Trainerroad gives me adaptations without any reason.
I am in first week of “General Base Medium volume 2”. I finished 3 days in a row without any problems. After that for day number 4 (Friday) I see exclamation mark with message “Training stress too high etc” and day 4 which supposed to be Threshold has now pending adaptation to Enrurance.
Why is that? I did my training on time, on ERG mode so it can’t be done “better”. I always answer post-training question with 2-Moderate.
Trainerroad knew much earlier what is the plan for the week. I sticked to the plan and now it tells me that the plan is wrong? What to do to avoid it?
This week was planned like this:
Monday - OFF
Tuesday - SS
Wednesday - Endurance
Thursday - SS
Friday - Threshold
Satuday - OFF
Sunday - Endurance
This doesnt mean the plan is wrong, or that you did anything wrong. Sounds like youre doing great. This is exactly how Adaptive Training and TrainerRoad works. Plan builder works with the days you say you have available when you create the plan. You can move those days around as you see fit.
Its generally not a great idea to have 2 intense sessions back to back (SS and thresh, in your case). But if thats how you arranged your calendar in plan builder, thats what TR goes with.
Once you begin the plan, the AI sees that stress building up and gives you a red light or yellow light and adapts the plan to an easier workout. This is TR helping manage your fatigue. Even if this is doable in the short term, it can lead to long term burnout.
If you gave yourself Fridays off and did thresh on Saturday, you’d probably be better off.
Also, make sure youre answering the post workout surveys as accurately as you can.
I don’t know how the workouts are structured (SST and FTP workouts can range quite a lot in how hard they are) but I am not remotely surprised you are getting warnings with 3 out of 4 days being harder.
Is that the structure of the plan by default or have you set those days deliberately?
More importantly how do you feel? And how is the RPE for those workouts.
How many hours are you doing for this plan and how many were you doing previously?
How much training stress did you have on a week to week basis beforehand and how much are you accumulating now?
what someone else already said, you trigger this warning because you have scheduled 2 hard workouts in a row towards the week which is basically poison. yesterdays TR Podcast episdode could be worth your while. if you dont want to listen to it here is the solution:
swap fridays hard workout with saturdays off day and you wont get any warnings. it will be better for you because the intervals will be of higher quality and you can improve more.
back to back hard days accumulate to much stress and do nothing for you beside adding unnecessary fatigue.
Did you complete General Base Medium volume 1 immediately prior to starting this phase of your plan?
If so, then a yellow day so soon into week 1 of volume 2 would surprise me.
If not, then it is probably because it is your first week and TR doesn’t have enough history to be sure that you can cope with the volume / intensity of the plan you have started.
If the overall TSS / intensity of the plan is in line with your recent training history, I would say it is safe to ignore the yellow day and crack on.
If the plan represents a sizeable step up in TSS / intensity from you recent training history, you might choose to accept the recommendation.
Week 1 of General Base Medium Volume 2 should not trigger a yellow day for someone with a consistent recent history of c. 6 hours / 290 TSS
I have almost no history on TR. This is not a custom plan. It is not from the “plan builder”. I selected existing plan from “Training Phases”. I only selected which day is which workout but It was almost like I plan it. I only moved 1 or 2 days without changing the order.
Before this Medium Volume 2 I had about 3 weeks of holiday break and before that I did Low Volume 1 but I was adding some minor zone2 rides to it.
you trigger this warning because you have scheduled 2 hard workouts in a row
Seems like this is not true because in this case Trainerroad should not allow me to plan this in the first place or should create warning before I started first day.
Also I could select “High Volume” and have 6 days training and only 1 day off - then it is impossible to follow your advice so what then?
swap fridays hard workout with saturdays off day
I want to be fresh for sunday so this is not a solution. I plan to extend Sunday zone 2 from proposed 2h to 3-6+h sometimes and I feel this will be hard workout compared to 1h intervals, so I want saturday to be day off. Generally I plan to extend both z2 rides in the plan because I feel they are too short (1h and 2h). I will think about swapping days but this is frustrating because if days order is the problem than TR should alert that before I started my week. It already knew my plan.
More importantly how do you feel?
I feel fine but does it even matter? I know it matters to me but TR doesn’t know so this can’t be a reason for which TR changes my plan.
Given you’ve manually selected the training plan, TR will not nanny you at that stage. There are legitimate reasons to schedule hard workouts on consecutive days. It’s getting tripped up by RLGL that may not know your training history. Have you synched TR to Strava or any other training or fitness repository?
I’m guessing it’s early Friday there where you are, & you’re about to start the workout. If you do so, pay very close attention to how you feel in the warmup, especially if it takes the form of an LSCT. If it feels harder than it should be, you could be fatigued from the last three days.
Would you care to share a screenshot of your calendar? And your career showing your current progression levels? If all your levels are starting from 1.0, you might get away with it for a couple of weeks, but then after doing sweetspot on Thursdays, your Friday threshold workouts will likely feel harder than they should, before they should feel that hard, & you could end up leaving gains on the table. Definitely recommend moving those threshold workouts to Saturday, if your life situation allows.
This is the crux of your issue. As you build up a history on TR it will have more data to work with and your adaptations will make more sense. until then, accepting adaptations is not compulsory, and RLGL is a warning rather than an instruction.
As an aside, if your Sunday ride is going to be ‘hard’, then you have four hard sessions a week - general consensus is three is plenty, so consider swapping out a SS day for an endurance day when you extend the Sunday ride length. I have no idea of you or your training history, though (much like TR at this stage!) so you need to judge for yourself.
