🎉💪🏋️ Strength Training Upgrade: Add Working Sets! 🏋️💪🎉

Announcements
1

An upgrade to our current Early Access feature just dropped!

You can now assign Working Sets to your Strength Training sessions! :muscle:

Tracking Working Sets gives you a more detailed look into exactly what types of strength exercises you do and fine-tunes Red Light Green Light to more accurately detect fatigue.

This is an extension of our Early Access release of support for new sport types, which is currently a web-only feature and available in-app soon.

What are Working Sets?

These are the individual sets in your strength sessions, not including warm up.

Let’s say your workout includes:

  • 4 x 12 Shoulder Press
  • 4 x 10 Bulgarian Split Squat :face_vomiting:
  • 3 x 12 Deadlift
  • 4 x 10 Burpee
  • 3 x 15 Sit-Up

That’s a grand total of 18 working sets. :weight_lifting_man:

By adding the extra granularity into this week’s Strength sessions, Red Light Green Light saw the difference between my Monday’s upper body session and Friday’s squat day and detected a Yellow day.

1600×382 115 KB

Decided to take Saturday off completely after those split squats… :skull:

How do I Set Working Sets?

You can do this from the planning step before your workout or you can add them after we’ve automagically imported your session from Strava/Garmin Connect.

From the planning side, click into any day, select Strength Training, and plan away!

1364×809 43 KB

1359×874 43.8 KB

From the completed side, you can drill in and add Working Sets once we’ve imported your session.

1600×983 122 KB

1600×982 116 KB

If you forget to record, or want to manually mark sessions as completed, we’ve got you covered there too. :ok_hand:

1600×837 89.5 KB

What do I need to do to start adding Working Sets?

This is an enhancement to our latest Early Access feature which imports new sport types with Activity Sync.

If you already have Early Access enabled, you don’t need to do a thing! You can start adding Working Sets to your planned and completed Strength Training sessions today.

If you haven’t enabled it yet, you can do so right here: Early Access

What to expect by enabling Early Access?

In case you haven’t seen the main post, this launch is web-only and is coming soon to the apps. By enabling Early Access, both your past and future activities will be immediately imported, displayed, and considered by Adaptive Training and Red Light Green Light.

You’ll still get adaptations and red/yellow days as a result of new sport types in the apps while we finish up the remaining app work to display the activities.

Why add Working Sets? …and the future!!!

Tracking working sets adds that extra level of granularity to what you do in your strength sessions. This is great for tracking your work, but it goes deeper than that by feeding into Red Light Green Light to detect when your gym work impacts your fatigue levels.

In other words, we’re going to weigh those heavy leg days differently. :pray:

This enhancement to Strength Training really sets us up for the future. Something we’ve always wanted is to better integrate gym work into our training plans. This is a step in that direction and we’re super excited for ya’ll to start using it.

Drop any questions or feedback below, or feel free to message me directly. For more help with adding Working Sets, check the Help Center, and as always support@trainerroad.com has your back.

Thanks everyone!

22 Likes
2

So it’s the number of sets that matters? Not intensity? I do 5x5 pretty heavy and am fried after. Much more so than doing 3 sets of 10. (25 reps vs 30 reps in this case). Is this accounted for?

5 Likes
3

Does a similar feature exist for rides?

It’s a real pain to try to match outdoor rides with TR workouts to get PL’s to update accurately.

It would be great to be able to do an outdoor ride and afterwards tell TR, “this workout was 5x4 minutes at 120% FTP” instead of having to match it to a workout.

4 Likes
5

Adding them after the activity has been imported from Strava doesn’t seem to be working. When I click save on the “Edit Working Sets” modal, it closes but doesn’t update the table on the workout page.

(Great added functionality once it’s working, though!)

1 Like
6

There was a bug! :scream:

Fix should be out any minute here…

Thank you!

1 Like
7

I don’t understand how you calculate a working set total of 22 in the example given.

8

Corrected! There’s 18 working sets in the example.

1 Like
9

Looks like we missed some direction, but we’ll be updating it.

