I have regularly been strength training for over a year now without issues alongside my cycling plan, and ever since adaptive training introduced strength training and working sets I always seem to get a yellow day the day after strength training. Currently each week has 3 days of high intensity bike intervals, 2 days of strength training, 1 endurance or recovery ride, and 1 rest day. I believe I’m calculating it correctly at 17 working sets each day (6 upper, 3 lower, 3 total body, 5 core), and I’m estimating my TSS about 45-55 over 1 hour each time. I’m ignoring the plan adaptations to adjust the next day to endurance riding and honestly feel fine and like I’m recovering well since this is what I’ve been doing for quite some time before working sets was introduced to adaptive training. I would love to add some more working sets (mostly upper body) to my strength training days, but am nervous since I’m already ignoring adaptive training.
What’s the most likely issue? That I’m calculating working sets wrong? Need to lower my working sets even more? Or perhaps one day I will just blow up since I have weeks of nearly solid yellow days until my recover week. At this rate I get the impression that adaptive training will never would allow me to have both strength training and bike intervals in my plan.
I’m not sure this will help you but I do 3 gym sessions a week and am on my bike/turbo 6 days a week. Of the 3 gym sessions, one involves legs and two are just upper body/core. I am 100% NOT killing myself in the gym sessions like somebody who focuses on strength alone but my muscles feel like they’ve had a workout. My legs especially hurt the day after leg day. But I’ve never had a yellow day, nor have I had any workouts swapped after a strength session. I’m on a medium masters plan so maybe there just isn’t enough in there to warrant it? Or maybe I’m not trying hard enough
What do you have your “Training Approach” set to? Its found under Setings => Training Approch and can be set from “Conservative” to “Agressive”. While setting it to Agressive may not solve the Yellow syndrome for you its worth a look.
I think TR still needs to improve how its algorithm handles strength training, and I think TR needs to do more education about how we should be logging our strength workouts–how deep do we need to go for an exercise to count, which exercises are leg vs. whole body, how whole body and leg exercises are treated, etc.
I stopped adding any detail to my strength training days. This prevents the RL-GL adaptations.
I’d experiment with removing the working sets from your core exercises and see if that makes a difference. Ultimately, you are the best judge if you feel recovered or ready for a session. IMO, the yellow days are just precautionary anyway.
This is super helpful to hear, thanks. Glad it’s not just me. I’ll keep plugging along, and maybe even add some upper body lifts to my routine and/or adjust my adaptive training to be more aggressive to play with things. Stoked to see TR add activities and looking forward to seeing how they update strength training and working sets down the road.
I don’t get anything unless I go add the leg sets, then it’s a guaranteed Yellow the next day. I’ve just stopped updating the sets as a result. I don’t go super hard and mostly high rep or body weight stuff so I never get DOMS from leg days.
If not, then don’t record the working sets. The idea is that it’s recognising the damage you’re doing to your legs and giving you an endurance day, but if this is only moderately hard and you don’t need the recovery then it’s likely you aren’t lifting heavy enough to need to record working sets.
That’s funny any leg sets make a yellow day. Makes it seem like you can never do any strength training for the legs unless you are only doing like 2 high intensity bike days per week. On the flip side, I generally won’t do leg sets the day after threshold or high TSS workouts/rides.
On Mon and Wed I go to the gym, and do mostly upperbody stuff. Tue is a hard TR interval day, and after I upload my Mon gym session TR will make Tue yellow and offer to AI Adapt it from a VO2max or Threshold interval workout to an Endurance workout. I always reject the adaptation and have no issues completing the Tue session because I don’t do any heavy/hard leg stuff on Mondays. Hopefully at some point the AI will recognise this and stop asking me or making Tue a yellow day.
coming from a multi sport background and training and racing over the past 40 years, I have to say the algorithm is definitely not geared towards someone who does multiple disciplines daily. My whole calendar tends to be yellow unless I do little “work arounds” like putting my time for an activity as 1 second instead of the actual time, or skipping any estimated TSS other than cycling
After the podcast today I’m so confused now when the best time is for resistance training for lower body. Days between bike interval days? Same day as hard bike intervals but separated by several hours?
