🎉🎉🎉 Announcement: Personalized Custom Training Plans! 🎉🎉🎉

[Nate_Pearson]

@fluff

Also, there are features which have been lost in the process, polarized plans, direct control over training days, probably more, with their return promised at some nebulous point in the future.

You can still add polarized plans like you did before.

Get Faster with TrainerRoad

You also still have direct control of your training days. Can you be more specific about what you’re looking for?

[roleypup]

As an aside, I’d like to be able to choose the workout duration based on zone, such as 1½-2h for sweetspot, 1-1½h for threshold, 45’-1h for VO2 max, etc. Probably another situation of me being an edge case.

[Nate_Pearson]

@Eightball

How would this work if say I am planning on doing an Ultra Marathon next year but also an ultra cycling event. Would it be able to factor both events in? I know you say triahtlon is coming but what about a standalone running event alongside other stuff?

We don’t have a good way to plan for your ultra marathon right now. If there’s a good amount of time between them, I would do a “conservative” training approach on the bike while doing your marathon training (if you want to keep some cycling fitness).

Then do probably switch to a demanding or aggressive approach and drop the running on your way to do the ultra.

I suggest this because you’ll be accustomed to a lot more total training stress overall, even if it’s not cycling. I bet your body adjusts quickly to the new stress.

[Nate_Pearson]

@UWDawgs

They will adapt and switch to different workouts as you work through the plan

Correct, this is a display bug that we’re fixing (or might have already fixed).

But as you go through your plan you’ll get different workouts.

[Nate_Pearson]

@stickmandj

That was what I was thinking too when I first saw it. But prior to this update the calendar would be pre-populated with workouts that progressively got harder and would still adapt as needed. So this behaviour seems odd. I never bothered reporting it until I saw someone else did and that TrainerRoad was going to look into it.

Same response as above. They will adapt and switch as you go through your plan.

@adski

Wow. A training plan that doesn’t taper is a major, major issue likely to negatively impact many people who have worked months and invested much in a training process.

It’s becoming apparent that companies are using the public to train products and ‘first mover disadvantage’ is very real. It seems that an individual simply cannot TRUST these services. In TR’s case, the forensics and causality is open, which is good. however the ‘black box’ set of rules, dependencies, conditional behaviours, states, etc make it very hard for a consumer to provide the REQUIRED layer of assessment and CORRECTION on what should be a reliable product. It’s almost as though what is missing is a coach.

I want to be clear, the plan DOES taper as you approach your event.

There’s a display bug that doesn’t show it on the plan originally, but as you approach your event it shows on the calendar. Sorry that I wasn’t clear about that.

[Nate_Pearson]

@adski

This should have been a beta feature. Maybe it was too difficult to do so? Or maybe it was rushed out too early in an ‘emperor has no clothes’ situation. I really wonder whether a product manager thought before last week’s podcast: “This is ready for release”.

Man, you are brutal.

A very large team of talented and hard working people built and tested this.

This is the most complex area of our code, and we made some mistakes. None of us are happy about it and all of us want to make it better and improve.

All of those people I mentioned are working hard to fix it.

We’ll get together afterwards and figure out what we did wrong, and how we can improve it so we do better next time.

Again, I’m sorry about the bugs. There shouldn’t be so many. We’ve already fixed a lot of them and will continue to fix them.

[Nate_Pearson]

@talltill

…and one more related question: The system scheduled a 2h 150TSS hard solo ride for today, I did 2:15 and 160TSS. Afterwards, the system cancelled tomorrow’s 1h endurance ride for a rest day. I would have expected it dialing down to a lower achievable level, but why schedule and then cancel? The ride was hard, but I felt pretty good.

You went hard enough to trigger a red day. Red days have more to do with your recent training history rather than one particular day.

So although you might have just barely gone harder on that day, you might have done more (or maybe less long term) leading up to it.

[Nate_Pearson]

@schmidt

I agree with the previous points that the plan overview at the last step was better before - now I have to accept the plan and look at the calendar what plan builder did, instead of seeing it right away. It lead me to do multiple rounds of having to build all over which is a defeating user experience.
For the general fitness options I would need to see how the chosen option affects the plan before I accept the plan in the calendar ! If it is individual, as you said above, it should be shown in the last step.

We agree and will add it back.

In general we have two audiences:

1. Forum athletes
2. Non-forum athletes

Forum athletes are power users and wants lots of customization and ability to self coach/tweak.

