Will there be a discount code for TP Premium members?
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Anybody attend the webinar last night? Another one today at 11am Pacific, and I canāt attend. Iām getting about 5 minutes a day to play with WKO5 and develop a new workflow and customize charts/views/dashboards.
Couldnāt; we had our Tues night hill interval ride. But Iām planning on watching this morning.
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The webinar was quite good as it just went over how to navigate around wko5 along with answering various questions, Iām sure it will be uploaded to their YouTube channel soon.
dFRC was spoken about, albeit briefly and Tim gave a good explanation about it.
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Question for you all. Is this really worth it? I am a data person and have been riding a lot more and current doing Sustained power build MV since I pretty much dropped swimming and run for fun now. I want to up my game but which one is better and why Training Peaks premium or WKO5? I get there are differences but looking for opinions from real users. I am keeping my TR yearly sub for sure.
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TP Premium is something like $120 per year.
WKO5 is something like $170 one-time payment and will last about 4 years before another paid upgrade comes along. Plus you will want to buy the latest Training and Racing with a Power Meter to help make sense of the modeling in WKO5.
You donāt need either to get faster. But WKO5 can you help make coaching decisions based on your training and racing results. But you need to figure out how to make sense of the data.
Iām very happy with WKO4 and as stated earlier in this thread it took time to learn the tools/modeling, customize views, customize charts, and analyze in the context of my seasons. I will be upgrading soon.
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Thanks for the quick response. I will check it out and doing some more research.
WKO is a good compliment to TrainerRoad. However even once you have developed a workflow, if you donāt make time to do the analysis then IMHO itās a waste of money. Basically you need to be committed to carving out time to analyze yourself using WKO, as if you were a coach.
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Summary [and a few thoughts on ] of this morningās webinar:
Tim described WK05ās workflow as the webinar included both new users and existing WKO4 users. For the most part it is the same as in WKO4. From a UI/UX point of view, the difference is the cleaner and more flexible UI/features available. However, I retract my earlier comment that this will lower the barrier [much] of user adoption as the value proposition is targeted toward serious cyclists and coaches who have the time and desire to more deeply understand their training and riding/racing in order to make plans/adjustments to each.
IMO: Modeling the anaerobic batter (dFRC) is an exciting topic. I asked Tim about dFRC being available for real time use (e.g. on Garmins for use during training rides and races). His short answer was a hesitating ānoā. He did go on to explain dFRC further saying: 1) modeling the decrement due to work (decline in FRC available) was easy, 2) what is substantially more complex is modeling recovery due to the complexity of the multiple factors going into the calculation. He sort of implied that this is ārev 1.0ā that they will be updating over time.
Training Impact Score (TIS). TR users know well that āNot all TSS is Created Equalā. Beyond tracking Time in Zone (TiZ), TIS is WKO5ās first offering of showing the impact to both anaerobic and aerobic physiological systems from a given workout. Tim made a point that this was an introductory offering of the feature and will be reaching out to the WKO4 FB group in a couple of weeks for feedback.
Smart Segments was also covered. It is pretty well explained at www.wko5.com, and Tim didnāt provide any additional info at the webinar other than to make it clear that they are not importing Strava segments, but rather using user created segments (from laps).
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Judging by your question, Iām guessing that you are relatively new to doing power-based structured training (please correct me if I misjudged). With that as a premise, TR alone is completely sufficient (i.e. follow a plan, learn what the data is telling you, etc. and you will become a faster cyclist).
Where WKO4/5 separates itself from TR analytics is the additional insights it provides. For example, if you were to compare your SSB MVI vs MVII at the beginning and end of the training blocks, where did you improve? At FTP, did you improve your time to exhaustion (TTE) - a measure of how long you can hold your FTP?; how about your Stamina (how well you would do in long endurance events)?; your Functional Reserve Capacity (how many KJ do you have available anaerobically above FTP)? etc. Depending on the specifics of what you are training for, these and many other metrics can be valuable to assess your training gains.
