (indoors, outdoors) and runs and swims associated with TR triathlon plans will adapt to Rest Days on red days.

Here’s what RLGL looks like in action:

• Follow your training plan – you could see a yellow day. Remember, that’s not a bad thing as long as you’re resting or doing an easy ride that day. Interval workouts will adapt to endurance workouts.
• Say you want to replace a TrainerRoad ride with that group ride. Go for it! All of your training is taken into account.
• That group ride was a big effort and now you need to rest to get your training back on track. Your prescribed workout adapts to a Rest Day (you’ve earned it).

And even if you’re not following a training plan, RLGL has your back to keep your training productive:

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What’s New?

Since we put RLGL in Early Access, we’ve made a lot of updates:

1. We introduced the Training Approach slider. This lives in the Adaptive Training settings. Adjusting this slider will adjust how sensitive RLGL is. A conservative approach prioritizes recovery. An aggressive approach prioritizes intensity and is only recommended for athletes who have extensive experience with training, nutrition, and restorative sleep.

2. TrainNow supports Red Light Green Light, offering workouts based on your RLGL status and even offering Rest Days when needed!

3. Workouts that aren’t associated with TrainerRoad training plans will now adapt based on your RLGL status. If you have ad-hoc workouts scheduled on your Calendar, we’ll suggest adaptations to keep your training on track.

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Again, we’re so excited to release Red Light Green Light to all of our athletes! Our team worked so hard to get all of these updates bundled into this release – I can’t express my gratitude and pride in the team enough. We know these updates will help make you faster, and we hope you like them.

If you’ve got questions or feedback or find any bugs, please discuss them here or reach out to me. And as always, you can email support@trainerroad.com!

And here’s our Help Center article on Red Light Green Light, complete with updated FAQs: https://support.trainerroad.com/hc/en-us/articles/20753792083995

And finally, if you’re reading this and have never tried TrainerRoad, or it’s been a while since you last tried it, go sign up so you can see how Red Light Green Light would have improved your training in the past. You’ll sync your ride history when signing up and be able to look back at your training calendar and see when you would have gotten Yellow Days and Red Days. If you don’t agree with it, we’ll give you your money back.

Thanks very much!

[JoeX]

Well done, it’s a great feature!

[Jolyzara]

I wonder if Dylan Johnson will post a follow up to his favorite… and now outdated video?

[webdev511]

He could make it a click bait title again even if it’s notice that things are now different?

[TheHunted]

Totally, I wonder how he feels now that every criticism he had has since been addressed, I bet he wishes he had waited 3 years before bringing out that video

[cfellowes]

I love that you guys continue to develop TR.
Slightly perplexed as basically, this traffic light thing thinks that every outside ride must be followed by an easy ride / recovery day.
Sadly, I don’t think I’ll be paying much attention to this particular addition.

[hubcyclist]

this is bit perplexing indeed, i don’t think it’s because of the outside ride but length and tss. I don’t have TR any longer but over the past year I would do weekends of 2x3hr, 2x3,5hr and even 2x4hr so I’d be curious what it would have said about that. I think I used those back to back endurance days to get some really solid endurance volume. While I can see this meeting its intended purpose of preventing some overtraining, but I do wonder how much it’ll be holding some people back from their potential if this feature is constantly holding people back from increasing volume in a smart way

[Back2Basics]

I suspect it’s taking the TSS into account a lot here. Your training plan appears to have you are a planned TSS of 197 for w/c 4th March. On top of this you’ve also done one 216TSS ride and another 153TSS ride - so you’re first ride was 110% of your planned TSS and by the end of the week you had done 287% of your planned TSS.

I’m sure what you are doing here is similar to a lot of users, me included, but it is just a guide and from what I can see this guide appears to have worked for you rather well. After those longer (quite considerably longer than your structured workouts) outside rides, it is suggesting you might want to rest. You’ve not rested but done some fairly gentle endurance rides, and that has balanced things out for you. I suspect that if the endurance ride on 28th Feb had also been Neige, that 29th Feb wouldn’t have been yellow (Echo-5 is nearly double the TSS of Neige).