The non-forum athlete is more using us as a coach where they are assigned a plan and they complete it.

We dropped putting the entire plan on the overview section because I was thinking of serving #2 and that group #1 could still look at it on the calendar.

I still wonder if requests will die down over time after they use this feature more, but nonetheless, we’re still going to add a sample back to that page.

[Nate_Pearson]

@adski

Yep, there’s some wack behaviour going on at the moment. I had today’s core workout listed as a ‘race’ in the Mac app, which would be interesting!

We’re looking into this now, sorry about that.

[Nate_Pearson]

@Buckethead

It would be great if we could download the .fit file through the mobile app (assuming the mobile app calendar is what you are talking about). Right now without Apple Health integration I am importing .fit files through HealthFit. This gets all workouts data into Apple Health.

Of course you could solve this by syncing workout data directly to Apple Health

Yes, that’s the real way to solve that. Sorry that isn’t done yet.

[Nate_Pearson]

@SilvanK

Like, if I manually add training phases (e.g. base 1: It would be great to adapt the duration of specific days of the week for the whole block.

Even better if I could tell it to do a specific number of days, outside of low - mid - high

oooo, like if you manually add a training block to your calendar through the training phase. I don’t think we’re going to add that in, it’s a little too niche and not the direction we want to go in.

[Nate_Pearson]

@AldridgePrior

I think @SilvanK is referring to the UI when manually adding a single training phase to a plan (as opposed to using the CTP wizard).

ie. this interface, which allows you to move workouts between days, but doesn’t allow you to define the workout durations:

Polarized will get this update later. We need to finish fixing some current bugs first.

[Nate_Pearson]

@roleypup

As an aside, I’d like to be able to choose the workout duration based on zone, such as 1½-2h for sweetspot, 1-1½h for threshold, 45’-1h for VO2 max, etc. Probably another situation of me being an edge case.

We’re going to have a whole new AT system coming out and I think you’ll be able to do this with it.

[adski]

Hi Nate, thankyou for hearing the feedback. Yes it was direct. The sustained effort from the entire team is appreciated.

[Rizzi]

@Nate_Pearson

Man, you are brutal.

A very large team of talented and hard working people built and tested this.

This is the most complex area of our code, and we made some mistakes. None of us are happy about it and all of us want to make it better and improve.

All of those people I mentioned are working hard to fix it.

We’ll get together afterwards and figure out what we did wrong, and how we can improve it so we do better next time.

Again, I’m sorry about the bugs. There shouldn’t be so many. We’ve already fixed a lot of them and will continue to fix them.

@Nate_Pearson just to give you some other feedback from a regular forum user (it’s becoming 6 years):

I’m always happy to see new functionality and the form posts. Even if the new functionality has bugs and it needs a month or two to iron out the bugs. I just like to see new things TR .

I’ll give my feedback and critique where needed (hopefully constructive) and really appreciate and enjoy seeing you on the forum since you are the only one speaking on TR vision and future functionality (per your own policy) and unfortunately it’s become a little rare seeing you here (except when new features are announced).

Don’t be too harsh on yourself, keep it up and I’m looking forward to the day when there will be generated plans with max 1 day intensity per week and WLv2 will be released…

[roleypup]

This sounds cool!

Okay here’s an idea if you’ll be so kind as to entertain it.
What if, in the interim, say an athlete’s circumstances change that day & they have more (or less) time to train. Next to, or under the load workout button, they’re presented with a button to change the duration.
Some will use it to say, “Yo, TR! I have more time to train today” then they select a duration, then AI looks at the next 14 days planned, finds the most suitable alternate for a different duration & presents it, or shows a RLGL forecast & says something like “The training load from this duration is expected to negatively impact your next n key workouts. We recommend the current duration, or shorter if possible. Are you sure you want to proceed with a longer workout?”
Or the athlete is saying “Hey TR, I’m time-crunched today. What’s going to hit the same systems & give me the most bang for my buck?”
Takes the thinking out of selecting alternates for those unfamiliar with the purpose of that particular workout. Or for those who are unexpectedly time-crunched.
But please don’t take away the manual selection of alternates!

In my example below (yes I was naughty training on a red day yesterday ), or in the situation of someone on a recovery week, it may also suggest something like “Have a day off the bike today & use the time to get ahead on [insert randomly-selected cycling/health-related ancillary task here].” Or not-so-random: if the athlete has repeatedly cited sleep in recent struggle surveys, it could tell them to nap, or to go to bed earlier tonight.

