For the record, I deleted the duplicate post that I presume was made in error or as a result of edits to the original one.
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was trying to fix some typos/missed words. Bottom line is that there’s far more “normal” people that use the app versus full time racers. That user base is what built TR. Don’t throw out great features that many users rely on in the name of progress or to cater to a niche of the userbase or simply because that’s how the coder decides to implement a new feature/function. Add the features WITHOUT scrapping the old.
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That’s a bit aggressive isn’t it?
Anyway, I guess it’s not so easy to just listen to the users. If I “push” a week, I would want to adapt the subsequent weeks (i.e. don’t have two rest weeks now a week apart), but not push the end date out.
Some nuance is required.
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Not aggressive, but the complaints from users have been going for months with only “we’re trying to come up with what we think is the best way for you to now do what you used to do easily”
to your point about adaptation WITH a push, so let them adapt AFTER the push. Push it all out, and then run algos and adapt as necessary. But let the push happen. If i am traveling for a week and I don’t have an event locking the end, push then adapt. if there’s a locking event, ask “do you really want to do this or do you want to just skip training this week”. Either way, adaptation can run on the plan and suggest changes. but if I am doing SSBII, and i want to get all 6 weeks of training, regardless of whether i travel/get covid/get kidnapped, let me push… It’s just software and nothing is impossible with a little bit of code.
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Oh, if I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard that one… 
It’s usually followed 2 months later by the announcement of a major schedule slip in a project review, due to all the “little bit of code” change requests.
This said - I have already said, and I repeat it: the UX of using “annotations” to change a calendar is just awful. There’s a simple trick to determine the best UX method in an app: imagine you’re asking someone else to do whatever you want the app to do. How do you figure the conversation would go? In this case it would be “I need to push the training schedule off by one week, to clear next week”, and the person you’re asking would likely respond either “ok, done”, or “if I do that, it’s messing with your event on such-and-such a date; do you want me to compress the balance of the schedule, or push out the event?”
Edit: forgot to add what the current UX sounds like.
“I need to push the training schedule off by one week”
“Oh, you mean you want to annotate the calendar?”
“Er - no, I want to push a week”
“Well, you need to ask me to annotate your calendar to do that”
“Ok - and if I want to start a workout, do I need to ask you to annotate something to get you to do it?”
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“No, you can’t actually push a week. You can only skip the week, provide a reason in the form of an annotation, and then hope that we can appropriately compensate for it”
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“Just ask me to move the last week of your plan, then the previous week, then the week before that, then the week before that, until you have pushed the way you wanted.”
“Why are you being so difficult?”
“It’s for your own good. One day, you will understand.”
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Very much the point I’ve made earlier: the code behind the annotations path should really be behind the push/pull week functionality. It makes zero sense to put a feature that applies to weeks in a feature that is associated with modifying days.
The code mostly exists - even TR suggest the (extremely clunky) workaround of moving weeks one by one starting from the last.
That’s like “Siri, turn off the lights” being responded with “I’m sorry, I can’t do that. You must ask me to turn the lights off one by one, in the correct order”.
But the “little bit of code” that’s missing is to check if the push has impacts on events, return to the user with the info, ask to confirm or change the request, compress the schedule if needed, etc. Just “a little bit of code”.
@bregan I’m stepping since Ivy is out for the day and I feel your post violates forum guidelines. Placing them below for reference:
- Be excellent to each other
- Challenge the idea, don’t attack the person
- Contribute Constructively
- Don’t break the law
- Keep it tidy
Questioning Ivy’s personal level of experience is closer to a personal attack than a relevant question that will help us arrive to a point of understanding.
As Ivy mentioned, removal of push-week functionality was a deliberate decision made to reduce confusion for our athletes. Looking at the data, very few of our athletes used the push-week functionality, and it was a common source of confusion. It still remains an area we need to improve and it’s on our list of things to do, but it’s important to accurately identify and differentiate what affects few people, and what effects many. We have to prioritize building the features that will enable the majority of our athletes to get faster. As of now, placing refinement of this aspect of the user experience ahead of larger issues would be a disservice to the majority of our athletes.
This tone is rude and demanding of Ivy, our Community Manager, who’s job it is not to build these features. It is not exemplifying “Be excellent to each other” and falls into the lower portion of the constructive debate triangle.
I’m confident there’s room for understanding and civil discussion on this, so let’s reach for that and be respectful. 
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I totally understand where you are coming from Jonathon. I was the one who revived this thread and asked the question as I felt that we were not being answered!
