I would like to be able to limit the weekday indoor ride time limits, yes. Currently, I have to adjust every plan I build to limit weekday rides to 1 hr.
More than half of my weekly time on the bike (4-5 hours out of 7-8 hours) and TSS comes from two long(er) outdoor weekend rides, however. I really can’t stand long indoor sessions, nor can I fit them in very well during the week, so I’m really looking forward to a system that could take outdoor rides into account and still allow me to follow a plan that allows progression.
I’m thrilled with the idea of being able to choose the time allotment per day. I work a fairly seasonal job and this time of year when AT gives me a longer workout on a weekday it’s no big deal. In the summer when I’m rolling out of bed at 3:45 to fit in a one hour workout before a 12 hour day at work it would be great to have a 60 minute cap on weekday rides.
Are the hours you would plug in be the max you’d want to do on a given day? Some days I have a lot of flexibility to add volume (weekends), and other days there is a definite time limit (working weekdays). Maybe some concept of days that are more flexible than others?
I wouldn’t want my max hours to be given to me every week, or in every macro phase of training. Presumably there would be a reasonable build up then rest week pattern within that.
Think of the “max time” a basic setting, not a hard limit. What it does is keep any automatically assigned workout to a time up to, but not over that value. If you set any give day to say 60 mins, you will only be served default workouts up to that time.
If at any time, that day or any other, you have more time available than your pre-set “max”, the easy option is to use the Duration option from the Alternates tool when you load the assigned workout. Set a longer (or shorter) workout duration, and you will get some optional workouts that you can immediately swap and perform with just a few clicks/taps.
I think the “time limit” is mainly meant to prevent TR/AT from giving workouts longer than typically available for a known “typical” schedule. The Alternates give the rider the ability to fine tune on any given day to suite variability as needed.
I would LOVE this option. I have plenty of time to train and the question is always how best to balance intensity, recovery, and fun on the bike to keep improving fitness. What you’re describing moves things closer to true athlete-specific coaching when combined with AT, red/green-light, and FTP estimate.
Living in Portland, OR, my ideal this time of year would be to take a minute on Sunday afternoon to look at my work week, the forecast, and other obligations and be able to say: I’ve got 1 or 2-hrs/day M-Th, 1-hr Friday, and would like to do a 5-hr ride mixed-intensity ride on Saturday outdoors and a recovery ride on Sunday outdoors, 2-hrs or less. If TR could take that and tell me what to do during the week so that I’m not over-cooking myself on the weekend, that’d be awesome.
I’d also like it to be able to give me a 2-hr workout during the week that has the “intensity” during the ride of a 45-min workout - ie., a VO2 workout from a 30-45-min workout plus the remainder as a rolling tempo or endurance ride for those of us wanting to get in increased time in the saddle, or who just enjoy extra riding.
One last thing, it’d be great to be able to tell the system that the 5-hr Saturday ride is going to be XYZ – maybe an option to select, flat, rolling, or climbing, and low/med/high intensity?
BTW - this functionality would be something I’d be happy to pay significantly more for in my monthly plan… I’m a legacy guy and don’t mind paying for the value I’m getting.
With this first release, it will try to pick the number of hours for that workout day.
If you want to switch it up, use the workout alternative features. That makes it easy to find a shorter workout at the same level.
The long-term vision is to let you pick the number of hours you can train each day, then we assign the hour value. This requires red light/green light and a few other things in order to make this happen. So still a bit far off.
As a starting point I’d love to input amount of days and hours per week I can see myself dedicating (per phase) - then trusting AT to come up with a reasonable suggestion and distribution of time across the amount of days chosen. The possibility to later on tweak the time duration on a daily level is a nice feature which I probably wouldn’t use as much, unless I’d want to say increase the duration on a specific day and have AT recalculate one or more workouts to even out the total for the week. I don’t think the options need to be more detailed than that.
Love the new road map. Looking forward to the roll out to build out a 4 day a week plan. @Nate_Pearson will the new plan builder roll out allow me to customise the weekday to which the weekly training plan starts? At the moment the training week starts on a Monday. Would love to be able to customise the plan to start the week on a Sunday so it is the first training session of the week rather than the last. I’m probably a pretty unique case so not a high demand for this but would work brilliantly for my life constraints.
We have requests for this but it’s of a lower priority compared to FTP estimation, changing the duration for individual plan days, and redlight/greenlight.
