Hello,
Im starting to dip my toe in the trainnow world and really enjoying the flexibility. I was wondering if there is any plan to add a drop down or way to select difficulty at the top (Right under the time dropdown). Some days when you just want achievable or productive it would be nice to see your options for the difficulty you want across the 3 categories. Secondly I think it would awesome to have sliders at the bottom of the 3 options. For example in climbing you can choose sweet spot or threshold workouts, attacking - vo2 or anaerobic, endurance - endurance or tempo. Sometimes I find myself refreshing a bunch until I land on exactly what I want. I do understand the appeal just jumping on a seeing what is recommended and I could see a the case that you don’t want to just pick what you want to do all the time. So maybe it could be something you have to enable if you want it. Or after 3 refreshes it is something that gets enabled so you can drill into what you want specifically. Maybe this sort of defeats the appeal of train now but I think it would be nice to have sort of a workout filter list with the “AT backend” as some guardrails inside of trainnow as well.
Curious what other peoples thoughts are and how people are getting the most out of the TrainNow Life.
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I am a mountain biker in an area where there are frequent trail closures for weather. If the weather is good, I hit the trails. When trail conditions (or schedule) won’t allow a trail ride, I use Train Now. I love it. Trying to follow a plan with weather driving my decisions was impossible. Train Now takes all that into account and I have seen some good gains from it. For me it is the absolute best feature on TrainerRoad.
I love train now and i like the slider thing…be rad if they did that for difficulty (TSS slider) and time (instead of the drop down). When it comes to difficulty if i don’t feel like a “hard” climbing or threshold WO i usually just choose endurance.
the only thing that i wished it really did was to look at your calendar and if you have a race coming up it would schedule appropriately
Thanks for the suggestion, all!
This is truly what Plan Builder is meant to accomplish, TrainNow isnt currently set up to be a standalone program to keep goals in mind, rather just to a) supplement Plan Builder, or b) allow athletes who arent on a training plan to select workouts in their preferred difficulty on the fly. 
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Thanks Ivy,
yep understand, and really one of the beautiful things about TrainNow is in its simplicity. Adding all these features/want-list would/could marginalize this aspect of it.
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I would love to see a 3x3 matrix (endurance, threshold, vo2) x (achievable, productive stretch). TN could still highlight a preferred/recommended workout like it does now, but you’d be able to see a more diverse set of options.
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I remember @Jonathan mentioning in a podcast that, at that time, he had no active goals and was using TrainNow to maintain his fitness. I did wonder how he was achieving any form of balance, given the limited range of options presented by TrainNow. Having additional sliders/filters for difficulty and perhaps also energy system would allow people to use this feature more constructively as a tread water option, rather than just to fill a gap or supplement etc…
Of course, this starts to get towards going into Workouts and using the filters. But having some form of suggestion with slightly wider yet more specific guide rails…
Following a plan is really difficult for me in my current life, I really love TrainNow. I’ve quit second guessing it’s recommendations, it’s smarter than me, lol!
It would be even better if it could incorporate future goal events. For example, I’m targeting a criterium in July. If TN could combine that information with its knowledge of what I’ve done and my current training fatigue it would be even more powerful.
For example, instead of just prescribing a VO2 workout, it would be able to specify one that was more aligned with the Criterium Plan rather than say the Rolling Road Race Plan. I also feel that recommendations would be altered for the better, knowing that I was aiming to build and taper for an event
Got it. So just for clarification so that I can pass along the appropriate feedback to the team, you want TrainNow to operate within the scope of Adaptive Training and Plan Builder, to a degree but with the flexibility of TrainNow. Meaning when you’re presented with TrainNow options, you’re being moved towards a very specific discipline and goal that you identify based on an entered event. Does that cover it?
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Yes! That’s a brilliant articulation.
Background- Masters, 75 minute Z2 daily commute. Weekly crits or track racing. 2X week strength. I’ve tried following LV plan, but when I factor in the odd weekend race/group ride/social ride/course recon/etc I’m subbing more workouts than I’m completing. TN lets me plug in a bit of quality when I can - works well for me. But it could work better if HAL knew what I had upcoming. Maybe push me a little harder with VO2 instead of SS in build up, or maybe dial it back closer to event. Not sure. Thanks for considering this
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Awesome! Will check in with the team about this, keep up the good work. You’re crushing it. 