I’m new to TrainerRoad, currently on the Aggressive training approach, and noticed something puzzling — after the Base phase, my weekly TSS stops progressing and plateaus in the 280–300 range regardless of which phase I’m in.
My current planned ramp is only 2.6 CTL/week despite being on the most aggressive setting available.
Beyond the few week simulation window, the projected CTL goes almost flat (0.7 CTL/week), which I suspect is just workout scheduling rather than real planned load.
My questions is:
How far ahead does the AI actively optimize workouts and weekly TSS?
Does the AI factor in an athlete’s demonstrated capacity when planning future blocks?
I’m curious about your experience, how does your TSS progress across phases? Is it building steadily, or flattening like mine? Thank you.
Can you screen shot your calendar or make it public?
Lots of questions like… how many days are your training? What is you time availability and how long are your workouts? What is your training history? etc.
This is my opinion, but TR is geared toward the time crunched athletes with less than 12-ish hours to train. To compensate for the lower volume, high intensity workouts are used to compensate for the time crunch. If you have limited days or hours to train you will hit a ceiling in regards to volume and stress. You can manually adjust hours and days you want to train when making a plan that might “raise the ceiling” and see some progression.
Beyond the window, the workouts are placeholders, and don’t represent what will actually be offered. I’ve seen some wildly different values from those placeholders when the window comes arround, especially on aerobic or recovery rides. The placeholders all seem to be 20-25 TSS per hour, but in reality turn out to be more like 40-50 which over a few weeks can make a huge difference to the accumulated TSS
Also, don’t forget that TSS is only correct at your current FTP. I wouldn’t expect both a significant FTP rise and a big CTL accumulation - so if your FTP is predicted to rise that will be another factor that’s hard to account for in the future
Thanks, that’s really helpful! It confirms my suspicion that the flat CTL projection beyond the 4-week window is just an artifact of low-TSS placeholders rather than real planned load. Good to know the actual workouts can come in at nearly double the placeholder TSS — that would make a significant difference to the accumulated load over a few weeks. I’ll stop reading too much into the numbers beyond that window.