[Feb 14]
Thanks for the feedback!
I get this, and I think our current annotation > time off > Adaptation model works for folks who have a set ‘end date’ event in mind that is rigid, where NOT all of our athletes need to abide by that timeframe at all.
Will pass this along to the team! Cheers."
This issue was passed along to the team February 14th. And I asked the following close to three months later.
I was then responded to the same day.
I did not get the answer I wanted. I have adaptive training enabled. I thought the team was working on a way to give us back push and pull. I too am not satisfied in any way with the annotation system. I want to complete all my workouts even when life gets in the way. HOWEVER, I understand that this is not all about me and accepted that I was not going to get an answer. I understand the annotation system and quite frankly hate it but its a first world problem and am more than willing to live with it. I also understand Ivy is the community manager and does an excellent job giving us the information she can. I posted the following.
"I thought there was going to be a push or pull option or something brought back for those of us on AT. Life comes up. I would like to be able to push or pull and have the plan adapt to it. I would like to still have the option of doing that weeks training a week later and not just miss it.
I guess the annotations is all we have. I must have read the thread incorrectly."
And I gave up on the matter.
Ivy responded with
"It sounds like you’d like to move a particular week of training a week later, even if this week of training isn’t best for you. This was the issue we built for with the new annotations.
We were finding push/pull was getting people’s training off track. Annotations make sure we give you the right workout after your time off so you continue getting faster.
You may end up getting the exact same workout(s) when you’re back from your time off OR Adaptive Training may find a better workout based on fitness changes."
I had already given up at this point. Ivy’s response to me frustrated me a little more. At 53 years old I am not really a racer and up here in Canada our season is incredibly short and if I am lucky I get to race three times a season. I am more of a trainer for health and fitness than I am a racer.
At 53 I think I have earned the right to choose what is best for me and my program.
“It sounds like you’d like to move a particular week of training a week later, even if this week of training isn’t best for you.” I would hope that I should be allowed to have some input in deciding what is best for me. I understand your algorithm thinks it knows what is best for me BUT what is best for my mental health and well being? If I am training for health and fitness and not really racing I personally get upset/angry and a little depressed when I do not get the opportunity to do all my workouts. Your software is designed to make everyone faster. That is awesome. I want to be faster but realistically I am a cat 5 racer. When I race cat 5 I am racing in the 17 to 75 age group. How much am I going to actually be able to compete in this race. I enjoy it… But Most likely I am going to get yanked from the race before it is even over. Because of this it is mostly the training and riding outside that rewards me.
As I said, I had left the topic as I realized that Ivy was unable to give me an answer to the question that I asked. I realized all I was going to get was a solution that trainer road had chosen for this issue that did not fit my needs or the needs of many other users. I did not feel like flogging a dead horse.
Today is my first day looking at this topic as I had a notification on it.
“As Ivy mentioned, removal of push-week functionality was a deliberate decision made to reduce confusion for our athletes. Looking at the data, very few of our athletes used the push-week functionality, and it was a common source of confusion. It still remains an area we need to improve and it’s on our list of things to do, but it’s important to accurately identify and differentiate vocal minorities and silent majorities. We have to prioritize building the features that will enable the majority of our athletes to get faster. As of now, placing refinement of this aspect of the user experience ahead of larger issues would be a disservice to the majority of our athletes.”
- I disagree greatly on this. It would be interesting to know how many users are top shelf racers vs the rest of us normal human beings.
- Very few users used the push pull week as very few of us actually needed to use it in the past. I only used it one time I think in the past when I had hernia surgery. In the past the world was a normal place. We had races, events and could go anywhere on earth without issues. That was before 50 versions of covid. That has changed cycling and many things for the entire planet. Covid has affected your user base more than any one thing that has happened since the founding of your company. Quite frankly I feel your algo cannot fully compensate on how this pandemic will affect all of your users!!! Many of us want the opportunity to keep some sense of empowerment and control of our lives and our training as there are already so many things outside of our control.
I asked a question. It really was not answered… I will go back to being a member of your silent minority now. I just wanted to explain where I and maybe a lot of users are coming from.
I do not agree with began’s wording or approach in dealing with this issue. However he was very clear in what many of us feel on the matter. I do not want an explanation of how to do something I do not want to do that does not serve my purpose. I want an actual solution to my problem. HOWEVER I know I am not going to get a solution to my problem as it has been made perfectly clear that myself and riders like me are not the users you are catering to. I fully accept that. Love the product. Love the podcast. Love everything you all do for us users. I love everything you all including IVY bring our way.
