I’ve started using Trainerroad about 3 years ago, and I’ve always find the workouts to be the right level of difficulty. It helped me a lot to avoid overtraining and progress over time.
During winter, I do indoor training and outdoor training (with power meter) for the summer. Except for maybe one ot two months during the off season, I’m almost always on a training plan.
In my mind, it was the right tool and I never really looked elsewhere.
Well, this has changed a bit recently. Something has changed in the AI system and it’s clearly not for the best, at least not in my case.
For the last couple of weeks, the workouts have started to be less and less challenging to a point where it’s not even moderate difficulty anymore.
I’ve started to manually change for harder (not recommander) workouts, and even if I’m nailing them, no change in the AI Algo, still refusing to accept that I’m at a better level than what he’s believing.
I’ve seen that we can ask for an FTP adjustement.
Frankly, I don’t care about an artificial number change. What is important to me is that I can trust the system to give me the right workout at the right time.
I thought I had it, I’m starting to have doubts.
Please fix it soon. The summer season is short in Canada, not time to waste with a bad software release.
Looking at the comment, it seems something’s wrong for a lot of people, asking for people to fill a form for a fix is really bad support. You should rollback the change that broke the system and do a migration to adjust the users data automatically.
For support you’ll need to make the training profile public and confirm you’re happy for TR support to discuss, or drop them a ticket - always been pretty quick at replying if you want it keep it private.
Looking at the amount of complaints in this forum, I think we’re past the individual support.
Something need to be fixed at a larger scale than that.
I guess I’ll continue to manually adjust my training until my event and then, if my trust in this system is still not back, I’ll just look at the market to find the next training app.
It can definitely get stuck too low. I spent an entire block manually increasing power because everything felt off. In my case, it fixed itself after the next ai detection, and has been spot on ever since.
imo, just figure out what amount to increase power for RPE to be about right, and increase everything all block that much.
I think there needs to be a user workflow for “this feels way off” that allows the system to take such feedback into account and adjust faster than default.
If I had to guess, it’s probably from not having enough max efforts on your recent power curve. There’s always going to be a wide error band modeling max efforts from a sub max power curve.
It would be nice if users were prompted if their power profile has gaps and needs a hard effort at X minutes to improve model accuracy.
I mean… there really isn’t that many complaints on the forum considering the massive scope of changes that happened… it’s working well for most people.
That said, I think i have bumped into your kind of issue before.
Can you try manually adjusting your FTP up or down by 1w and see if the difficulty of your future workouts drastically changes?
Normally a 1w toggle of your FTP would not cause any big changes - but I think that the software can sort of “latch” sometimes and the predicted RPEs don’t align with the current FTP levels. Toggling the FTP setting manually can reset it so big changes can happen.
Make a note of the levels of the future workouts before and after the toggle…
Thanks for your answer and your suggestion.
After looking and asking around, I’ve realized that these problems are a lot more frequent than they’re suppose to be.
As a software engineer myself, I have little patience for buggy software (and even less with very slow ones: the trainerroad interface is becoming slower and slower, like in the calendar for exemple).
Since it’s the AI part that initially brought me to trainerroard, I decided to take advantage of AI for training without someone else adding a buggy fuzzy layer on top of it.
I’ve found a MCP connector for training peaks which simplify everything !
I now have an AI coach (Claude) that can interact with trainingpeaks to create workouts, look at my HRV, my sleep, etc.. I can easily adjust my goals, adjust a week if I’m sick, etc… Everything directly by chat which is so much more practical.
I wouldn’t have realized all the new possibilities (and it’s just the beginning) if trainerroad hadn’t dropped it.
Just cancelled my Trainerroad subscription.
So I guess, thanks Trainerroad…
Not discounting anybody’s struggles/issues I’d respectfully disagree.
As mentioned elsewhere (and if you’ve ever done 1st line you’ll probably experienced it directly) no one ever posts (calls) to say “yup everything is good” so issue feel magnified.
There’s probably around the hundred mark of unique users posting with issues, that aren’t self inflicted like overtraining, which out of the user base is a very small amount. Yes, they’re going to be a pain for people afflicted but I think it’s been a pretty good experience for most folks after the initial teething roll out.
