I’m a long-time user of TR, and somehow the switch to AI workouts is not working for me. I’m super confused by what it is directing me to do. I’m on a masters Gran Fondo plan, but for weeks now it’s been filling my weeks with yellow and red days and just prescribing endurance sessions. So I’ve been picking my own workouts according to what I feel I should be doing with the result that I’m not following my TR plan but just doing my own thing. How can I get back on track with my plan? And is there a way to switch the AI training off and go back to the old adaptive training? I felt that that was more logical and actually more sensitive to my progress than AI. Here’s my calendar: TrainerRoad
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Can you make your calendar public and share a link to it?
sure! I edited my post to include the link
Your weekly pattern of completing workouts doesn’t seem to follow how you have set up your schedule. My first recommendation would be to change your plan to match your actual work, which seems most often to be interval days on Tuesday and Thursday and a long ride on Sunday.
If i had to hazard a guess, I think it might be getting confused by your period from ~October to March where the volume was pretty low (seeing on average about 100 TSS per week)?
If you have a good sense for what you know you can handle, I’d just override the yellow / red days (but keep red easy, for sure) and keep an eye on how your workouts progress. Not sure another way to get the AI to see that you can handle the volume.
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That’s fair. My work schedule changed a couple of weeks ago, so now I’m doing intervals on Tue and Thur.
I guess that could be it. I was very busy at work and then got sick, so my training was quite meh, but now I’m back to my usual routine and I often really don’t feel tired when it thinks I should be.
whew, that’s a very aggressive plan with few days to recover…the ‘yellow and red’ days are not a surprise.
If Tuesday and Thursday are you key days you might want to have a day off before Thursday. Or move your Thursday to Saturday. Your hour long endurance workout following the Tuesday hard ride is too much.
I agree, it’s probably this. It just has no idea of your current capabilities based on your recent history. Also, it probably sees that you get after it and then stop, get after it, and then stop, so thinks you’re overdoing it. In addition to teaching it what you can handle, I’d try to focus on consistency over intensity if needed.
any idea how long it will take to learn? I’ve been back into regular training for 8 weeks and it feels like I’m battling the AI more and more
Sorry, no idea. If it matters, I’ve turned off the AIFTP and am using my own, lower, FTP.
Looking at your calendar though, you’re almost never doing the AI prescribed workout. I’d contact TR support for feedback, but I’ll bet part of it will be something like, “stick to the plan, do the workouts AI recommends, rate the workouts honestly, add volume as needed, and give it time to dial in”.
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Yes, I’m not doing the prescribed workout because the prescription doesn’t make sense to me (because it’s just endurance rides all the time). I’m doing a bikepacking holiday in the Balkans in a couple of weeks. Might do my own thing till then, and then see what the calendar says when I’m back. I’ll need a rest anyway, so a few easy sessions will be fine.
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Looking back deeper into your calendar it seems as though the last several months is really the first time you’ve stepped up your consistency. You have had some plan or another in place going back well into next year but completion level was low. Now that you’re being more consistent you are likely just accumulating more fatigue and your body is getting used to the stimulus. I noticed this when I first joined TR and the Red Light / Green Light system retroactively analyzed all of my riding going back years. I noticed that near the beginning of me really being consistent, back in early 2023, I had a ton of red and yellow days. Of course back then I wasn’t on TR and there was no such thing as RLGL so I just went ahead and continued to do what I wanted. Over time my body has acclimatized to that load and now that I’m steady and consistent I have few yellow days and basically zero red days unless i do something really silly.
I would recommend just scaling your prescribed schedule back a bit until you eliminate the red days (don’t worry about the yellow days, just don’t bury yourself on those) and build your fatigue resistance from there.
Just a thought.
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Hey @Overratedcarbon 
Lot’s of good feedback already! But I think we’re confusing TR’s AI Workouts with the Fatigue Detection feature (this part does not use AI and has stayed the same from Adaptive Training times).
If I have permission to posts images of your Calendar I can help explain things further and find a path forward.
https://www.trainerroad.com/forum/t/updated-forum-guidelines/111501/3
If not, I could recommend contacting TR support directly: support@trainerroad.com
Well I was doing other sports (rowing) in October/November which don’t show up well in the calendar, so it’s a less dramatic step-up than it looks. But I did have a big break from late December into Feb, because of holidays and then geting sick. It seems the AI does recognise other sports or strength training as work, but can’t calculate the effort exactly. So perhaps it thinks (like you did, based on the calendar) that the last 8 weeks are a more extreme acceleration. But surely it ca tell from my HR and survey responses that things are ok?
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Have you tried putting a rest day between your two hard workouts? I imagine that will fix most of your issues.
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Hi Caro, yes please, that would be helpful. I thought that fatigue detection is related to the workouts it prescribes (i.e. fatigue –> lower intensity workouts). The red/yellow days don’t really bother me, but it does bother me that every week seems to turn into low-intensity endurance week.
Plus one from me. The best judge of how tired and/or motivated I am is still me, not an opaque algorithm. TR - Can you please provide an option to go back to the adaptive training where it suggests short term adaptations around a longer term plan? Also if you must keep the newer AI features, please provide more transparency and explanation as to why certain workouts are being suggested. I’m a long term user and am seriously considering not renewing which would be a real shame.
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Yes!