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@Jonathan it looks like there’s a disconnect between the two sides. As stated by myself and others the (more advanced - see below) functionality is now accessed in the wrong place.
An analogy: imagine if Microsoft moved the “Save as” functionality in their programs from the File menu to the Edit menu. That’s effectively what TR have done with moving a weekly feature to one accessed via a daily interface. That’s what the complaints are about.
The dialog shows global, daily and weekly modifications (yuch!) and from the “Add an Annotation” short description it’s not obvious if it can be used for adding a week or ten days of illness, vacation, etc.
I realise that it’s incredibly difficult to fit increasing amounts of functionality into a “simple” interface and to some extent the user does need to “explore” a bit but the hamburger menu is now a standard feature on websites and those three dots sit next to the week number whereas the annotations dialog is hidden unless you click on an empty part of a day or the big blue plus sign at the foot of the screen.
Obviously you have access to more data than we do regarding how us users interact with the features and will/should have an idea of how both methods have been used. You say that the push/pull feature didn’t get used much but there can be different reasons for that: not knowing it was there; not actually needing it; etc. On the forum side I can recall many more questions asking how to insert/move a week since moving to the Annotations method than using the Push/Pull method so anecdotally at least it appears harder to locate/use.
I used the push/pull functionality a couple of times and have used the Annotations functionality, I think once, maybe twice. All cases were “push” rather than “pull” (from memory).
Annotations are more flexible than a simple Push - the latter simply took the scheduled start date of each workout and added 7 days to it. I remember that there were checks so that you couldn’t move the current week but apart from that it was pretty simple. Annotations let you move things by however many days you want and let you specify start and end dates. The reason for the delay probably feeds into AT.
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Hey ya’ll. There’s some confusion in this thread so I wanted to clarify a couple things.
There are two different cases we’re talking about:
- Training plans managed by Adaptive Training (either by Plan Builder or adding a plan to your calendar).
- Training plans you created yourself (either on TR or through TP or another source)
I’ll go through each of the use cases and how they work today.
Training plans managed by Adaptive Training
“Push Week” Pros:
- Life can happen. If you can’t train for a week you want to be able to push that week of training so that you don’t skip workouts in your progression and get a harder workout the next week.
“Push Week” Cons:
- You can only push a week at a time. So if you were only not training for a few days, 10 days, 18 days, etc; you couldn’t push the workouts correctly.
- You could mess up your work/recovery/taper cycle depending on which week you pushed.
“Delete Week” Pros:
- Easily delete a week of training
“Delete Week” Cons:
- Same as above (you’re effectively saying you don’t want to work out this week, but it has to be a week at a time and you could mess up your cycle)
“Pull Week” Pros:
- If you pushed a week out, you can “undo” that by pulling a week.
“Pull Week” Pros:
- Same as above
New Time Off
You can push weeks by setting Time off on your Calendar. This does the exact same thing as push/delete weeks. And deleting the time off does a “pull week”, but also gives you:
- Flexibility to plan to skip workouts that don’t follow directly into a 7-day period. IE you can have 5 days of time off during the mid-week but still work out on the weekend.
- Automatic understanding and adjustment of work/recovery/taper cycle so you don’t accidentally get a week off than a week of recovery.
- Automatic adjustment of decay of progression levels. If you schedule 17 days of time off, Adaptive Training will bring you back at an easier level than if you just missed 6 days.
- Feeds Adaptive Training information that you planned to miss these workouts rather than skipping them for another reason (tired, busy, life stress, etc).
- If you delete time off, it’s the same as “pulling” a week. But you get the flexibility of having that be just a few days or a ton of days. You’re not limited to 7 days.
- Everything adapts the exact same way, so in most cases (but not all), if you push out a week you’ll be doing those same workouts a week later.
tldr; Time Off gets you the same features as push/pull/delete week but more flexibility and control.
Training plans you made yourself
If you put each workout on your calendar yourself and used push/pull/delete to move your plan around things have changed. You’ll have to manually move/delete workouts.
We made this decision based on data. We looked at the usage of those buttons over a three-month period. Out of the hundreds of thousands of interactions on the calendar that we recorded, push/pull/delete each had about 200 interactions.
Then if you look at 92%+ of our athletes who have plans on their calendar are using Adaptive Training, and that Time Off gives you more flexiblity/control compared to the old “push/pull/delete”, we were looking at around 20-30 interactions per month (out of 100,000+) to maintain a feature and add confusion between push/pull/delete and Time Off.
