Yes they did, I tarted using the free version of TrainerDay for this very reason, they have a very simple workout creator which you can library by folder, just export to TP the day you want, bit of faf but gets the job done
I never asked before I left in a couple of years back, sorry. He was allowed under a coaches licence of TP to store a full catalogue of workouts.
Unless something has changed in the meantime, to my knowledge the Workout Creator is based on Adobe Flash, a technology that’s been literally dead (as in unsupported by Adobe) for several years now. Even before Adobe’s announcement that Flash will be EOL, it has been clear that Flash is dead and I’m really surprised TR hasn’t rewritten the Workout Creator from scratch with something newer in the meantime.
(Yes, I’m aware it might not be customer-facing software, but to my understanding TR uses Workout Creator itself to, well, create workouts.)
I always assumed it was my computer that didn’t play nice with WC, now I see I’m not alone.
One would guess that the future of AI will allow us to see the predictive “fitness” or “training levels”, which means that you’re going to want to input future workouts, to predict where it will take your fitness. Currently TR does this all behind the scenes.
All of TR workouts have really non-descript names, so it will become increasingly annoying to try to find the workouts that you can plan for the future. Much easier to build a workout and call it “3x10 minutes @92%”. AI is great for recommendations, but sometimes it’s just nice to keep it simple.
Completely agree on the uselessness of the workout creator. Pretty much every other app/website that I’ve used (even free ones such as intervals.icu) has a much better and easier to use workout creator, it’s one of the reasons I cancelled my TR subscription, as others have said finding a simple workout such as 2 x 20 sweetspot in TR isn’t that easy due to the naming of workouts, plus the TR workouts tend to have varying ranges, many of the sweetspot workouts for example have 2 minutes at 88% then a minute at 94% etc, whilst I prefer to use a set percentage and build my time at that percentage over a number of workouts.
Given how long it seems to be taking to shoehorn outside rides into the TR ecosystem, I do think a diversion away from that to implement a new workout creator for everyone would be time well spent.
Was wondering if there have been any improvements made to workout creator and if not, what do people use and what is your workflow for creating your own TR workouts? The main reason I cancelled TR a few years ago was because I was pregnant and all of my workouts were my own creations since I couldn’t do normal workouts. i would like to try TR again but am wary knowing that there’s a few workouts I will definitely want to add myself…
Two options:
- TR’s workout creator - it works for me on my Mac, but hasn’t been update in years (decades???) and TR has said there are no plans to update it
- If you have a TrainingPeaks premium account, you could build structured workouts in TrainingPeaks and they will sync to TR where you can execute them. Or if you have a TrainingPeaks premium account, execute them in TP virtual, which is what I’ve been doing lately
There’s a couple of issues with ‘custom workouts’ in that they don’t seem to work well with TrainerRoad’s Progression Levels, so if you are using your own workouts and then trying to use Plan Builder this could affect things.
In all honesty I’ve given up on the workout creator (and in fact cancelled my TR subscription) from memory, if you are looking for the cheapest solution to create and get your own workouts into TR to use with their workout player, you can use TrainerDay to create and plan workouts using their excellent builder and calendar, they allow you to sync to TrainingPeaks (set up a free account and they’ll pull each day’s workout on the day) and from there you can sync to TrainerRoad and Zwift. It is a bit off a faff to set up initially, but once you’ve done it it works well, plus you can then keep your own workouts and sort them as you wish in TrainerDay, which has a really good workout player of it’s own.
I have absolutely no idea why TR refuses to build a web based workout player it would make so much sense for those who want to self coach rather than use Plan Builder, instead, once you start looking for an alternative, you end up leaving TR. Bonkers.
If you’re going to create and manage all of your own workouts and plans in TD, why would you ship them to TP to do the workout in TR? You’d lose all the benefits of a TR subscription, wouldn’t you? I’d just do the workouts in TD and save a bunch of money.
Yeah I have been using trainerday but was looking forward to trying the TR plans, at least for part of the season, and then mixing in some of my own workouts.
I agree it seems like an easy thing for TR to improve to retain users. Trainerday’s plan builder is incredibly simple and works perfectly.
You could always use the ‘alternates’ feature in TR to find something that kind of resembles your own workouts. FWIW, I’m not really a fan of the new Plan Builder, certainly for a Masters plan it seems quite fixed, Tuesday Sweetspot, Wednesday 30min, Thursday Endurance , Saturday Over/Unders, Sunday Outside ride (but quite short). Once you hit build you get a ‘VO2’ workout on a Tuesday, it doesn’t really adjust, other than if you traumatise it by doing more than a couple of hours outside at the weekend, then it gives you the red/yellow warnings and switches your Tuesday workout to Endurance.
The issues I’ve had with the plans include my sweetspot workouts being pegged at 94%, my endurance workouts at 74/75% and then over/unders at 95/105% . Even after only a few weeks I felt like I’d had enough so I choose to leave, of course many people on here sing it’s praises though so the plans may work for you and there has been mention now of something fantatsic and shiny new coming for several months now, which may well address some of the issues I’ve had with it.
The idea would be to do a mix of TR and personal workouts… particularly close to a race - wanting to do some specific things. And yeah ideally no one would pay two subscriptions to do that but TR doesn’t have a good workout creator.
Yeah, totally agree if you’re just doing the occasional self-created workout. In Chopstick’s example it was creating the whole program outside TR.
I’ll mention another one here: WC workouts cannot be converted to outdoor workouts. I think this has also been mentioned during a podcast, in response to a listener question.
If you really want an outdoor workout, the TrainingPeaks approach that has been mentioned in this thread is how I have accomplished this.
What type of workouts are you looking for that we don’t offer?
I feel like you could likely do pretty well with TR without the need for custom workouts, but I’m curious as to what your goals are. 
That’s been my workaround too (Training Peaks) when I’ve wanted an exact conversion of default workouts (without lap pauses) or ones made by previous coach.
I’ve not used workout creator in ages (maybe 2017) when I was with a coach but didn’t have a powermeter, so I used TR’s virtual power.
@eddie my use case is different, but I have a regular coach, and she provides specific workouts that don’t always match up to a TR workout, and I’d rather do what she gives me rather than find something approximate. I actually DO use the current workout creator, especially since I usually like to add in a little extra warmup or modify it slightly (sometimes she just gives me a 15’ warmup block of 40-75%FTP (to gradually warm up, but TR makes it a single level of 58%) but would love it to be a bit easier to use. I sometimes need to add text to intervals and that whole process is kind of a pain.
You wouldn’t even need a dedicated own TR workout creator. A better option for TR would be to just have an open API that you can send workouts (in specific formats) to. So you could use many already available creator apps and build your own ecosystem around that. I’d guess that intervals.icu would have an integration ready in 2 weeks.
Hi Eddie, not who you asked, but just as an example, what if I want to do 4x4 minute VO2 @110% with 8 minute rest intervals, or maybe 4x20’ SS with 4’ recoveries. Just making something up randomly.
So this is mostly for those who want to focus on something specific, or coach themselves rather than follow a plan..