I’ve noticed a few of you saying you felt like RLGL was beneficial, maybe as much as you thought WL2 would be. Can you explain how?
I ended up leaving TR when RLGL was released instead of WL2 because I just couldn’t find any benefit in the whole “red means stop. Ok, now that a lot of you have questioned this, let’s say red means stop, unless you decide to go forward, and that’s ok sometimes because it may mean you get a green the next day after riding on red three days in a row, so you should listen to RLGL, but not really, but sometimes definitely, and if you still don’t like the results there’s a slider so you can make it go easier/harder on you” approach. I just couldn’t get my head around that at all. It feels like everything is a “maybe”, and if it all comes down to “go with how you feel that day and choose an alternate if needed”, then it’s no different than before RLGL.
I now feel the same way about strength and the whole “only count your strength work if you do every set to failure” approach. As an aging cyclist and not a bodybuilder, I just don’t see any benefit there at all. All the strength work I do that isn’t to failure doesn’t induce fatigue?
I don’t mean to be snarky, but I do feel being critical is justified when I don’t feel like the company is adding any additional value (for my use case) over the last few years but prices keep going up.
What am I missing? (And yeah, I know I might get flamed for sharing my current view, but I want to hear what approach you’re taking and how these things are adding value for you)
And again, the point isn’t the state of the product today, but the unfulfilment of a “promised” feature. I think they should not have announced it as clearly as it was. All of this noise would’ve been avoided. Living and learning.
From the training standpoint: I think I would largely benefit from this feature as I tend to deviate from the plan or get bored at intervals when the summer arrives. I still do my hard work, but mostly “unstructured”. I might be the 1% that isn’t worth the work to contemplate, who knows?
Personally I use RLGL to compare against how I feel (curiosity) and sometimes consider putting a brake on me if I get too ambitious in training.
The strength training thing isn’t intuitive and I don’t use it. But I’m not strength training really. Couple of days a week I just do 1 set of push-ups until my body shakes and I can’t continue without losing form. I’d consider that 1 working set to failure for upper body (maybe full body?) but I guess it’s not really worth logging…maybe I should?
@Nate_Pearson:
I assume my case is not the target audience for that feature…and would not make a difference on my bike training… Maybe there should be a one click stop “I did pushups to failure today” on the calendar to make that feature more accessible and easy to use for the casual crowd but on the other hand I want TR to focus on the bike/triathlon part making me faster and while strength training seems nice on the one hand it also seems to add some noise.
I would say there are at least two levels to this feature: one is simply documentation, i. e. I did this sports-related thing today. The second is to include it in the fatigue computation or in your training plan.
I completely agree that the current UI involves too much manual labor and would benefit from integration with officially endorsed TR strength plans. I have started subscribing to Dialed Health and am doing the bodyweight program for beginners as well as the mobility program. With most exercises I have no idea whether they are full body or so. And I don’t have the patience to input all that manually.
On the other side, while the Dialed Health strength training plans have been great so far, support is non-existent and the “workout player” is, hmmm, very rudimentary. (I think DH has two employees and they seem to have grown quite a bit, too much for Derek to keep up with support.) Sounds like Dialed Health and TR could both benefit from working together …
Is the problem the feature or the lack of trust in the feature?
In my experience, RL/GL is spookily accurate and I generally listen to it. On yellow days it recommends I do an easy endurance workout if I have something harder scheduled and on red days it recommends a rest day. The feature really makes a difference as I have started to commute a lot (i. e. a lot of rides outside of my training plan, mostly in Z2). So I initially had a lot of Yellow Days.
The UI still feels a bit clunky and I couldn’t find a way to accept a recommendation after initially refusing it. But overall, the feature has been working very well for me (≠ you).
Possibly a wild assumption, but it looks like the calendar for tr-test-kyle01 can provide some insight on the backend workings of WLv2. (I needed to switch off the early access calendar to be able to view it.)
Yes I know your use of Disaster was simply to furnish an example of the hurdles of WLv2, but I actually came across this whilst I was looking at workout compliance, & trying to determine which degree of stupid it would be for me to partake in the madness on WWDD :
Those progression levels give a very different outlook compared to the 8.3 in Z5 & 1.6 other zones offered to the rest of us.
Also, the intervals named “Fake” refer to the Z1 intervals.
Then there’s this example of Red Slate -5 on the same account, again with its very different resultant progression levels. Also in this particular example: how the system copes with a three-second latency.
The strava rides would be fascinating to see, alas, imported strava files are not clickable for me.
Is this already happening? I did an unstructured zwift ride and TR categorized it as productive sweet Spot 3.0 (which however was not reflected on my career that remains as 2.5 level)
The updated TrainNow feels like a stepping stone and for me, fills any void caused by my unstructured outside rides not contributing to PL scores.
If I want to quickly calibrate my indoor plan, after mostly riding outside, I can throw in some TrainNow rides and if the ML has a suitable prediction for me, update those PL numbers.
This in turn adjusts the future of the plan AND in a way where I’ve proven that I can achieve what is asked indoors. As below, ML has determined that, on that day, my Sweet Spot was likely to be ~5.x and I’ve verfied that. Perfect.
Did TrainNow actually recommend that workout? That sort of jump in PL would be ranked as a Breakthrough workout. Pretty sure I’ve never been recommended a Breakthrough, though have manually picked them myself when I’ve been confident that I’ve done non-TR outdoor training which means my PLs aren’t a good reflection of my current capabilities.
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