You can kinda get it to happen by switching your days around so that the first Tuesday is on Sunday. It’s a bit confusing but it’s possible.
Then on the Sunday before your plan you can do a ramp test, then the next Sunday you do the next week’s workout. AT will take it from there and adapt the workouts.
Again, a bit confusing but you can do it. I actually did it myself for Cape Epic.
I’m hoping when you do this that it can calculate the max amount of time for each day at the beginning of the week. Adaptions can make the rides shorter but not longer. This way if you look at your week at the beginning you can plan for how much time you should be ready to spend for each workout for the rest of the week.
Maybe even an optional notification on the smartphone so to tell you the workout you have planned for that day. Mostly to let you know what you should be ready to do later in the day
That would be post redlight/greenlight. We think that we should bring in more data like sleep/hrv/steps/weight and some qualitative data in order to really nail what you have said above.
But I think everyone wants what you said above. It’s just hard to do and we have some things to put in place so that we can do it well.
I’ve tried this on another platform as it sounded great, but the reality was not what I expected. It ended up giving me workouts I didn’t want, giving me too much time between workouts, and things like that. I have it a few months to train it but it never got up to speed.
My takeaway is that there is a balance, a level of prescription each of us are happy with, and a level of direct control we want. Fully prescriptive within windows in a calendar is going too far for me.
That makes complete sense. Also hoping when you set the time of your workouts in a day you can say you have time for two workouts in a day and pick which one should be the main one. (I. We. Easy before work and after work do the hard one) I know you can just use train now to pick an endurance ride but with red light/green light it would be nice to know if I should be doing that by just looking at the training plan.
As to hrv, I hope you aren’t just looking at ways to measure outside of workouts like the sleep tracking and readyness (Garmin’s body battery and hrv4training), but also the change in hrv from pre to post workout, and hrv during workouts (alpha 1)
There is another element to the experienced/inexperienced athletes I’ve seen on the Ironman thread for a few years - some people find it hard to compare TRs plan offering to other plans out there. It’s already a bit of a problem, but as planning becomes entirely flexible…hmm, perhaps you’re moving to being a place where people can coordinate their plans rather than buy them?
The double-day thing is pretty unique and I doubt we’d support that at first. In my mind, it adds a lot of complexity. BUT, with the system, you could add an easy endurance ride to make it a double day, and then it would adapt. We’d probably just not do the work to prescribe it.
HRV is a big project. When you measure HRV changes what your HRV will be. And different products measure them at different times so it’s not consistent.
There’s also some research that HRV is not as useful as some might think.
Our approach will most likely be to validate how HRV influences workout outcomes by product. IE we’d try to see if there’s a correlation between HRV, our prediction on how someone will do in a workout, and their actual outcome.
If HRV increases the accuracy of our prediction of workout outcome, I think it will help drive redlight/greenlight.
If it doesn’t increase the prediction…then we won’t have it drive things.
And if that happens, I’m guessing we’ll have to publish our data because there’s lots of money tied up with HRV and we will get attacked for saying it doesn’t improve our workout outcome predictions.
For TR, I hope it DOES help improve outcomes. That would help us makes athletes faster. But we won’t implement it unless we can prove that it will make our athletes faster.
I actually think we’re in a very position in the industry to accurately test HRV on a large scale. I think ERG cycling workouts paried with how precise workout levels are gives us a pretty details view.
And I’ve used Alpha 1 in workouts and we’ll look into that too. Again, more validation is needed.
If you can predict people’s ftp couldn’t the intelligent recommendations include showing alternatives and how they result in better ftp gains? Three rows on the screen with the details of how the week is set up, the first being the current and two better setups. Click on the row and see the more detailed plan
This could be a perverse incentive though. I think we’d want to recommend a volume based on what the athlete has done before. IE we THINK you’ll do more on this volume…but you’ve never done it and you might not even have the lifestyle/motivation. So starting that volume could be a recipe for burnout.
Maybe this is more about how we’re understanding each other. Not really asking for it to prescribe. So while my use case may be adding morning workouts, this would be more about adding more workouts in general.
More asking that I tell it I’ll be doing extra endurance rides from the beginning (not adapting to something added that it doesn’t know about) and red light/greenlight and change/cancel the planned endurance rides if it thinks they are too much before touching the “real” workouts.