[JaeTee]

Thanks for sharing that @Nate_Pearson, that’s awesome. It feels like a real next level for planning once it’s sorted. It’s great to see the team is ambitious about building hard but super useful new features.

I’d be curious to hear about planning window vs phasing as well… currently depending on the window (1, 2, or 3+ months) I give CTP, the plan is either consecutive build phases (for 1 or 2 month plans), or a base, build, speciality cycle (for 3+ months). So very different training. I’ve read a couple other comments above that sound related. When the dust settles on the launch, is the goal for the planning output converge on a “true optimum” independently of the planning window? Meaning will the planning be able to be based only on training goal, previous training, and events if any, or will the planning window always fundamentally alter the planning & training approach? If so, might be helpful to have CTP provide some guidance on how to think about that when asking for the planning window. Thanks, JT

[eugeneg]

I deleted the Plan and re-created. All good. The product is fantastic and ever improving.

[AldridgePrior]

I’ve lost track, a little, of issues that people have raised, which ones @Nate_Pearson has acknowledged as valid problems to be fixed vs. intended design, which ones may now have been fixed, which might still be outstanding…

So, at risk of repeating aspects of my initial post on this thread regarding how CTP didn’t work how I’d expect it might, I’m going to re-describe what seems off when I use the new wizard:

1. The volume suggested doesn’t seem to take particularly good account of my history. This might be because it very heavily weights the immediate past vs. it “zooming out a little” and considering a longer timeframe:
eg. I did significant volume across the spring & summer - lots of double-digit to mid-teens hours/wk, 400-700 TSS/week, culminating in a cycling trip late August where I did 2x ~25 hrs/week, 700+ TSS.
That trip was largely easy riding (mainly v low intensity), but I still took a little time off after returning, and have just this week begun adding structure again.
Also, the plan I had CTP build is future-dated by a month (begins in early Nov), so there’s not yet any actual activity data for it to see in the month prior to the plan’s start date.
=> Do these two things explain why the volume suggested by CTP seem low, if I follow the recommended “Balanced” approach?

For example, the following is what CTP spits out for me as a Masters plan under the 5 different Training Approaches:

    Aggressive:    6 days    8:00 hrs   395 TSS
    Demanding:     5 days    5:00 hrs   267 TSS
    Balanced:      5 days    5:00 hrs   267 TSS 
    Moderate:      5 days    5:00 hrs   267 TSS
    Conservative:  4 days    3:45 hrs   211 TSS

Also Note: each of Demanding / Balanced / Moderate all give the same result. Not sure if that’s intentional? Definitely not intuitive.

ㅤ
2. The “Training Approach” and “Workouts per Week” setting don’t seem to work independently, which is unexpected and limiting.

For example, building on what I’ve shown above, if I opt for the “Conservative” approach’s custom plan as a starting point (4 days, 3:45 hrs, 211 TSS), but then use Settings to change “Workouts per Week” to 6, I get this:

     6 days    8:00 hrs   395 TSS

…which as you can see from the list above maps directly to the “Aggressive” approach’s plan .

Or, if I go back and use the slider to actually opt for an “Aggressive” approach as the starting point (6 days, 8:00 hrs, 395 TSS) but then use Settings to change “Workouts per Week” to 4 (eg. I’m requesting similar “aggressive” total volume/load but now spread over fewer days, ie. give me longer duration workouts!), I get this:

     4 days    3:45 hrs   211 TSS

…which as you can see from the list above maps directly to the “Conservative” approach’s plan.

The upshot of this is that “Training Approach” and “Workouts per Week” seemingly cannot be adjusted independently of each other, in the manner you might expect. Of course, you can’t really have a Conservative plan operating over 7 days, or an Aggressive one over 2 days, but there’s a middle ground surely where there’s some independence between these two settings?

For example, what I expected to be able to do was direct CTP to give me a reasonably aggressive plan comprising 4 workouts/week, ie. asking for longer workouts on those 4 days. But no matter the “Training Approach” starting point, as soon as I use Settings to change “Workouts per Week” to 4, the plan I get is simply a Conservative plan equivalent (4 days 3:45 hrs 211 TSS).

Again, apologies if these issues have already been acknowledged and/or work is underway on them!