In addition to the “Compliance rate” metric that @Nate_Pearson discussed in Our Training Plans are Improving, it would be useful to add a “Plan Compliance” metric. Which would track how “compliant” you are to your scheduled workouts over a user defined rolling window (e.g., 3 weeks, 5 weeks, etc.).
My underlying hypothesis is that for a lot (most?) of us, “Plan Compliance” is a better predictor of improvement than which plan / plan volume we are doing. Plus with this you could do some interesting analysis: do I need 8 solid weeks of plan compliance to see gains? More / less? Also, you could analyze something like: is 75% plan compliance to a mid volume plan better for me than 95% compliance to a low volume plan, or vice versa.
I think most of us basically already know how plan-compliant we’ve been. For those who let every uncertainty lead to inflated doubts, do they really need another way to dose themselves with pressure to stick to a plan, and does plan compliance, no matter the other circumstances, always create the best possible result?
Your idea regarding an analysis of varying levels of compliance to varying plans would have neither a control nor enough data to yield meaningful results. If you’re after a comparison between 2 levels of training activity, the weekly TSS in plans is already available and the scalars 75% and 95% can be applied to them. 6-week exponential moving average.
I’ve requested this before and had good feedback, both from TR and from other users but what I’d love to see is a basically a “Seasonal Zones” view as well as the option to view by plan.
For the season view, you could use your same seasons you’ve created in the Power records pages but view it by zones, essentially showing you how much time you spent in the various zones. Obviously, at each FTP update, those zones would change but the time in zone would stay relevant to your FTP at that time, as in Threshold work doesn’t retroactively become Sweet Spot work simply because you grew your FTP during those 8 weeks.
In viewing by “Plan Zones”, it would show me the total time spent in each zone during the plan vs. the total time prescribed. This one is the kicker as I don’t think people realize how much they cut corners, downgrade to a minus version, dial down the intensity, back-pedal or just plain skip a workout here and there. I think we all get to the end of a plan and expect results and then scratch our heads as to why we didn’t get them. Before we know it, we’re on the Ask a Cycling Coach podcast asking whether to use BCAA’s, which sleep mask won’t dry our eyes out and whether to add 3ml of scented candle wax to our chain lube or 4ml when really IT’S BECAUSE WE DID NOT DO THE WORK! At the very least, if anyone is attempting to cancel their subscription they should get a notice showing how little work they actually did so Trainer Road can make it clear who’s fault it is when the results down come.
Don’t forget that they used to have a metric for this before the calendar, there was a bar graph next to the completed plan, but it only tracked skipped workouts. If you swapped a workout, that counted as green, and if you altered or stopped one early, it still counted. While compliance might be a bit much, I do like to use how many times I might need to bail as a judge to see if I’m overreaching or not. Sometimes an ego check also helps… I had my best build since joining TR after manually dropping my FTP by 5 watts at the beginning and thus had near perfect compliance (and good fitness gains) in the plan.
Listening to the last podcast and it was mentioned that “workout compliance” is one of the things monitors by TrainerRoad. Got me thinking, could this be something that is reported at the end of each workout? Better still, at the end of a workout completed outdoors, where compliance is more difficult. Be good to understand how effective an outdoor workout actually was.
I always thought that when they mentioned “workout compliance” they meant how many people actually completed or even attempted the workout in a plan at a more high level. Not necessarily on a more individual level of how closely you accomplished the goals of the workout. Especially because you can look through your average and normalized power for each workout interval and compare it to the prescribed power.
Discussions here with Nate and others touch on personal workout adherence to the overall prescription, as well as overall plans. I expect they are including small and large pictures to better capture the riders’s work, with an eye to if and when to adjust their plan.
Think semi-automated review and suggestions to plans and individual workouts. This and other ideas are all speculation, but with consideration of the comments here and the podcast.
I did track my ‘compliance’ by simply plotting my workout tss/target tss over time. Ideally this would be 100% or a straight line over the course of the training plan. It does a good job of showing how close you stick to your calendar.
Guess I’m thinking of something a bit more specific than just TSS. Garmin does an interesting job with their training effect and I think TrainerRoad could do something similar.
Previously I have just worked out my compliance by printing off the schedule and ticking it off as I went. Actually looking into how closely I complied with the power target sounds like a massive improvement.
This may be a “wish list” item or I may be alone with this idea…or it may already exist.
Is there a way to compare what I actually do against my plan, over an extended period of time. I know each individual workout has the time, KJ, IF & TSS values so you know if you’ve gone as hard as you needed to for as long as you needed to. But if I under perform across a number of workouts that could be a large cumulative gap equally if I consistently over perform across a number that could indicate I need to re-test my FTP.
Is there an appetite or even a need for what I’ve nominally called Training Plan Adherence Metric TPAM?
OK If I wasn’t so busy on my turbo I could get a spreadsheet…and yes I know TSS actual vs TSS planned is on the web page calendar. But that allows me to drop TSS completely on Tuesday and add loads on Saturday - tricking the calendar’s score. Any Podcast listeners will know that “all TSS is not created equal” and to compound this it messes with the sacrosanct mantra of consistency so a weighting would need to be incorporated into the metric.
So for example if you’re with 3% of time, power & IF vs the Training Plan that, for example, counts as 100% a difference of actual vs Training Plan 4-8% counts as +/- 10% then 9%-15% +/- 20%. This will recognise the differential of a high TSS but shorter effort whilst that Workout may hit the correct TSS it will not be consistent with the Training Plan.
Outdoor with a PM would easily transfer across and in the same way as we can guesstimate as TSS we could now guesstimate at IF.
It could be calculated weekly and like CTL be a rolling average so if you slip for 1 week you return to normality and “good” behaviour your TPAM score will drift back in line.
From an app user experience it will help with honesty, there will be nowhere to hide if your TPAM score is only at 52% you you can’t blame Chad or Nate for a poor service and it’ll keep you honest with yourself, for example I soak up long hard rides so get a massive TSS boost, but would like to hide away from the Spanish Needles of the world. This would stop me “cheating” - I don’t I’m a diligent if under performing acolyte.
Suggestions, development of the concept all welcome and if Nate runs with TPAM a beer token so I can enjoy “A Beer with Chad” would be sufficient
A way that it could relatively easily be implemented behind the scenes with TR would be
Time (T) * Z1 vs TZ1p(planned)
TZ2 vs TZ2p
TZ3 VS T*Z3p …etc and a simple histogram as a weekly assessment.
Has a compliance status after finishing a block been introduced at all?
I have finally finished a block where I think I was pretty compliant whilst fitting the workouts into a busy schedule and it would be good to see feedback on that.
