Could you move Tuesday through Saturday’s workouts back one day?
Then you’d have Saturday off, and Sunday likely wouldn’t be yellow.
Or maybe you could switch that 90-minute threshold workout to Thursday and move the 75-minute VO2 to Saturday. I think that one is likely going to be easier to recover from than the threshold workout.
I get incredible value and results from the AI as it pertains to picking my workouts and getting me just to the edge of what I can do. I’ve made fantastic progress since the beta. But I largely ignore yellow days. I feel they just don’t really apply to me. I seem to have pretty good genetics for recovery and I think TRAI underestimates my ability to recover so I just sort of do my thing on yellow days.
I do always honor red days though which I think is a reasonable compromise.
I forgot to add the Monday I needed that time off due to responsibility’s.
Once in a while I’m able to workout on Monday’s, but that is a good idea that I’ve never thought about.
The switching workout days I never considered because I thought TR gave you the workout order for training reasons but that is something that I will look into, thanks.
A few weeks ago I did something that put me in a fatigue hole that only time off an a AIFTP drop seem to solve, I never figured out what caused so I’m hesitant to ignore the Yellow days.
Eddie’s got some good suggestions there. Other ways to handle it I also use from time to time include:
Ignore the yellow. Proceed as normal. (previously mentioned )
(if you typically ride in the mornings) do the endurance ride on Sunday in the afternoon giving yourself another half day of recovery. I often use this trick when I need to compress my week because I got sidetracked one day and had to push a workout to the following day. Sometimes I even get away with an early morning ride and a late afternoon ride on the same day to get back on schedule if the intensity isn’t too high. I also find these occasional double day challenges are nice little “stings” to the system to practice handling load under fatigue. I don’t do this often!
Since the next week is deload, Move Tuesday’s deload endurance ride to Wednesday which gives you two days rest Monday/Tuesday. And the workouts being lighter this week you’ll have no trouble recovering for Wednesday/Thursday’s back to back.
To be fair it should be stated that I have a pretty easily manipulatable schedule which is not everyone’s situation. So I realize there could be an “easy for you to say” component to this post. Apologies to anyone out there if so.
I like this, Can build time each Sunday making the last one before De-load week the longest.
During work week I ride after work and the weekends it has to be mornings.
@eddie I moved the days around for the next three weeks to see what the Ai thinks.
Yellow days and times stayed ( I know that this can still change once I do the workouts) but prediction wise gain a watt, that can change too but a positive.
I try to respect the yellow/red, but for a Sunday ride with a rest day Monday I’m usually okay adding a little volume, but keeping the intensity low. Usually that will turn the Monday to red, and fully respecting the rest day is important to make sure I hit the Tuesday session with fresh legs. I’ve also noticed I get less yellow/red a few months into the training plan versus early on - I think the system probably has more data to better understand what I can endure.
(I always have to check the spelling) … But this could be confusing any French riders using translate… Especially as we’re discussing red and yellow days…
An update on this, so I started adding time, half hour per Sunday ride to build up to 3:00.
Was going to keep de-load week to whatever TR recommended but was still debating whether to do those on the trainer or as an outside solo ride.
Then I complete today’s workout and I get this monkey wrench, Red day, those I were going to respect. I just don’t know what I did to trigger it, followed the plan but I did add ten minutes of easy spinning to my workouts to loosen up the legs.
I’ll move the 1:30 ride forward to next Sunday and continue from there.
I’ve gotten yellow days after going for a walk with the family around the neighborhood or going for a swim. So I ignore them completely and turned the function off.
You did slightly more TSS than would have given you a yellow day.
The biggest drawback to the current yellow/red day is there are hard cutoffs. If you’re 1 TSS over or under the split between red/yellow, there’s effectively zero difference in your training fatigue, but it looks like a huge difference on the calendar.
If you were expecting a yellow day, and you did slightly more TSS than the plan predicted, just go ahead and treat it as a yellow day. It’s effectively the same thing.
I’ll add that the AI often doesn’t agree with fatigue detection. They’re separate systems that don’t really talk to eachother. If training through a yellow day makes the predicted FTP go up, AND i’m not feeling fatigued, I’ve got no problems training through it.
If I’m feeling fatigued, I’ll either make it a short z2 or take the day off.
I agree with this. One of the things that has allowed TRAI to really work for me is to learn when I’m the boss and when it’s the boss. Usually TR is the boss but occasionally I big foot the AI and assert my authority when I’m sure of what I’m doing.
It’s a learning curve but its my body, ultimately there are times I have a better idea what’s going on in here than the AI does.
Just looked back on those date. I thought it was because the workout on the 6/4 was almost two hours, that’s been the longest hard workout that I’ve done for this year.
This time I thought it had something to do with the Build Phase.
These VO2, Threshold and low key Anaerobic workouts are no joke
Looked at the TSS, nothing that I’ve haven’t done before so I can imagine that TR is seeing something in the background or wants me rested for what’s coming up.
Looking back at April 23-26th, it looks like a similar amount of stress and no red days. You even set a season-best PR on the 25th. The same happened two weeks prior to that as well.
I’m guessing the fact that you’re just getting back up to speed with your TSS and that you’re doing slightly longer rides right now is enough to push you into red. I’m assuming that we’ll give you a longer leash before long if you keep riding like this, though.
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