Personally I’ve always felt that the number of weekly hours of 6-8 TrainerRoad assigns is hardly enough for my goal of racing at a higher levels. Used TR’s amazingly simple platform Plan Builder programs for well over a year now and religiously stick to what they prescribe 95% of the time however in gravel and road race events I’ve had a real challenge keeping up with similar aged riders. Over the one year period with TR my FTP has actually dropped 5% which I have no answers for. My sustained high level power and my climbing ability 1.5 hours into a race fades which is quite disappointing to say the least. I’m in my mid-60’s, been racing for decades now so I’m not so new to this.
This doesn’t answer your questions about intensity and durability, but you can easily change the number of weekly hours when either using plan builder or selecting a plan.
Are you saying that you let plan builder decide on what training volume would work best for you and you trusted it, but now you think that you would have been better with more volume?
The difficulty is, there is never any way to prove it. If you had done more, maybe you would have got burnt out, or maybe not. TR will always argue that the volume and plan is best for you based on their huge data pool.
Correct, I put my faith in the TR Plan Builder to create the training program for my race. I believe that after the event my engine was not powerful enough. Thinking that I need to do more hours on the bike. I did learn that another rider in my category at the race does 13,000kms year and I only do 8,000. We both had virtual the same finish time. So much for my theory about longer hours on the bike.
Not really sure what to do at this point for the 2026 season.
Yeah it’s a difficult one for sure. We so often hear the same stories…that people feel under prepared for their seasons using TR….but then TR arguing that extra intensity/volume above the suggested plan will risk ‘burning you out’
Did you change the slider approach…I.e. from balanced to aggressive? That would ramp up somewhat, as would using the ‘check plan volume’ option more often to see if it will allow more capacity. However, the TR argument will be that the balanced approach is the best one for you and if you did more you may end up too fatigued. If you want to stay with TR building your plans next year I would maybe look at playing with the slider and really listening to your body. If you find you can handle an aggressive load then that may well give you better results.
Of course, you could also be on a particularly slippery bit of the decline after 40…maybe this year just gone your body has decided enough is enough but perhaps it will level out again for a bit next year?
Have you tried increasing volume? As others said, TR will set volume based on what you’ve done recently and can recover from. It can’t assume that you can handle additional volume if there’s no evidence to support it. What does your typical week look like? I would start by incorporating longer rides.
Another thought is that you might be going too hard early in the race, we’ve all been there .
Also, at mid-60s you’re likely to see a decline in aerobic capacity, good on you if it didn’t happen earlier.
Firstly there’s no denying that my advanced years will without a doubt come into play…this of course probably motivates me further to continue to train smarter, maybe even harder.
I did adjust things like turning “off” the Masters option, moving the slider to “Advanced” and leaving my FTP at my original 245 vs the TR suggested 232. Number of weekly training hours was between 6.5 - 8. Not unreasonable and had no issues with being over tired.
My only thought would be to manually increase my weekly hours to around 9-12 hrs proportionally to each day of training
Thanks for the feedback, and I’m sorry to hear that things aren’t going as you had hoped..
After looking at your career, the first thing I can see that is concerning to me is that you haven’t updated your FTP since May. We’ve tried to adjust your FTP many times, but it looks like you’ve declined all of those FTP detections/adjustments.
Because of this, I think your FTP was set too high, and you were stuck doing really low-level workouts (in the 1.0 - 2.5 range) for quite a while.
You’re just now starting to see workouts in the 4 - 4.5 range in some zones, but I feel like your training hasn’t been as productive as it could have been had you lowered your FTP and taken on higher-level workouts.
I’ve also noticed that there were a lot of ups and downs in your training stress since last September. There are a handful of weeks with only one or two endurance rides completed, and a fair bit of unstructured riding scattered throughout. I don’t know the context of your life, so I can’t tell you if that was “wrong” per se, but consistency certainly does have an impact on fitness.
How did you feel throughout your training? Were you fatigued throughout? Did you look forward to your rest weeks? In general, were your workouts challenging? Are you fueling the work?
Let me know your thoughts. I’m sure we can make some progress here.
You might have better genetics than the other rider and can achieve nearly the same result on less volume.
Volume is a key driver of fitness. This is proven and known. It’s why pro athleltes ride 20-25+ hours per week. They also do a lot of those hours at 50% of FTP because with 450+ watt FTPs that is still motoring along and burning a lot of kilojoules at 50%.
Newer research seems to indicate that the big volume helps create durability. That’s the ability to put out maximal efforts at the end of 5 or 6 hour races - the way professional cycling is raced.
You seem to have missed the settings where you tell TR how many hours per day you have to train.
Keep in mind that in most cases, cyclists become professionals because they can ride 25+ hours a week and adapt recover consistently over time. It’s not always that you just need to ride that much to become a pro.
Those athletes are adaptation/recovery freaks which is why that type of training works for them and why they can stack such large bricks in their training year after year.
Volume is a part of the equation, but more volume can’t always be the answer as there is line for everyone. The hard part is finding that line to ensure your training remains productive and sustainable.
At TR, we make those estimations based on the data you give us, and over time (weeks, months & years) we’ll allow for more volume, IF the data supports it.
My only point is that, at the top level, they all do big volume. There are no exceptions.
I think what amateurs can take from that is that if you are competing, even in a lower masters category, your competition may well be doing 15+ hours per week. One of my team mates won the Tour de Gila master B category - it took many 15-20 hour weeks to win the stage race even at that level.
I would further say that anyone could build up to 25 hours per week and adapt over time. It’s just that most of us don’t have the time nor the additional time for recovery and lying on the couch half the day.
This is a really good reminder. Thanks for saying it in public where the rest of us could get the reminder too.
I know I’m guilty of often not accepting small changes so I’d ignore 250 to 247, for example, simply because I’m too lazy to go change my FTP in all the apps/devices. No biggie, but if you do it multiple times, you might end up riding at 250 with a PL 2.5 when you should be at 238 with a PL 6.5 workout.
I was suspect of how after a few solid months of training in the spring my FTP would decline to 232. After it first dropped I decided to conduct a Ramp Test and the number was 245. So I accepted that and made it that number. Then a few weeks later the AI suggests that my FTP should again be reduced to 232.This FTP “flip-flop” has resulted in me not fully trusting the AI FTP recommendations so again I decided to leave it at 245
Can you ride at 245 watts for at least 40-45 minutes? If so, then it’s your FTP. If you have a good anaerobic capacity then it probably isn’t your FTP.
That could be partially due to only doing level 1.0 - 2.0 workouts. They are much different in structure than those in the 5.0 range, which is often where athletes spend a chunk of their time, especially early on, before they climb up to the level 6.0 -8.0 workouts.
In theory, any of us could increase our FTP and then do lower-level workouts to compensate, but this is a substantially different type of training load than doing higher-level workouts.
I can understand why you decided to go with that ramp test FTP early on, but ignoring 5 months’ worth of FTP updates is likely where things went wrong here, in my opinion.
I believe we’ll probably both disagree on the FTP discussion however I might suggest that my dialing up the plan to “more aggressive” and switching “off” the Master’s aspect and doing more hard days may be the culprit here.
Looking back, it wasn’t common for you to knock out three hard TR workouts in a week, too often. You usually did the first two, but then did unstructured riding on the weekend (at least in the recent weeks).
Two hard workouts a week is what we recommend for masters athletes.
During those back-to-back weeks with races, maybe it would have been better to dial back to one hard workout, since racing takes the place of the second hard workout.
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