However, IMO where WKO4/5ās value really kicks into high gear, is once you have an indepth understanding of your training metrics, you can begin customizing your training for further gains through TRās Workout Creator, whether modifying existing training sessions or creating your own. In simple terms, I would describe it as going from becoming āa Faster Cyclistā to becoming the āFastest Cyclist you can possibly beā. But no doubt, it takes time and energy investment to do so beyond the financial cost.
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My analogy would be that TP is like a nice chemistry set. It comes with instructions on how to make some basic chemical experiments which arenāt hard to follow. It does what a lot of people are interested in and it will wet the appetite of those who are interested in more.
WKO is like a thoroughly equipped college chemistry lab building. You can do all the simple stuff TP has. it even adds significantly to the basic prepackaged experiments. But at some point, you actually have to start learning chemistry to use all its power. WKO becomes just a tool to apply a whole boatload of chemistry knowledge you have to acquire somewhere else
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@bobmac and @STP Thanks for the detailed responses. I have been training with an actual power meter for almost 1.5 years now and before that virtual power with my kinetic road machine but definitely no offense taken. Some of it for me as well is I have done tris for a while and I am pretty much now going the route of road biking and want to see what potential I could have which is my main reason for asking.
I love doing research and willing to put in the work to do the analysis for sure and figuring out how to get to the peak performance. I guess at this point if I were to get one it would be WK05 as I will keep my TR sub when it renews and do the TP basic.
What is the best/easiest way to get all of my garmin connect data into the system? Also i am assuming if I have it on a computer and get another one I can transfer the program to another one correct?
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@ericallenboyd I have TP basic (free) and all TrainerRoad training and outdoor rides/races (Garmin 520) sync to TP. Thats all you need to feed WKO4 and WKO5, it will sync all data and new data from TP.
TrainerRoad will sync workouts to TP. And Garmin Connect will sync to TP.
what @stevemz said
The new WKO features can be seen as a competitive response, and a welcome one. As discussed above Xert has anaerobic modeling for years, it is somewhat interesting and welcome to have in WKO5. And I still use Golden Cheetah from time to time for Smart Segments, my previous solution was creating a private segment in Strava and then using Veloviewer because Strava doesnāt allow sorting your efforts on a segment by power. I expect to take full advantage of Smart Segments. The Training Impact Score looks to be a response to Garminās feature (using Firstbeat algorithms), its not on my Edge 520 so no experience using it.
Thanks. How about all of my past data? I setup a free tp account but I am not sure how all of the past Garmin data comes over to TP. I would typically use tapriik but it is not working with gc right now.
Past data? Sorry to hear tapriik canāt help at the moment. Here is an unhelpful help article. Long ago I started mirroring all my data on Garmin Connect, Strava, and TrainingPeaks (and now TrainerRoad). Plus Iāve got a local copy on hard drive.
Unfortunately, Garmin Connect doesnāt have a bulk export that I know of. If you have the .fit files on your computer you can drag and drop them on you TP calendar. Thatās what I did for 10 years of Strava data- bulk exported the data from Strava to my PC as .fit files, selected them all, and dragged them as a group onto my TP calendar. Took about 10 minutes of my time to do it all. It took TP a while to process all the data. But it did manage to do it.
Mmmm I will have to look as I am not sure what computer the files are on. I might just have to wait until tapriik works again to get wk05.
@TimWKO, I selected āPast Workoutsā and let it run multiple times for over an hour at a time and itās still extremely slow for me. Seems to be worse when the āWorkoutsā left-hand explorer is open.
I do have 16 years of power data, but WKO4 is much faster with the same data set. I have a fairly well-specād iMac: late 2015 27" iMac, 4GHz i7, 32GB RAM, 512GB SSD
MacBook Pro is fast after doing the two hacks over a day last weekend. And I can reliably crash WKO5 when selecting two smart segments. Good times.