It should tell you to take working sets to failure. Studies show that taking sets to failure is almost exponentially better than leaving a bunch of reps in reserve.

So if you’re doing a high rep set, but taking it to failure, they’ve seen similar gains in hypertrophy and even strength.

So the intensity between a 5 rep set and a 25 rep set should be the same if taken to failure.

One issue with high rep sets though is that you might end early because of pain rather than true muscular failure.

But if you’re lifting something 5 times that you could lift 10, then I’d just call that a warm up and wouldn’t count that in working sets.

3 Likes
10

This is fixed! :raised_hands:

1 Like
11

Weight lifted and current tested 1,3, or 5 rep max for the given lift feels like a better approach than just advising every set be taken to failure. Thats certainly a type of training, though not one I’d imagine many coaches advise for every strength session.

Completely unrelated, has RLGL been roadmapped to include measurement of morning resting heart rate the day following training? This feels like one of the most accurate measurements of fatigue and could help with the model when strength training is being added.

3 Likes
12

Thanks. This is an exciting development. I guess my only other question has to do with big compound exercises like “farmers carry”, “deadlift”, and “sandbags”. That sort of thing. Those can really work you in a good way. I found it impossible to do a hard day on the bike the day after these sessions and self-impose a yellow or even red day. But either way, just having SOMETHING accounting for strength training is a big move forward. Thank you.

1 Like
14

Thanks! Confirmed it’s working on my end.

15

May be a dumb question but I am curious how to categorize back squats and deadlifts since they tend to tax the entire body despite being more leg dominant exercises? Would these be full body or lower body?

1 Like
16

Hmmm. I think that take really has sufficient nuance. The main paper presenting what might be called “exponentially better” outcomes from training completely to failure are a) specific to hypertrophy, not strength (“strength gains decrease negligibly as sets are terminated farther from failure” from the paper), and b) are much more wishy-washy when training fairly heavy (e.g. 80% of 1 rep max or higher).

Here’s an episode of Iron Culture with two of the authors of the paper, Zac Robinson and Michael Zourdos, discussing the paper where they mention these caveats (including the guesstimate of around 80% of 1RM being where training to failure becomes less important).

Stronger by Science also had an episode that discussed the same article, and had some valuable thoughts on the source studies and statistical methods that may influence how clear the connections between reps in reserve and hypertrophy outcomes are.

Greg Nuckols (of Stronger By Science) was also on Zac Robinson’s podcast, Data Driven Strength, but it ran 4 hours so I haven’t actually listened to the whole thing. Still, it seems fair to say that this general takeaway that training to failure is “necessary” is not the one the authors, or other science communicators in the strength training space, find appropriate.

I am still somewhat curious about playing with this feature, although I’m a bit unhappy about having to do data entry in TrainerRoad about it. My Garmin watch already has all the exercises and sets to eliminate the need, unless that data isn’t available to partners.

7 Likes
17

When I put in working sets for future activities it doesn‘t save them. Maybe that’s a bug?
As I do the same plan every week, I‘d rather not put them in anew every time.

1 Like
18

Totally understand the confusion on this! Squats and deadlifts should be categorized as full body.

2 Likes
19

We’re looking into this now. It’s an issue with those future activities being set as recurring.

1 Like
20

You’re right. You could leave 1-2 reps in reserve and you might get the same result as training to failure.

Then you have to assume that athletes actually know how to leave a rep or two in reserve and not go too easy.

For inexperienced or intermediate lifters; I think the guidance of going to failure on your sets will sometimes still result in a 1-2 reps in reserve. They just think they can’t possibly do another rep so they end.

It certainly doesn’t look like training to failure is sub optimal vs having 1-2 reps in reserve.

So for us giving cyclists guidance on how to do strength training, I think it’s appropriate to have your sets go to failure.

Although I agree there’s more nuance; just hard to communicate that. But what we are communicating seems to get as good of a result as anything else.

1 Like
21

Easiest way to verify is to stop with what you think is 1 or 2 in reserve, but occasionally take your final set of a movement to (form) failure, assuming you can do so safely.

Then recalibrate your RPE/RIR if required.

2 Likes