I have no complaints about Athlytic, it’s a simple tool offering one of several views into what I call my recovery budget. That view is more important in the context of when to focus on going to bed early.
My point in saying that, is that Athlytic or Garmin or Whoop are mostly independent of my plans to progress my training load. For example here is Athlytic stating the obvious after this afternoons endurance ride a few hours after lifting:
I’ve repeatedly learned that training readiness comes down to how I actually feel, on the bike. And when making schedule changes, considering TSB when resequencing workouts to reduce the risk of overloading.
That’s basically my take on these tools after using them along with a coach for 3 years.
Is this only at the plan setup stage, or will you be able to insert them during the plan and have it update on the fly?
Also, for ‘group rides and zwift rides’, should we read ‘any non-TR ride activity’? E.g., am I going to be able to insert a solo 130 mile all-dayer? Or a commute that happens every Tues/Wed/Thu?
Taking into account the impact/fatigue/etc of either un-planned activities, or of activities that departed from what was planned, is a must-have feature, whether that arrives sooner or arrives later.
I know I’m stating the obvious by writing that upcoming days/week need to take into consideration the reality of what you did in your past few days/week, regardless of what your plan might’ve said you were going to do. And I think that’s what people are primarily asking for. If the product doesn’t do that, people will just work around that blindspot by departing from what the plan’s telling them.
Yeah - I think there’re three types of use case here:
When setting up the plan, I know that I’m (usually / for period x to y) going to be commuting 3 times a week, and joining the fast group ride on a Sunday - build my plan with that in mind and show me what it looks like.
[What I was talking about] During the plan, I’ve decided to do a century ride in two week’s time - add that to the plan, adapt it accordingly, and show me what it looks like
[What you’re indicating] I binned off my planned endurance session for racing on Zwift, and threw in an extra ride when nothing was planned - adapt my plan to account for what I actually did.
The suggestion of choosing alternates if you have more time I think needs re-working.
Say for example I have 2-3 hours I can ride on Friday instead of the 90 minutes scheduled that I would normally do….
Okay so this would be the workout, (my levels are low since I haven’t used TR in a couple months)
*48 mins in threshold zone
But I have more time and I heard them suggest to pick an alternate if you have more time…. Okay so I have 2.5-3 hours let’s pick an alternate and this is one of them….
Now I have a 5x 20 over under workout, granted it’s more of tempo over unders but I don’t think that should be an option for someone. There should be a suggestion to add more endurance time, as opposed to more intervals.
Now I know they have said choose low volume and add more endurance but I have also heard “if you have more/ less time choose an alternate”.
Just saying there should be better clarification for newer athletes on this. Luckily I know better but someone else might not. @Nate_Pearson
Like others have said, I think WL2 will solve a lot of issues. To me, the main hangup with the TR plans is that they are not built with the typical* working person’s schedule or real-world outdoor riding in mind. Talk to just about anyone who uses TR and they likely will be ignoring the weekend rides and replacing with long outdoor rides. The fact that these rides don’t factor into one of the main selling points of the TR platform, which is Workout Levels, completely baffles me. Some will say “just use workout alternates to switch to a longer version,” but I think most people here can agree that a strictly structured 3 hour Sweet Spot ride is not what we’re trying to do on our long weekend rides. Maybe it would work better if, using Workout Alternates, we could easily replace a 90 minute SS ride with a 3-4 hour Endurance or Tempo ride. I really like the FasCat Coaching approach to scheduling these long rides as “semi-structured” Sweet Spot rides because it takes into account how real-world riding actually works.
The value of each of those cases will vary by person.
For me, as someone who very commonly does stuff that’s different to what’s showing in the Calendar (for a variety of reasons, such as outside rides being very weather dependent, and readily varying my “plan” based upon how I’m feeling), the key value would be in your point 3: accounting for what I actually did and adjusting accordingly.
Ultimately, reality always trumps plans. So, while I see lots of value in both point 1 & point 2, I consider point 3 the “must-have” feature. It’s not clear to me from what Nate described above for redlight/greenlight whether this will have the scope that I would like: I don’t only want to see the difficulty level of the next workout to be tweaked up/down based on what may have recently done outside of what was planned, but rather for the plan to adjust “holistically” to the work I’ve recently done, ie. for the nature (type) of upcoming workouts and their duration to also be in play,
I do appreciate that product improvement & releases occurs in steps, and that it can take time to deliver comprehensive solutions to problems, but I’d be keen to know whether what I’m looking for is something that might arrive at some point: fully dynamic plans that respond to both plan changes & to the reality of the work you’ve actually done.
Rhetorical ? – where is the point of diminishing returns with all this stuff? (And I ask this as someone who’s used WHOOP for 4+ years.)
I’ve got a job, two kids, a wife and competing responsibilities. Even if we assume WHOOP is assessing readiness to perform accurately – it still has to reconcile with the realities of life somehow.
As a good friend (also a WHOOP user) expressed it – “I don’t care if I’m the red today, because today is the only opportunity I have to do this workout.”
I think we are on the same page - I don’t buy into the training readiness aspect. My point is that it informs my decisions around recovery - the 22 hours a day when I’m not working out. Will leave it at that, wrong thread for this discussion.
I think the current solution where you just add the extra Z2 in the cooldown is okay. It could perhaps be a bit more polished with a separate button. And it doesn’t work for all workouts (some workouts ends without a cooldown).
Yes but how would they know to add Z2 without some fail safe or suggestion while picking a longer workout. A newer athlete could put themselves in a deep hole picking a longer workout. My example has 48 mins TIZ and the longer one is 100 mins TIZ. That’s a huge difference and without being warned or something, well they will not have a good time.
I want to spend more time with your comments above, but to bring it back to this thread – as an n of 1, I’m not ‘hiring’ TR to manage all 24 hours of my day. (I’m not certain I’d entrust any given solution with that much scope). I want TR to make use of best available data to offer me the best possible plan based on those inputs (from sources like WHOOP, Aura, Garmin, Apple, MyFitnessPal, etc.). But ONLY if it’s making a measurable impact/difference to my training plan and/or day-to-day schedule – and presumably contributing to the overall goal of making me a faster/better cyclist.
I’ll ponder it more. Just a first reason. Again, only n=1. And you know what they say about opinions. Lol.