We should have done better messaging around why we did this and how the new way is better. I also understand if you’re like @AlphaDogCycling and only have custom workouts brought in by Training Peaks that you’ll have to manually adjust your plan and it’s not a two-click solution anymore.
So it’s still possible to do the same thing before for those 20-30 interactions, but now you have more clicks.
If there are a lot of people upset still, we could make the drop-down options come back and when you “push” a week, we could just have that add one week of Time Off automatically.
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Thank you for your very detailed response Nate.
My confusion and it seems the confusion of other users is that when we add an annotation we get no feedback. It seems that adding the annotation does nothing at all. I believe you that something is happening. But it would be nice to see what happened when I added the annotation.
Am I just not paying attention to what is going on OR is it all behind the scenes???
Thank you!
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Thanks for the detailed explanation, and the time to write it. From this, it sounds generally like you are only solving for the use case of people using Plan Builder, and actively removing functionality for people who manually create plans. I’m not arguing with is this rationale, just trying to understand the overall thinking at a higher level than this one item.
If the above is correct, another solution (though it could add complexity) would be to only enable the push / pull functionality for people who actively enable it (e.g., similar to Early Access features. Maybe add an “Advanced Options” section).
Another use case with having the manually push / pull: those of us working on coming back from C19 (but this could be anything thing. E.g., Knee issues, surgery, sickness in general), where we aren’t using plan builder - doesn’t make sense - and need to take things a day at a time.
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tldr; If you choose Time Off, illness, or injury, then the plan adapts. If you choose notes, then the plan does not look at it.
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I would change the word a little bit and say we’re solving for Adaptive Training (and removing confusion for that. Since the usage on the other say was so so little, we removed the “easy-click” way and those people have to do more work now.
I’ve thought about this a bit. The push/pull stuff does have some edge cases with Adaptive Training that complicate things and we’d kind of move the problems to a different area.
So if we did do it, we’d only want it available for people who don’t have plans on with Adaptive Training. And then that could cause confusion for people about why it’s not showing on their calendar on some weeks but it is on others.
If you’re taking things one day at a time, maybe just delete the upcoming weeks and manually pick each workout as they come up?
I’m all for coming up for a solution for the non-adaptive training peeps as long as it doesn’t make the adaptive training experience worse for everyone else.
I’m trying to think of a way to do this…but I don’t know how. I’m open to discussing it though and if we need to do a call I’m available for that too.
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Having recently contracted Covid, and for other holiday trips etc in the past, the Annotation system has worked really well. One suggestion I’d have, or improvement, though I have no idea how tricky it is to initiate, is that it has great value for shifting or altering rest weeks, but the system needs to know to change the subsequent rest week if it’s within x-period.
For example, I schedule a rest week for the school holidays the week before my planned rest week, could AT then shift my planned one to be four days mid next block or something? Or ask if I’m ok doing an extra week in the next block 
. I know this is no simple solution as everyone is different so I don’t envy you here.
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This is a solution, but it has the effect of making TR a not very good planning tool for manually created plans. That is: if I know that if something comes up, and I’m on a manually created plan, the only way to adapt the plan is to delete the out weeks and re-create them, this would push me (using the royal “me”) to not plan out to far in advance in TR / find a different planning solution and just use TR to execute the workout of the day.
The other option would be to have Time-off, Illness, Injury work for manually added workouts just like they do with Plan Builder workouts. That is: If I have manually added workouts to my calendar for the next 4 months, and I add a "Time Off’ which starts on Thursday, May 25 and runs for 7 days, it would push everything from May 25 onward out by 7 days.
Minor UI comment on Annotation Colors: it would be great if one could set the default colors for Notes, Time-Off, Illness, and Injury as different colors. That would make reviewing past seasons much easier, as (for example) if I’m scrolling through my calendar and see a note in red, I would know that I was sick for the period covered in that annotation period. And it would increase my consistent use of color for different annotation types.
So if I’m using AT and take time off using an annotation and nothing adapts does that mean that something is broken or that the system decided that nothing needs to be adapted? As I said in my earlier post I’ve tried annotations several times with what appears to be no changes.
Incidentally my husband (also using AT) is sick and tried to add a notation today to take the week off and he got no changes either. Had to manually make changes to his program as his scheduled rest week is next week and all it did was delete his rides for this week with no further changes.
If it were working properly what should we expect to see?