Can you post your calendar for us to take a look at?
1 Like
For triathletes, all of your bike rides and runs will have an impact on RLGL. Weāre actively working on swimming implementation at this time.
Yellow and red days arenāt necessarily bad ā you can train through them, but itās important to remember that theyāre acting as warning signs for when your training stress is ramping up too quickly.
The sweet spot workout, for example, isnāt necessarily what triggered a red day on your TR Calendar. To me, it looks like that red day was most likely caused because you trained 7 days in a row (including through several yellow days), and all of that training stress adds up. RLGL recognizes this and gives you a warning to let you know that you might be ramping things up too quickly. Itās also worth remembering that you got back into your current plan in April after a pretty long break, so compared to what you were doing before your current plan, your volume and training stress is quite high ā especially considering the big leap in running volume.
Again, you can train through yellow/red days, but itās important to ask yourself if you should. I wanted to make it clear that RLGL is working as weād expect it to in this case.
7 Likes
Any news from the TR development? Maybe @Nate_Pearson could comment or speak on the next podcast about the status of WLv2, swim import, the
and whatever else is in the works.
(Compared to previous years itās become relatively quiet at TRā¦maybe itās a new policy at TR or Nateās personal situation or TR is struggling moreā¦nevertheless it would be really nice to get a heads up once in awhile)
What garmin device do you use? They can not be the best to follow for day to day training advice. One thing I have learned the hard way, if my fenix7X and TrainerRoad are giving me red days/ telling me to rest, I probably should taie a rest day.
The inner David goggins in me says itās all wrong but I like looking at the big picture. Rest today or a couple days means I can workout more days during the year without leading to burning out.
Yea I mostly pay attention to my HRV and even that isnāt something to rely on IMO. I have noticed when my HrV tanks, thereās a good reason for it but thatās about it lol.
Do your best and forget the rest.
1 Like
Not arguing with you, we all have different bodies, and as mentioned, things like sleep and daily stress go into it, but that ārecovery timeā doesnāt mean ādonāt rideā, it means the amount of time recommended before you should do a āhardā workout.
3 Likes
Hey @kjdhawkhill, would you mind sending me your username over DM? I am not finding it. I want to take a look at your training history with RLGL. 
I also wanted to clarify that Red Light Green Light is not a readiness score like Garmin.
In contrast, RLGL isnāt telling athletes if they can do todayās workout or not. An athlete may well be able to complete a workout on a red/yellow day, but RLGL will tell you whether completing that workout is going to risk long-term fatigue.
RLGL is a TrainerRoad feature that monitors your training to help prevent long-term fatigue. RLGL tells you when you might be overdoing it with Red and Yellow days on your TrainerRoad Calendar.
At the end of the day, you know your body best, so you can decide to accept the adaptation or not Or as @mcneese.chad mentioned, adjust the training approach.
2 Likes
@kjdhawkhill, I was able to look at your training history and can explain a bit further why RLGL was recommending Red Days on these ātraining campsā and also a natural trend I noticed in your training history that RLGL was able to capture nicely.
Again, before diving into it I wanted to reiterate that RLGL doesnāt tell you if you can train or not, as you may well be able to complete these training camps with no problem. Instead, RLGL monitors your training to help prevent long-term fatigue. Think of it like spending on your credit card when youāre close to your limit. You have to adjust your spending habits to get back on track.
RLGL and āTraining Campsā
As an example, in 2023, before your training camp which seems to have been in June, you had only been riding approximately 2-4 hours per week since December 2022, so it makes sense that RLGL gave you Yellow and Red Days when all of a sudden you were completing 10-13 hour weeks.
There is a productive level of stress that will gradually make an athlete faster versus an unproductive level of stress that will derail their training. RLGL aims to capture the moment when recent training pushes an athlete over the boundary of productive stress and makes the necessary adaptations to get them back on track.
You can see that within that one-month block of training, RLGL started to ease out of the Red Days given that you were successfully handling the amount of stress and it even eased down to one yellow day on an 8-hour week on July 17th.
The above, to me, seems much like a coach would behave if they were seeing how well you respond to that jump in training stress.
RLGL Trend
A natural trend I noticed with RLGL in your training history is that you go from these periods of time where you are mainly commuting (25 minutes a day) to big blocks of training 8+ hours and thus getting Red Days which is to be expected.
