“The rest he has to beg to do just a little bit of exercise like walking around the block. We are a vastly different beast from the majority of people seeing cardiologists.”
Same goes for any medical procedure. When i had a colonoscopy, i told the anesthesiologist twice that my resting heart rate is in mid 40s. It can go to low 40 while I sleep so don’t jack me up with some meds because I’m not >50 or 60 bpm. My son tells me that many medical device in the hospital he works at sends an alarm if a hr on a patient goes below low 40s.
What have the tri TR users experience been with the latest TR AI/ML features? They 're not working out well on my side by underestimating what i can do.
This early season I wanted to follow structured training plan and make use of TR’s AT, AI FTP detection and TrainNow suggestions. After 2-3 wks into LV Base FD triathlon, I’m not sure i’ve found the right FTP and workouts to do. If I do what TR suggest, they’re too easy. I substitue and pick a 2.x or 3.x PL workout and still I rate it Easy/Moderate. I bumped up FTP twice now and workouts are still quite easy. I’ll get there and I could joke that I’m getting faster but it’s wasting time. Is it because it’s a LV Base plan ?
After 2 months off after IMAZ, I’ve done the RampTest (213W -10% vs last Nov) , then 2 wks & 6 workouts later the AI FTP detect worked once and said 223W (+5% ) . Today after work, I did 2x8min FTP test (i did 254W & 253W on each yielding 228W FTP so another +2%. All PL got erased back to 1 again) and then was able to do Monitor-1 (a SS 2.7) 15min later and tired.
Anyway, I’m keeping a picture of Progression levels before they get reset to 1 to help choose the right Stretch workout.
Advice is welcome.
Maybe i should switch to a Build plan and do Base outside after winter is over.
The first few weeks are meant to be relatively easy as you get into the swing of training, and there is always the question of whether we are pushing ourselves too hard - so I would stick with it.
You can of course increase the intensity of a workout during the workout if you want to.
Personally I’d say three weeks isnt long enough to tell whether the training is working, so stick with it.
Are you getting the swims and bikes in and completed?
True….my company produces consumer blood pressure monitors. I regularly trigger the Irregular Heartbeat Detection feature because my HR is so low.
I also recently had a minor surgery and during my pre-op appt they did an ECG and the tech had to get my readings checked because it was “irregular”. Was a bit nervous but sure enough, it was just my low HR.
Are you getting the swims and bikes in and completed?
Should be irrelevant. TR lists those wo but doesnt take them into account in the algos.
Anyway, I took 2 weeks mostly off running to nurse a QL injury but added a couple of TrainNow cycling wo. No swimming. I downhill ski regularly however and sometimes hop on the trainer after a day on the slopes.
Irrelevant to TR but not to you If you aren’t recovering from running and swimming in between the bike rides, you’ll be fresher for the bikes - just another explanation as to why you’re feeling the rides are easy at the moment is all.
Maybe it’s just me being a fringe case. I’d would be curious if other long time triathletes face similar issue with TR and what they do about it.
@JoeX Yes I’m relatively fresh but not so much as my job is >40h and days on the mountain DH skiing takes a toll on the quads to some extent.
If I want adaptation, I need a good stimulus. If I followed the Plan and the AT, i would have just done what turned out to be 1hour Tempo rides for 3 weeks. All the PL get reset to 1 whenever FTP goes up. The AI algo is quite slow at converging to challenging but doable wo.
Given the AT + the AI FTP detection doesn’t seem to pick up it’s too easy. and now that i retested ftp, I’m debating whether to
continue to substitute wo at PL +2 (i.e. Stretch)
a month of Build
stick to Base
It seems to me the rampTest and the AI algo have very large weighting on VO2max &b anaerobic (my weakness . No surprise since I’m 52 and have been doing ironman for 8 years).
Second illness in this block, left work planning to go for a run on Friday afternoon feeling a bit tired, 30 minutes later I was in the house dripping with sweat and absolutely freezing.
Starting to feel a bit better now though, hopefully will be ready for the last 4 weeks of base.
My experience of the AT element of the LD Base MV plan is largely positive. The progression makes sense to me and is largely what I’m looking for at this point., i.e. more time in zone for tempo and sweet spot. I haven’t failed a workout yet, despite some ambitious looking ones, so I take that as a good sign.
One thing I am finding that is at odds with that is the endurance ride. At this stage, I’m finding that the adaptations suggested for the endurance ride are to up the intensity rather than the duration. Personally, I think it is better to do a longer ride in mid-zone 2 (endurance) than a relatively shorter one in high zone 2. But I can’t quire get AT to agree with me.
This might be a bit more of a training philosophy thing. And in fairness, I have been completing the higher intensity versions in what feels like the intended perceived effort. I just feel a bit edgy that my long ride isn’t getting long enough.
There is also a strange situation where my tempo p/l is ahead of my endurance one, so my plan has adjusted so that I have a longer tempo ride this week (3 hours!) than the endurance one next week (2:15).
Feb was good but not quite as great as Jan. Mostly because I moved flat so opted out of 2 workouts, so I didn’t crumble into dust. Pretty pleased this was only 2 workouts to be honest.
