I have to disagree. PL has nothing to do with amount of volume you do (X min / Y days).
As I understand, PL is more like your personalised current abilities per training zone. It means, you can evolve faster/slower in some zones than others and not being stuck at fixed percentages of FTP that all move together. Something like Coggan’s iLevels. It also simplifies your own planning: choose whatever number of hard days per week with desired zones and then progress PL += 0.5 week over week. Adjust depending how you feel i.e. home-grown AT
But I do also desire for more flexible volume configurability. I am currently doing 16-20h/week and it is tedious to search/schedule workouts for longer period. It could be very easily automated as already described in various previous posts.
@DarthShivious I think even without data, and I’m not a TR user, I can say that it’s a superior training platform FOR SOME. It’s not THE superior training platform though.
I was implying that by investing time and resources on PLs other aspects, such as for instance greater plans flexibility, may have been neglected. Or at least this is the impression I got since for quite some time now the discussion has essentially focused solely on PLs.
From software development perspective, outdoor workouts PL detection is dependency for other stuff – AT can’t make reasonable recommendations if it does not understand what happened out of plan.
If this is the case though, is Join for instance doing the same thing? How have they managed to accomplish that in much less time it seems. Or is Join just assuming that the workout suggested has been completed unless there’s manual input from the user indicating otherwise?
JOIN doesn’t assume, you have to explicitly tell them that an activity you completed is your structured workout. They also do grade it against the planned workout. Time spent in zones, total duration, TSS, RPE. How it all factors into the adaptive nature is an unknown.
Join isn’t perfect but their flexibility is far ahead of TR. My ctl is the highest it’s ever been and I feel just as strong and fresher. I’m on a stamina builder now so I’m not expecting FTP gains. If I wanted that I would pick their FTP builder plan.
My guess there is different complexity in TR context, a la something to do with bug assigning inflated PL to workouts that have combination of different zones. But of course, this is just guess, I really don’t know.
It does feel like this is true, but the whole price raise thing was based on more money means we can do more things and deliver them faster. TR has become a lot more secretive and far less direct in their customer engagement (for what i feel are sadly obvious reasons), so I am holding out hope that there are great things happening in the background that we’re unaware of.
I think the thing with these various training platforms is an introduction of unneeded complexity that makes customers feel like they need something smart that adjusts to them. My training has actually gotten a lot more simple since moving on from TR, I focus on specific areas in a block, do a couple of workouts where I either try to increase time doing tempo/ss/thresh or just doing vo2 as hard as I can for 3-5mins. And outside of that just z2.
I think there’s a very strong “please spoon feed me” mentality that gets developed with these apps, I think helping people be more independent in planning is probably the best thing any product can do (but they won’t lol)
@hubcyclist For some, certainly. Personally I don’t care about being independent or thinking about it. I’ll spend that time/thinking elsewhere. I will happily be spoon fed like JOIN does for me. Open it up, send it to TrainingPeaks, off I go with little thought while still improving.
To be fair, for competing cyclists wanting to peak for specific date, there is little bit more complexity (residual training effects, specificity, etc). But yeah, I personally don’t care. All I want to do is LSD and all the hard days only serve the purpose making those lazy days more enjoyable
And from this point of view, simple building blocks like volume and hard days configurability is already good enough. And then TR can build more complicated use cases using same blocks.
if you’re still improving, great, but I think the day comes for many when we reach plateaus and I don’t think these platforms are smart enough to identify plateaus and how to change things to breakthrough those plateaus (TR certainly isn’t, users are beholden to their plan structure)
I’d like to see the tri plans updated- I think the ‘bones’ are good, but IMO they’re pretty dated in terms of functionality and the swim/run workouts could use some pretty basic revision and improvement with respect to both design and the smaller details (for example, RPE targets for the run workouts can be pretty wildly inconsistent even within the same plan, and occasionally sort of questionable in general.)
Also a more modern workout creator, but unfortunately I think I’m out of luck on both fronts.
Workout Creator! That’s a good one. A significant update on that would be great. I agree though, I’m not sure there’s any significant benefit for TR unless it’s integrated into the main app/website. That should be eminently achievable if there’s an appetite.
But that’s what I get from TR? Use Plan Builder, pick my days, open the app (at most select workout alternative), do workout, answer the survey honestly, and let it adapt. I don’t get how people are over complicating it?
All the talk of burnout, I really question how much above plan work people are doing, and how they are answering the surveys. Or are they insisting on doing HV?
There’s loads of threads about people burning out on TrainerRoad plans. The general pattern seems to be initial success, followed by plateau, then burnout, regardless of the level (LV/MV/HV) choosen. I’m happy to be corrected on this but the feeling seems to be there’s just too much intensity in TR plans.
This is how I see it too. My goals are different than a lot of you on the forum, but I’m still very happy with TR as a platform to serve up workouts and build a plan that I can modify according to my whims. I think PLs are a huge feature that lets me adjust things up or down based on how I feel, what outside riding I’ve been doing, etc.
What I want from PL v2, or whatever, is that I see where kg power levels are based on outdoor riding so that I can pick the right workout indoors. If I go ride a bunch outside for a month, my levels will drop a ton even though I know that my endurance or threshold has improved based on time spent in the saddle or improved times on some local climb. Or just on how hard that last hill up to my house felt after last week’s “junk miles”.
If all it brings is keeping my levels where they should be (i.e. which workouts can I expect to do inside) I’ll be a happy camper. I hope it comes soon. Until then, I’ll keep doing what I’m doing. It still works great for me.
Since Adaptive Training, I’d question how people are answering the survey’s. If I put “too intense” I get an adaptation to future workouts, that I have been able to complete. To borrow from another system/ podcast how many burn outs were genuinely FTFP? And not adding lots of “zone 2” that wasn’t actually zone 2?
Finally, I’d say forum users does not equal the entire subscriber base.