Now, if we look back at your training data in say, 2020, where you had a pretty consistent year of training you can see that at the beginning of the year, you were getting Red/Yellow Days and as you progressed through training the Red Days started to vanish and even the Yellow Days started to decrease.
RLGL Today
It looks like itās been about a year since youāve had a consistent block of training that wasnāt mainly commuting, so I would expect RLGL to give you Red/Yellow Days at the beginning of a training plan like itās doing right now (mind they are not a lot).
As you consistently get through the training plan, the amount of stress you can productively handle changes to a point where, for example, completing a challenging workout wouldnāt cause a Red Day. But the same workout might have caused a Red Day at the start of your training plan.
As you train, recover, and get more fit, the amount of stress you can productively manage changes and this is precisely what RLGL aims to capture to avoid overdoing it and prioritize consistent, quality training.
10 Likes
I think I annoyed the RLGL gods. Has been suggesting days off, which Iāve largely listened to, but suggested today off after a reasonably hard session yesterdayā¦ which I definitely wasnāt listening to. Did a breakthrough threshold session (ground it out), and now itās telling me I shouldnāt do my vo2max session on Tuesday. No.
Confused by it generally. I shouldnāt have any trouble recovering in time for Tuesdayās session, and Iām just under three weeks out from my A Race, so taking my foot off the gas now doesnāt seem like the best idea.
1 Like
Hi @kjdhawkhill 
RLGL is still turned off, but how many days in the last month would the algorithm, at default setting, have āforcedā me to skip a workout or commute?
I took a look at your training history with RLGL turned on and I am actually quite pleased with how many Red/Yellow Days is giving after almost a year gap of training with this amount of volume.
I think there are a few things to note hereā¦
Your training load from around September 2023 until you started a training plan in June of this year has been for the most part commuting about 3 hours per week.
Any time you go from about 2-3 hours to 7-9-12 hours of riding per week (granted youāre doing interval work now) RLGL is most likely going to naturally give you Yellow/Red Days. Much like a coach, itās probably going to tell you to back it off a bit so you progress into it.
The nice thing youād see here if you were to turn RLGL, is that itās recognizing rather quickly how much load you can effectively take on as you get through your training plan.
I see that since you started the plan in June, it has now given you zero Red Days for the past two weeks. It still is, however, giving you Yellow Days, but I see that even those are decreasing.
The above shows me RLGL is, much like a coach, effectively reading how well you take on load and adjusting accordingly.
I did notice, that there are instances, where I believe you wouldnāt have gotten a Red Day had you followed the Recovery Week. What I am seeing is that in the last two months of training, you havenāt actually taken a proper Recovery Week, and have on top of your interval work performed 2 FTP Tests two consecutive weeks. This all can be taxing.
As advocates for taking proper Recovery Weeks, you may just be able to get away by not fully taking them given your training history, as we talked about, shows a pattern of these big blocks of training followed by big periods of just commuting.
If you are going to be following a training plan consistently, then we recommend you take the appropriate Recovery Weeks so that you donāt risk shortchanging positive physical adaptations and compromising the productivity of upcoming workouts.
Lastly, I think itās important to clarify two things:
- RLGL is not the same as Garminās or Intervals.icu as RLGL is future-focused, fatigue prevention. Thereās more info with a chart on this post.
- RLGL recommends to take it easy or a rest day to prevent long term fatigue. It does not tell you if you can do a ride or not, since as you mentioned, you know yourself best. Orā¦ as you mentioned, youāre on vacation and just want to ride
As far as āgetting through the training programā can you provide any insight on how AI/ML interprets todayās outdoor ride?
I think youāre speaking of the ride on July 22nd, in which case itās matched to a TR Workout Johnstrup VO2 Max 4.0.
Looking at the ride data it looks like you followed the interval work, nice work! Once the ride gets matched to a TR Workout youāre telling the system you completed that workout and it goes as follows:
Progression Levels get signaled that youāve completed a 4.0 VO2 Max workout>>your VO2 Max Progression Level updates from a 2.9 to 4.0>> Adaptive Training now knows to recommend adaptations to future workouts at that new level.