Haven’t missed a planned swim, so delighted with that streak… 27 and counting. The other highlights were that I finally learnt to tumble/flip turn, went for a bike fit with Matt Botterill (which was great) and ran a 10 mile PB (the most underrated of all the distances).
One thing that has been on mind is that the Sunday long run is starting to feel like a grind as weekly volume increases. I’m considering swapping Saturday and Sunday round on the plan, but wonder whether there is a downside there? I think there is something to be said for running on tired legs. But on the flip side, I want to be enjoying the run. Tough call. What do other people do?
So onto the last block of Base. Plan builder has made this 5 weeks. Gulp.
I’ve been pretty happy with the Adaptive Training. I started using it last summer as part of the Beta. I don’t think I’ve ever used TrainNow except to get an occasional filler easy rides. I haven’t used AI FTP yet either, but I have a ramp test scheduled for tomorrow, so we’ll see what it says.
Early in the AT Beta, there was a bug for some users that any FTP increase would cause all PLs to reset to 1s. I’m curious, what were your PLs before being reset to 1 after a 5w increase in FTP?
As you’ve noticed, AT doesn’t respond well to changing your FTP frequently and it does best when you have 4+ weeks of training between FTP changes. The PL shift as a result of FTP changes seems to work pretty well for me (early Beta was a different story), BUT they need to be situated pretty well to start with, which they won’t be after 2 weeks.
Since the AI FTP and 8-min test FTP estimates are pretty close, I’d say leave FTP alone for a while. If your workouts are too easy as you say, respond with easy in the survey. For Achievable and Productive workouts, if you respond “easy” it’s more likely to accelerate the PL progression of your plan and might schedule a stretch workout. If you respond to those workouts with “moderate”, it tends to think you’re on the right PL slope and it will take things more slowly.
You can also give things a kickstart by using the alternates feature and doing a stretch or breakthrough ride early on to level-set your PLs.
I know some people that do long run Saturday and long ride Sunday. I think there is very little, if any, downside to it. I’m also skeptical of any physical benefit to running on tired legs. Mental benefit, sure, it doesn’t hurt to know what it feels like. However, how I feel late in a Tri isn’t the same kind of heavy leg feeling I get running on Sunday after a long Saturday on the bike. In an ideal world where you didn’t have to go to work, I think only 1 long workout would be on the weekend (either long run or long ride) and the other would be mid-week. While my long runs are sub-2hr, I will sometimes do the long run on Friday AM before work, make Saturday an easier day and then do the long ride on Sunday.
My guess is that FTP AI detection is for small incremental change once you’ve trained for a while ( how many weeks?) and not for beginning of season. That’s unfortunate because i don’t test well on ramp test. I probably lost more Vo2max in offseason than I lost endurance & threshold.
My PL were between 2 and 3.x before i started increasing the ftp.
Every PL was reset to 1 when FTP was increased by 10W (5%) and again to 1 after the 8min test yielded a +5W (+ 2%). Today, Support changed them back up a bit.
Still, I’m surprised that the Sprint PL went back down to 1.0 even tough i did a PL3.1, deemed it Easy and I did it between 8% and 18% higher than it asked for.
I think I’ll keep doing Stretch/Breakthrough workouts until I fail one.
Pretty decent results for me too. TrainNow has delivered me through the offseason surprisingly close to my race day best. Not using AI FTP yet, but AT has worked great as well. Thoughout a tri plan progression I would at some point feel overwhelmed by tempo and sweet spot workouts while missing the high intensity that I need. I guess I got weird legs, but with AT my tempo and Ss rides remain productive and the VO2 and anaerobic work that I do is still challenging. It is pretty awesome and I believe I will leave T1 this year faster than before, after 3 years of stagnation.
I’ve personally turned off AI as i know my body better than tr does. Ai is good for many people as is is a gentle progression, but i also see it as wasting valuable time for more experienced riders. Using the pl still to try and keep things only slightly increasing after a breakthrough or stretch workout in week 1 or 2. Not following planbuilder either since I’m following a bit of a 14 day cycle instead of 7 and my long rides and runs then alternate between Saturdays and Sundays.
I’ve noticed whichever sport i do on saturday more often I’ll get better results so I’m trying to balance my saturdays between bike and runs.
After everything I said yesterday, I have to take some of it back.
I did a ramp test today, got a decent result of +9w up to 286w (3%) (roughly where I was last summer). AT nerfed my progression levels quite severely, mostly in Tempo which went from 4.8 down to 1.4.
Looking at the adaptations that came through, the VO2 and endurance rides look OK. The Tempo stuff looks abysmally easy, but it’s giving me some stretch workouts over the next couple of weeks. I’m going to push those up to breakthrough workouts to push things along instead of waiting for 4 weeks for it to correct things on it’s own.
I did peek at the FTP prediction before I did the ramp test out of curiosity and it was within a couple of watts of my ramp test result. So with my n=1 was that FTP prediction does a reasonable job of estimating ramp test results (along with all of the various assumptions about the ramp test result).
If you aren’t recovering from running and swimming in between the bike rides, you’ll be fresher for the bikes - just another explanation as to why you’re feeling the rides are easy at the moment is all.