IF you select 6 days of training, you get 3 hard rides and 3 easy rides but never 2 hard rides in a row. the difference between 6 and 3 days of training is the volume goes up but the intensity stays roughly the same. you get “endurance” work between those hard days.
if your goal is to push up the volume on the weekend i would suggest a different approach. to get what you want do the following:
select 5 days of training but select 2 intense days instead of 3.
then you go on and split it as follows.
Mo Off (since you come from a hard weekend)
Tue Heavy Intervals
We Off or easy z1
Thu Heavy Intervals
Fr Endurance
Sa Off
Sun Endurance Long Ride
this split give you the following options
a) you can have some intensity (sweetspot or some treshhold on climbs if your longride is hilly)
b) you can add endurance on saturday if you fancy it
c) you can add endurance on wednesday if you fancy it
always remember if your volume goes up your total hard invervall days need to go down. 1-2 per week are super and 3 are as good as 2 (so i suggest you settle with 2 and get the rest of options a, b or c above.
This is definitely true. If you used plan builder, TR would do a better job with its recommendedations for you in the initial planning phase. If you just select a training phase and go with it, TR assumes you know what you want and lets you do it.
With little training history data, and recent time off, TR will definitely be pretty conservative in managing your TSS once you start.
If I were you and I was prioritizing that Sunday ride, I would switch to a masters plan (2 intense days per week instead of three) and do an endurance ride on fridays.
I am having basically the same problem. I generated a TR plan for myself and based on load alone it keeps giving me warnings (yellow and red), trying to replace easy WO’s with even easier WO’s or entire rest weeks. I have not struggled to finish any WO including “VO2 max” and “Threshold” (italics because the WO’s really didn’t push me at all). I monitor WO HR (that HR matches with power), resting HR, HR variability, and sleep quality which TR does not and they all indicate good to go. Also, I only do the WO’s that TR assigns me and there are no outside rides that would add stress. I am having a very hard time trying fathom how TR can generate a plan and then tell me I can’t do it based on absolutely NO DATA. I have even set training plan intensity to demanding and that still doesn’t fix the problem. I think this may be more of TR liability issue than a “trying to prevent over training”. I have been following training plans since the late 90’s, I have a back ground in endurance sport coaching, if I had a client who was exhibiting the data I am I would be telling them we need to ramp it up, we are not reaching your full potential. As an aside, I have been with TR so long I was on the $99 until last year. I have always had great results following the TR plans but for some reason this year the TR AI coach is just doing absolutely bonkers stuff.
@hpvpaul2 could you provide a specific example of what you are describing? I checked out your account, and it looks like you’ve been doing Zwift workouts up until this week – from what I’m seeing, you haven’t done a TR workout recently and you haven’t yet started your custom Plan Builder plan, so I’m confused about how you’re running into the issues you mentioned above. If you can provide some more clarity, we might be able to help you out!
@bo998 as other athletes mentioned, since you’re coming off of a break from riding, Adaptive Training will notice this and warn you when your volume/intensity is ramping up too quickly to be productive accordingly.
It looks like you took most of December off, then started up your Base Phase and got one yellow day after you did 4 workouts in a row. To me, that seems totally normal – you’ve gone from no workouts for almost a month to doing 4 in a row, so Red Light Green Light stepped in to warn you that you were accumulating too much training stress too quickly.
Yes, of course that matters! If you feel good, then you could (cautiously) keep training through yellow days if you are up to it. You ultimately know how you’re feeling more than anyone/anything else can know.
As you continue to train, Adaptive Training/Red Light Green Light will learn what you’re capable of doing as you feed it more and more training data. If you choose to ignore yellow/red days, though, do closely monitor how you feel – if you start to experience more fatigue than is manageable, don’t be afraid to back things down so you can recover appropriately.
I’d also echo the recommendations from others to try out our Plan Builder if you’re open to it – you’ll likely find that it gives you a more optimized plan with fewer yellow/red days than you might see on a “stock” plan.
@ZackeryWeimer When evaluating for adaptions, does trainer road only go off the completed workouts and the RPE from the survey after each ride. OR, does it also go based off heart rate from the rides? It seems like going off heart rate would also be a very important determining factor (although that should technically align somewhat with someone’s post ride survey response).
you haven’t yet started your custom Plan Builder plan
I don’t want to use custom plan. I chose “General Base Medium volume 2”.
I checked out your account, and it looks like you’ve been doing Zwift workouts up until this week
This one is fine but please don’t share more of my private activities info in public lol. Plus It is actually wrong because I did 4 weeks of base 1 before my current plan. And zwift was before that, and some outdoor data from strava is also imported, but it doesn’t matter.
It looks like you took most of December off, then started up your Base Phase and got one yellow day after you did 4 workouts in a row. To me, that seems totally normal – you’ve gone from no workouts for almost a month to doing 4 in a row, so Red Light Green Light stepped in to warn you that you were accumulating too much training stress too quickly.
This is the essence. I now understand that I should not plan 4 workouts in a row but my main issue with TrainerRoad is why did it allow me to plan activities like that in the first place?
When I selected the days in which I want to have workout then TrainerRoad already knew that I plan to do 4 workouts in a row, 3 of which some people here describe as “hard”.
So I get that this plan is wrong and should not be executed but if this is true than why TR waits until I finish day number 3 or 4 to tell me that? It should tell me that before day 1 because nothing changed since then. TR system validation didn’t raise any issues then.
Hey there… Zackery didn’t divulge any of the details of your individual workouts or any of your physical locations, just the general layout of your plan & that you’d been on Zwift. If it were me, I’d think that’s reasonable to be made public, because you initially asked on a public forum, which also serves to educate the community through real-life situations. If you’re concerned about that level of privacy then perhaps you should have instead hit up support@trainerroad.com . Many of the same staff are there to help.
