For you
For you
For you
Assuming that everyone wants exactly what you want and that anyone who wants something different is “silly” is…well…silly.
Then tell me what more would you want from TR?
I get that they can improve how the program deals with race weeks and I think that it will come as they keep working on the program,
But what really needs improving that is stopping people from training and getting stronger?
There are tons of threads on the things people feel would improve the product, so I don’t want to start a another long list, but off the top of my head, what started the conversation above was that V2 was supposed to analyze unstructured rides and have those impact PL’s. We’ve literally been waiting on that for multiple years now.
I listed several others above, like running and strength plans, integrating health metrics, progressive overload (like for SS, TH, or VO2 blocks), integration with other apps like TrainingPeaks, text based workout builders, etc.
I get that you are happy with the current product, and that’s awesome, but some of us have been here a long time and have been asking for these things for years. Like I said above, I’m not saying TR has stagnated, there have definitely been new things introduced in those years, it’s just that some of the things discussed by the team many years ago still haven’t been released…and some of the competition HAS implemented those things. I’ve been a TR fan for years, and I gave them a lot of money over those years. I want to see them continue to improve and evolve, and if those things aren’t adding value to me personally, I don’t think it’s at all silly to go try the competition.
They have spoken about the health metrics side of things before in a podcast and how that wasn’t coming, also that much more data really isn’t game changing. I can’t tell you how many times I looked at my HRV on Garmin and just said “Ok”.
I get the V2 argument and I do think that is the logical next step and feels it will be in the 3.0 update but like I said, if you are doing your workouts outside as prescribed or indoors on the trainer, is the one or two unstructured ride per week really going to make so much of a difference because it didn’t move you PR levels?
I’m all for trying out the competition but I really don’t think having more data for the stake of more data is really going to be anymore useful and who knows what issues there program will have, more stuff = more to complain about.
Looks like you’re still using TR so something is stopping you from leaving?
Like I said before, even without these features the program in the state it is today is not stopping you from getting stronger if you follow the plan it set, I don’t see a reason to leave just because it’s not showing me extra data that may not even be useful to accomplish that goal.
Have they? How many customers are intently listening to the podcast and care as much as people like us (who are also active in the forums) do?
Now this isn’t to say that teasing a product that is too far away from release is wise, that it could upset loyal and informed customers. That’s absolutely a thing. Just saying that us forum nerds aren’t representative of TR’s broader customer base.
Small, incremental changes are great — but not everything can be realized by small, incremental changes. Sometimes you need to combine bigger changes and/or completely replace old things to enable you to implement certain new features.
Plus, if you carefully listen to the podcast, TR’s failure to release what we have dubbed WLv2 (aka scoring of free rides, including outdoor rides) has spawned other things like RL/GL. I reckon the learnings from failed attempts at getting WLv2 to work were very important here.
In the past, I have seen TR being smart about prioritizing features and building on them. The first implementation of Plan Builder was by today’s standards primitive. But it allowed TR to replace parts of it in a modular fashion.
The best thing that can happen to us athletes is healthy competition.
Same. I like a lot of the features they have added like TrainNow, RL/GL, Adaptive Training, and particularly AI FTP detection.
I would have left a long time ago if I wasn’t on a legacy price, because I was waiting for unstructured rides to be taken into consideration for my training. However at the lower price I am happy to contribute to the company in the hope they do actually deliver this functionality.
They lost me as a customer because their tri plans don’t support most of the AI stuff they were touting/charging for. Had nothing to do with them not rolling out a new shiny thing every quarter.
I posted a thought on this topic last week, but it seems I might have dropped it in the wrong place.
Sharing here:
I think they are already.
There has definitely already been a change in the last 3 or 4 months where the prescribed workouts seem a bit smarter rather than just relying on progression levels.
I’ve certainly seen unstructured rides affect/cause adaptations.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they have moved on from the idea of unstructured rides changing the athletes progression levels though.
I think they are slowly moving on from progression levels all together. The system already takes outside rides into consideration and it has been promoted that AI Train Now will give you “the best workout every time” (often way above current PL). This already makes whatever PL you are at inconsequential other than an internal difficulty grading system.
It seems that progression levels are now more of nice visual representation of roughly where you are with your training - rather than an integral part of how the platform chooses your workouts.
I have a feeling you might be on to something.
I was talking about not upping my FTP to improve pl and time in zone but TR said that’s not really how it works now, they’ve moved on to better planning adaptation now.
If they are it isn’t obvious to me, as I said I’ve not been following a TR plan for quite a while now but my outside rides are still uploaded to TR, but there is nothing obvious to me that they are being used (aside from AI FTP and RLGL) which isn’t what the original plan was.
Perhaps if I was on a current plan it may be obvious, but given the fanfare that was made at the time I would have expected it to be obvious. As I said I’m happy to support the company paying my legacy price, if I was paying more I would have left quite a while ago. Let’s see what happens over the coming weeks.
This in itself is a problem in my opinion, we shouldn’t have to ‘have a feeling’ about anything, it should be made very clear what is or isn’t being used.
Fair enough…. but I don’t think that the athlete progression levels are going to be much use to people not on a plan?
I remember many iterations to how e. g. rest weeks are dealt with across seasons. I reckon they have internal version numbers to keep track of the changes, but we are none the wiser. Who knows, perhaps we are already on WL v4 without knowing it. It also makes many changes and improvements essentially invisible.
That’s a tricky thing with software with a strong server-side component: the general public has no idea what version e. g. Facebook or Google’s search page is on.
100%. The workout recommendation engine, for want of a better term, and the data models driving it, may and probably are undergoing continuous upgrades. The slow pace of punter-facing “bells & whistles” features perhaps supports this view too.
If that view’s correct, it would indicate TR has focused (rightly, IMO) on the harder to solve problems that leverage their somewhat unique massive data set, rather than releasing the often gimmicky but quick-to-market chat-based (language model) me-too features we’ve seen various other outfits release…
I always thought some people used them as a sort of gamification or just a goal to select workouts in order to increase a particular progression level.
That’s the only reason I’m still subscribed at this point–the current price structure is way too high for the features IMO (especially with foreign exchange). I should probably finally cancel, THEN the next big feature will finally drop for everyone. 