If actual researchers, scientists and physiologists can’t figure out the value of HRV and how to apply it to training, I don’t think TR is going to crack the code.
That isn’t a slag on TR….but it shows how much is not understood about HRV, what it means and how to apply it to training regimens.
Further confounding the use of HRV is that not all wearables report this the same way (i.e., when should a single HRV for an entire 24 hour period be taken?), nor has anyone done the work to even show that the number that wearables report is accurate or consistent. So put me in the camp that TR should waste resources on HRV while there are bigger fish to fry:
Any actual evidence to support this assertion? 
I do have to wonder why people are always asking about this. What magic are they hoping to get from HRV or sleep tracking or whatever? Sometimes you do just need to FTFP to the best of your ability that day. There are no perfect training plans, and too often it seems like TR users seems to think there is one (and maybe that is to blame on TR’s marketing). At the end of the day, the fittest people are usually the ones who get after the training, thru the good days and not so good days.
I argue for it because sleep is a key recovery metric and most of us wear devices that do a decent job of tracking sleep hours. If it’s readily available, why not add that to the TR model as a data point?
I agree with those who question the accuracy of HRV. I look at it for trends. If it’s trending down, that’s a warning sign. No matter how I feel.
For those who argue these metrics are just noise that get in their way of training, please talk to those of us who have experienced the results of overtraining and burnout. The impact of that can be rather severe.
… or have the flexibility to say “Nope, not today!” based on RPE during the warmup, and do easy endurance instead … and then come back to the hard workout a day or two later and crush it.
I think you probably need both approaches in your toolkit.
Totally agree, and said that upthread. But after 25 years of structured training, I haven’t found any science that is good enough to answer the question beforehand if a day is going to be a complete rest, an endurance ride, or getting the exact workout done other than the RPE after a warmup. And as long as you have the time for the workout, there is no downside in trying. You will learn something about yourself. You will surprise yourself sometimes. How are you going to know if you can do something if you don’t try? After all, progressive overload (or doing something you haven’t done before) is a key training principle.
I think that would be an amazing feature (with plan builder then recalculating the coming weeks) or days.
E.g. sometimes life doesn‘t allow for the 3/1 schedule and a vacation falls on the third training week. Would be great if that could be manually added as a recovery week.
The same with days. Maybe a key workout on the weekend will be impossible because of a trip or sth. Then Planbuilder could schedule it instead of the easy ride on friday, knowing that some extra recovery is coming up.
In the “Training Adjustments” part of the calendar, it would be great to have something like a “work/life stress” option in addition to Time Off, Illness, and Injury.
I would use this for things like the couple times a year I have big stressful 80+ hour work weeks - during which not only am I getting zero training done, but after which I need a very gentle recovery week (or two weeks) - or for dealing with family emergencies, etc.
I know I can just manually make adjustments, change workouts, etc, which is what I do now, but it would be a handy feature for me.
When searching for workouts, often there is enough information in the summary details shown in the search to decide what to add to the calendar.
Propose to add an ‘Add to Calendar’ directly on each listed workout instead of needing to click into the workout to add it.
Something like in this image.
I would like to be able to see the average power of a given interval before doing it, similar to the analysis tool on strava.
One cool thing would be AI review of the calendars and creating virtual coach advices based on training history. Something serious which can pick up problems and game-changers from the history and builds a good pack of suggestions regularly Like Nate and Jonathan doing real calendar reviews recently on youtube.
Another point would be building training plans for longevity and weight loss goals. Market is huge for these and if Peter Attia or anybody like him using it online, it would be a very interesting grow opportunity for TR who could spend those funds for further development of this platform.
I think also mentioned a lot; an integration of a cycling specific weight training program with some incremental cost would be great. Dialed health has good plans but terrible app and really high cost. Expanding it for TR combining, automitizing scheduling of workouts and adjusting plans based on needs would be win/win cor both TR and DH IMO.
And normalized power. It would be great to analyze portions of a workout before doing it.
I think you are conflating with what users want to achieve and how they want to achieve it. If there is no scientific basis for HRV, then TR should not offer that as a feature. They could base their algorithms on reading chicken entrails, as long as they work/work better, it doesn’t matter how they work.
TR is doing that. Their biggest achilles heel is that (to my knowledge) they are not automatically tracking a lot of data that is very important such as sleep data.
People are very bad at judging what works better, not least because they are always working with N = 1.
I think that’s bad design. You don’t want to do that, because it gives athletes a knob, especially if TR doesn’t know what works and what doesn’t. TR should only display relevant information. I wish you could display more data I deem interested/relevant in a status screen, though.
Been mentioned before but some simple stats on the app would be an easy win.
Things like FTP and weight are already tracked so a couple of graphs showing FTP and FTP/kg over time would be good to track improvements (or in my case deterioration over time).
A bit more more work would be some of the intervals.icu type charts (AVG power per set interval, fitness and others).
Alternatively, TR could open up a little and offer an API so that other apps could provide more advanced analytics.
I would like to see a feature where an extra set or interval can be added at the end of a workout, before the warmdown. For example if you were doing a vo2 max session like sleeping beauty (5 sets of 5x30/30s) and were feeling strong, you could complete the 5 sets and then add a 6th round of efforts, similar to how you can extend the warmdown.
Nice idea, worth thinking about.
Maybe the app can make that suggestion if you have overachieved all your targets?
That would also work, but I was thinking about reducing the number of connections.
Basic analysis would be nice all within one ecosystem.
TR is full of “knobs” already. I do agree that HRV hasn’t personally shown me much promise as a precursor to performance, but they already have RLGL, pre/post workout surveys, alternates, Train Now, accept/dont AIFTP, etc. and depending on how people do or don’t use those, they are pulling a “knob”.