For me, this is exactly what I would what from this feature and if it is suggesting potential changes to my structured workouts all the better. That doesn’t mean I have to listen to those suggestions every time, but chances are the majority would be a good call.

[AldridgePrior]

@cfellowes

thinks that every outside ride must be followed by an easy ride / recovery day.

ㅤ
Your main schedule (3 instances, assuming the 25th also has a Threshold w/o) seems to be:

D1: Threshold w/oㅤ|ㅤD2: VO2max w/oㅤ|ㅤD3: ~3hr Outside Ride

…which RLGL responds to by recommending that your 4th day in that sequence is either rest or easy endurance, depending on the duration/intensity of those preceding 3 days.

It doesn’t appear to be the dumbest advice ever given!

You seem quite time-constrained on your indoor w/o days but then have plenty of time on the ride days. Is there any flexibility to do more (duration) on the indoor w/o days?

If it was me I’d reorganise things a bit, perhaps like this:

• combine those 2 VO2max w/o’s into a single one, so with the Threshold w/o I’d have two (longer) intensity w/o’s scheduled per week
• do the 1-2 longer outside rides at a level that’d let me still hit those two intensity days hard
• with the balance as rest days / indoor endurance, adjusting as necessary to ensure good recovery prior to the hard w/o’s.

Different ways to skin that cat obvs.

[BrianSpang]

I propose that when we take issue with RLGL’s assignment of yellow/red days we provide the forum some much needed context.

TR does not show CTL. But it does show 6 week average TSS. You can see this by going to Calendar and hovering over the vertical bar representing the last completed week of training. It will display the following:

Posting this image, or at least informing readers of your 6 week avg TSS, will help them make a somewhat informed judgment about the propriety of the red/yellow day designations. Without context, most criticisms of the RLGL red/yellow assignments are IMO pointless.

[huges84]

[cfellowes]

@AldridgePrior

You seem quite time-constrained on your indoor w/o days but then have plenty of time on the ride days. Is there any flexibility to do more (duration) on the indoor w/o days?

Actually, the screenshot was from rides prior to the ‘red light’ being added to my rides, but I probably wouldn’t have taken much notice. In terms of the rides that week, it was the last week of a 4 month plan and for some reason, TR dialled up the intensity but shortened that week’s rides to 30/45 mins.
TSS around those weeks was 435, 462, 511, 566, so a graduation that I was comfortable with.

I’m a big supporter of TR and not trying to dismiss benefits, but am trying to get my head around how I can use it together with how I’m actually going to ride (i.e. follow a TR programme and still enjoy riding outdoors).

[Macy]

That’s normal in the taper weeks of a plan though? Intensity at a lower volume?

[mcneese.chad]

Yeah, sure looks like a taper to me (not a rest week). But as ever, when in doubt an email to TR support may be worth it since we are guessing while they have all the stuff behind the scenes that we lack on the forum.

[Tubelesssealant123]

My feedback

Kind of weird to not see any green when the feature is called RLGL. I know this is addressed in the FAQ. Maybe have green days on the calendar be outlined in green?

The caution icon and no-go symbol should have a small pop up that tells you what they mean when you hover over them.

RLGL sounds weird. Fatigue Management is my throw in name suggestion.

[ChucklesKY]

This is a great feature. Love it. I think that RLGL sounds awkward and strange. I do like “Fatigue Management” as mentioned. Another option could be “Training Regulation”.

[WindWarrior]

training advisor or something playing off the word advisor sounds even better to me.

[svens]

@cfellowes

Slightly perplexed as basically, this traffic light thing thinks that every outside ride must be followed by an easy ride / recovery day.

@hubcyclist

I think I used those back to back endurance days to get some really solid endurance volume. While I can see this meeting its intended purpose of preventing some overtraining, but I do wonder how much it’ll be holding some people back from their potential if this feature is constantly holding people back from increasing volume in a smart way

No, it does not hold back. Z2 is specific to my goals and I do it a lot. Looking back last summer weekends, RLGL initially turned Monday following 7h+7h weekend to red, but next weekend, 4h+8h turned following Monday to yellow. I.e. once your fitness is at right level, RLGL will quiet down.

[JoeX]

Might be worth linking to the early access thread where most of these points have already been discussed and resolved