More info on Progression Levels and Adaptive training here:
5 Likes
RL/GL Feature request:
As if TrainerRoad didnāt have enough projects to work on alreadyā¦ It would be great if RL/GL could tell you how much TSS if done today would result in red or yellow day tomorrow. I understand that AT automatically adjusts to avoid red and yellow days, but in the case we choose to do something not on the calendarā¦
- This could help a lot of us from overdoing it by choosing workouts that are too long and hard
- Give us some insights to help moderate our ambitions and efforts on group/unstructured rides.
Maybe itās not a simple implementation, but is this something that would be possible to implement @Caro.Gomez-Villafane ?
1 Like
Hahaha well we appreciate your awareness! 
And we always appreciate your guysā ideas to improve the product 
.
RLGL is not as simple as X amount of TSS= Yellow/ Red day. There are other factors being considered by RLGL. Disclosing all of those would be unnecessarily complicated, and would be giving away secret sauce 
.
The goal isnāt necessarily to avoid Yellow and Red days completely! They prevent you from overdoing it and prevent long term fatigue. So getting a Yellow or Red day does not necessarily mean you have gone ātoo long or too hardā. Rather, they are there to indicate that you just need a little more time before you go as long or as hard again.
If you find that group rides/ unplanned rides are interfering with your ability to stay consistent with your Training Plan, TrainNow is a really great option. Have you utilised TrainNow much?
TrainNow will recommend workouts suited to your fitness level and the fatigue your likely carrying, based on your recent TrainerRoad workouts and non-structured indoor/outdoor riding.
Let me know if you have questions! 
2 Likes
269 tss/71.5 miles with 7k of climbing yesterday = red light today and yellow the following, which is normally my day off anyways.
Seems about right.
3 Likes
Iām wondering if my RLGL is functioning properly. It seems I get a YELLOW day after every bike session just following my plan. Honestly Iām typically marking the WO survey as MODERATE which I feel as accurate because itās not too taxing. Iām a triathlete so Iām also mixing in running, swimming and gym 2x a week. Iāve been doing this for years so I have a pretty good idea how Iām feeling and itās generally not matching up. Usually if I run in addition to my bike session itāll give me a RED day.
Iāve recently changed the option to be more aggressive in the settings thinking it would reduce the number of warnings but no luck.
Really Iām just wondering how to work this with multi sport. Is it common to get RED or YELLOW after every session. I feel if I followed it I would never run which Iām beginning to believe is the big conspiracy behind all this. TR team is just trying to turn us all to pure cyclists.
2 Likes
Hey @bdboggan
Oh no! You caught us 
, haha.
I looked at your Calendar and am confident RLGL is working. You can see this by the number of yellow/red days recommended compared to when you first started your plan after your REPAT time off. This shows me that RLGL is fine-tuning the amount of TSS it thinks you can perform without risking long-term fatigue.
As Iāve mentioned before on the thread, RLGL isnāt telling athletes if they can do todayās workout or not. An athlete may well be able to complete a workout on a red/yellow day, but RLGL will tell you whether completing that workout is going to risk long-term fatigue and itās up to you to accept the recommendation or not since you know yourself best 
Note: the nice thing I noticed though, is that these yellow days are not affecting your interval days and the swims and runs youāre doing in them are not triggering a yellow/red the following day. I did, however, notice that on Recovery Weeks you may want to keep things super mellow across all disciplines so your body is fresh for the next block of training.
2 Likes
Thanks for looking into my profile. It is good to hear the feedback. Iāll have to look into easing up more on recovery weeks. I thought I was; but I guess not enough!! Maybe too much running? More reinforcement of my theory!!
1 Like
Yeah
Recovery Weeks are meant for recovering, so if you feel the runs are potentially counteracting it, maybe try walking or not running at all and just doing the light rides on the bike.
As a runner now myself, on some recovery weeks I just plain donāt runā¦ and thatās because sometimes I feel the body needs to chill downā¦ running definitely takes more of a toll on the body than we think 
4 Likes
Quick Qā¦ This has happened a couple of times.
I had a yellow day and smashed out a power hour outside but didnāt get even a yellow the following day and I can assure you I am battered 
2 Likes
Looks like your outdoor ride had no power meter to record IF. Looking back at my calendar of HR only rides they seem to have triggered RLGL on their own TSS was higher. Power meter rides seem to trigger RLGL in my calendar as I would expect. I think its the old saying not all TSS is equal.
3 Likes