I agree that this is a big flaw. I noticed that even doing their own training outside is very different for me than doing it indoors. It takes me a good 10 miles to get to an area where I don’t have to stop often and theres some decent hills on the way so some effort is exerted before I start the intervals. For the intervals I will have to coast going down hills and apply more power going up so I average at the desired interval. All of those things are’nt taken into account. Ultimately, the biggest thing is that a 1 hour workout takes me closer to two because I have to ride to the area and ride back. Thats a very different workout and its not accounted for. Not to mention the unstructured stuff. Im torn between staying on the trainer this winter or doing outdoor rides. I wish I didn’t have to make these decisions and that AT got to the point it shouldve by now.
Idk if this helps https://support.trainerroad.com/hc/en-us/articles/4404974155675-How-to-Use-Outside-Workouts-with-Adaptive-Training
If it helps: don’t worry too much about that. AT doesn’t take extended rides with a long z2 cooldown into account either.
PLs are not a measure of your fitness, but help with finding the right indoor workouts.
If your outside 2h harder Intervall ride will affect your capabilities on the trainer, you still have the option to rate the workout with 1-5 after the intervals.
Don’t take PLs or FTP too serious.
I think it is very understandable that there are big challenges involved in AT incorporating unstructured outdoor rides, but I would be happy if it would just look at the TSS for the unstructured ride I did and adapt the rest of my week accordingly. Is this something that we could realistically get sooner than later?
Thanks for all of the hard work on this!
Well, recovery weeks aren’t subject to adaptations anyway. If you do a harder ride, simply don’t ride the next day or choose an easier workout using alternates, this really isn’t anything that needs to be adapted like the key plan workouts do
+1 here to wanting TR AT to take into considerations unstructured rides. I just renew my TR subscription because I tough AT was a pretty intreresting feature but the incapacity to adapte to non TR workouts is very disappointing. I do some e-races throughout my trainings and they can be pretty intense; making it necessary to adjust my trainings. I undertand that correctly capturing the training load from an unstructured ride is probably complex; but I don’t understand how one can pretend to have “adatative” training and not be able to adapt to this reality! Definitively looking forward to this being implemented! Hopefully sooner than later.
I think you’re conflating unstructured rides/e-races with adaptive training adjusting training load. It doesn’t. I ride more volume than my plan provides using TR workouts, and I don’t get any adaptation recommendations. The only thing adaptive training adjusts is what levels your workouts are based on the levels of recent workouts you’ve accomplished
I’m on a mid volume plan and I often do my weekend rides outside. Saturday usually structured (outdoor version of the planned workout) and Sunday unstructured.
I’m not sure but it seems that TR AT seems to assume I’ve skipped my Sunday workout and is now adapting my s.s power levels downwards.
What should I do? Go to a low volume plan? Link my Sunday ride to the planned workout- even though it’s unstructured?
I’m considering going back to Xert for a while as they solved this aspect of adaptive training ages ago. (Although no where near as polished as TR in terms of the overall platform)
You could, you are likely being assigned pretty key workouts on those Sunday workouts that aren’t being done. If you can incorporate those efforts even loosely into your outside ride on Sundays though, and associate that ride to the workout, you’ll get credit for working those zones accordingly!
Another option is to stick with mid volume, but change Sunday to your endurance day (if you feel like Sundays are generally low and slow when you get outside.
Hi,
Many thanks for the quick response.
I live in quite a hilly area, so unstructured outdoor rides always include a fair bit of Tempo / S.S.
As the Sunday scheduled workout is usually a S.S workout it seems to make sense to associate my planned Sunday TR workout with my outdoor ride. I will try doing that from now on.
I have also now matched last Sundays ride to the scheduled workout.
I followed the advice in these two support articles
Which, I guess, is all I need to know?
I’ll try this from now on – Although looking forward to the day when TR can recognise and account for Unstructured rides 
I just subscribed to TrainerRoad, and am SO disappointed with this. Without recognizing my unstructured weekend endurance miles, this adaptive training is useless. I also use TrainNow, and because Trainerroad is not recognizing my outdoor weekend rides, it keeps suggesting endurance workouts, while I’m already doing a lot of them…
then ignore the trainnow recommendation and do one of the other ones if you’re doing endurance on weekends, it’s not rocket science.
Just associate your outdoor ride with a similar workout and you’ll get progression levels
Is this feature coming by summer time?
I think it’s very hard to predict when features will be implemented. This was a solution because wahoo workouts weren’t being counted to Progression levels and this was a workaround
I have just associated my Sunday ride of yesterday (outside, unstructured, z2, long) with the scheduled workout in my plan, and it appears to have reset my progression levels to 1.0 across the board.
Is anyone able to shed some light on this please? Also, how can I get my PL’s back to where they were prior to this please? I have already removed the association but no change back to my previous progression levels have been evidenced as a result.
Now I have suggested adaptations as a result of skipping my workout, however, for the first time in my plan (I’m one week in) my faith in these suggestions is unfortunately now subject to questions based on seemingly irrelevant technical factors.
Any input much appreciated!
(edit: perhaps I should add, this ride was recorded on wahoo, and uploaded/pushed to TR via Strava, in case this is of relevance)
Many thanks
Contact support and they’ll have a look at it for you.
Thanks, I have emailed support with this query. Let’s see what they come back with - hopefully they can restore my PL data.
In the meantime if anyone has any input on whether they’ve had similar happen and how they resolved it that would be greatly appreciated. Presumably ‘associate ride’ works as expected for other people?
Thanks again
Hi Ivy, Can you hustle faster!?! Its outdoor season here now in the UK. My AT Endurance went from 1 to 10 on a single century ride which I rode as a 6 hour outdoor profile last weekend. @sunDOG21 and I are scheduled for an Everesting 10K attempt in June and it would be great for our AT levels to be accurate for refining Speciality training as we start to switch to more outdoor rides with the sunnier weather 
. We’re more than happy to be guineapigs in terms of testing anything new . I know this gets teased every few months on the AASC Podcast, so we’re definitely eager to see this feature!!!
+1 to @TractorBiker’s comment.