Not arguing, do you really need some AI to tell you how good you slept and to adjust workouts based on HRV? i used HRV and care about long term perspective of it. RHR and HRV aren’t always reliable. Nothing beets “how you actually feel”. I used Claude for coaching, and i ended up think that i am couching it instead it coaching me /it was experiment out of curiosity/. I know that the way how you interact with AI can have great impact. I am by no meas expert, but i have pretty good knowledge about training in general. It can be super useful for beginners to get into physiology of training. Structured training isn’t hard at all, its really easy to progress your TTE, sweet spot tempo or whatever with some trail and error, which is the beauty of self coaching. Peaking for right event is tricky. Looking in the comments isnt very truthful and it can’t give you good perception of the reality, because not all TR users post here. Lets say the most vocal ones do. I am interested in TRs answer for your case is. I wish you many watts in your new journey!
How are you landing on the workouts that you’re doing?
Are you following TR’s prescription, using Workout Alternates, or hand-picking your workouts?
There is a bug that’s currently affecting athletes who do their workouts outside, and it sounds like you’re describing a perfect case of that scenario.
We’re currently working on a fix, but I’m thinking we can get your training back on track.
Let me know your thoughts and we’ll find a way forward.
Hello Eddie,
I’ve followed TR’s prescription for 2-3 years without issue (indoor and outdoor) but, for the last couple of weeks, the workouts felt too easy and Trainer road always tried to slow me down when I actually felt great. The cherry on the sunday: Seeing the estimated FTP going down by 10w when all you do is try to fight a software that gives you way too easy workouts.
For the past 2-3 weeks, I’ve started to select alternative workouts (not recommanded by TR because too hard, while I actually can nailed them and rated them not hard).
At some point, I expected TR to adapt but it does the opposite and fight in the opposite direction. It’s like arguing with a stubborn coach .
Even if I use the same power meter, etc, I know there’s always a transition between indoor and outdoor season as I’ve always been able to push harder outside.
For the past years, this transition wasn’t an issue. But this year, it simply doesn’t work.
I’m doing outdoor workouts using my power meter currently.
Are you happy with the responsiveness of the UI in the desktop app or in the web browser ?
My goal here isn’t to say that it’s all bad, but I feel a drop of overall quality compared to what my perception of this software used to be.
But I agree that it’s a personnal opinion and I definitely appreciate your own feedback about it.
This sounds like the blueprint of the issue we’re currently working on resolving (workouts being too easy while predictions continuously drop during training).
This is the company’s top priority right now, and we’re hoping to have a fix out soon.
Using Workout Alternates to find harder workouts is a good workaround for now.
I’ve shared your specific case with the team, and I’ll follow up as soon as I hear something about a solution.
i don’t know…it’s been an issue for at least a month now. you guys are selling a training software that has not worked in quite a while and the only reply you ever post is “yup - there’s a bug. we’re on it”. feels like spotify not playing music and still somehow charging people for it. how about not having people pay until you’re able to provide what you are selling. TR is so good when it works - it’s frustrating how bad the experience has become
Hey @peter_klaun & @niclouxs I hear you on the frustration, and I speak for the whole company when I say we wish we had a solution in place yesterday
As @eddie said, it’s the company’s top priority, which means all other work takes a back seat to this, and we are pouring primary resources into this.
Like you, my training has been affected by this issue as well. As @eddie mentioned above, the best temporary approach is to use alternates to get harder workouts and either leave your FTP as is or tweak as you feel is correct.
We have a lot of research into scenarios like yours going on right now, as well as testing different solutions, but we don’t want to roll something out for those affected by this issue that will (1) cause other issues for you and others experiencing this issue (a relatively small portion of TR athletes) (2) cause novel issues for those not affected by this issue.
I know this isn’t the solution you were hoping for, but I hope it reassures you that we recognize the issue and are doing all we can to fix it.
I’ve also experienced this. AI training seems like it only works if you’re exclusively training indoors on the trainerroad platform and the second you start riding outdoors it sends you into an easy-ride-death-spiral. I feel like they took the ‘trainerroad burns you out’ criticism too seriously and waaaaaaayyy overcorrected to avoid accidentally loading people up.
Im actually using a combo of Garmin Coach & Trainerroad this year, when they disagree on intensity I go by my perception+HRV status. It’s a bummer to say but if I didn’t have a grandfathered in price (that work reimburses) I don’t think I could justify paying for TrainerRoad. I wish there was an option to roll my account back to Adaptive Training, which I felt worked pretty well.
Edit 2: oh snap I didn’t even see the main thread on this (don’t really keep close tabs on this forum, just saw this topic in the email digest and realized I wasnt alone)
I set up my plan as indoor workouts and don’t change them to outdoor until the night before. Not sure but I don’t seem to be having the big problems others are running into
I think the known issue only relates to when athletes are doing their structured TR workouts outdoors… I ride plenty of unstructured rides outside and do not have this issue… I have never really taken to doing my TR workouts outside as my local terrain doesn’t really lend itself to it.
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