This makes no sense to me. I fail to see how that plan is harder than the TrainerRoad suggestion.
Even more frustrating to me is that I’ve actually been following this plan of 2 hard workouts and 3 endurance days for one three-week block by now. But that’s way too little volume for me. So I’ve only followed the intervals suggestions on the hard days, but at other days I’ve thrown in bunch of extra easy endurance rides. Totaling around 10h a week.
I’ve done 3 hard days per week in the past. But I’ve found it to be a bit of a stretch for me. So I’d rather stick to two hard days.
Before that block I did some 5 hour weeks as I was recovering from some butt-problems. And before that I had some weeks almost completely off because of these same problems. Though that in turn was preceded by a 3-week training camp where each week was around 20 hours.
For more context:
Been a TrainerRoad user for several years
For the last few years I’ve been riding around 15000 km
During summer I regularly do 20 hour weeks.
My goal is ultra-distance events (so more volume really is key for me).
Ok. They’re just warning you not to increase too fast, based on whatever info they have from the recent past. We all know stuff that TR doesn’t know, about our history and about our daily lives. If you think you can handle it, then go for it.
They won’t punish or ridicule you, unless you ask them to review your situation on the podcast after you burn out or don’t progress.
TR is primarily designed around the time crunched cyclist. It can still work great for high volume, but you have to push it in that direction a bit to get it on course and maybe direct some of the training yourself to get to a volume you are comfortable with. It’s likely throwing that overtraining warning based on recent training history rather than looking at past typical in-season training history. I don’t think TR has a good way to significantly scale volume up over a couple blocks, the approach seems to lean more heavily on ramping up intensity to increase your training stress based on a somewhat fixed schedule. I might be wrong on that, haven’t really played with it in a while. It’s so easy to add on hours of endurance work that I never give it much thought.
I’m a 15-20+ hour a week guy and I basically manage my own volume progression and rely on TR primarily to serve me up my Tues/Thurs interval workouts. The rest is just me managing TSS and training stress through intervals.icu. From my perspective, TR more than pays for itself helping me manage the 2 interval days and providing a nice workout catalog. The rest is kind of no-brainer self managed endurance work that doesn’t really have any specificity besides building up appropriate training stress. I’ve also found the red/yellow day warnings in TR work fine even with high volume. Honestly, I don’t look at those much, but I find they align almost perfect with how I train (it’s very rare I’m doing anything on a red day or anything harder than endurance on a yellow day).
OK. Thanks. Then I think I’ll just continue doing what I’m already doing. I’m also pretty happy with the interval workout recommendations for the hard days.
I mainly wanted to point out how strange it is that doing considerably less intensity and a bit more endurance triggers this potential overtraining warning.
You already did it in the first post. If you run with the warning but allow red/yellow days to modify the plan on the fly then you are unlikely have an issue with fatigue. The big question is what have you been doing in the last 6 weeks. IIRC TR doesnt really care what you did last summer, just that it doesnt burn you out with too much now.
The warning can also come up if you have to much intensity grouped together in a certain part of the week rather than the whole week being too much. If I put one of my 1.5hr endurance sessions to 5hr it gives a warning even though my planned TSS only jumps from 500 to 600 when my weekly average is 800. It notices that a 1hr hard session followed by 5hr endurance and 3hr group ride over 3 days is too much. If I spread those endurance hours around the week it’s fine with it.
Yep, that’s the way I believe it works. That’s a reasonable and safe approach, but I think it would be better if it better considered previous training volume while in season. It’s totally reasonable for someone to quickly ramp from ~5 hours a week during the off season to 15+ during base as long as they have the training history and do it the right way.
I believe you can lay out your time available day by day and TR will attempt to fit to those days. One potential limitation for volume is on your intensity days I think they are capped to a pretty low number of hours. That works OK if you are just doing intervals, but not so great if you are doing intervals + endurance work that day. Again, the simple solution is to just add some endurance time by extending the workout or adding a separate endurance workout. But once you do that, TR isn’t really the one managing your overall progression.
You will more than likely get warnings and trigger some yellow/red days.
If I remember correctly, I selected 2hours as the max for both days initially, then increased this to 3 hours on a Sat once I felt I was comfortable with a longer duration.
As yet I don’t think TR can progress the session length up to your preferred maximum, but I’m not 100% on that.
If I add 3hrs to each easy day it’s quite happy however if I add just 3.5hrs to the Tuesday it gives me the warning. I add the training myself outside of TR and use RLGL to control fatigue. If Sunday is harder than usual or is a monthly 2-300km Audax then TR automatically downgrades or even bins off Mondays intense session.
Hope this helps illustrate my point about cumulating too much TSS over a few days in one part of the week.
OK. For now I’ve just upped my volume ignoring the warning. I’ll do another three-week block and see if it still thinks I’d be better off at 5 hours per week.
Just be careful with the red/yellow days. I’ve found them to be one of the best guides to stopping me overtraining. They have been implemented retrospectively so you can go back and look at your historical data. After checking previous years where I have overtrained, they would have given the correct warning every time and I’d have avoided it had they been available and I’d listened to them.
I’m well familiar with red/yellow days. I pretty much never train on red days. Though I pretty regularly do on yellow days as, well… my calendar is quite full of them. Though I rarely do a hard workout on a yellow day.
