55 non racing but very focused on FTP and performance growth. Very little TR in the summer, More in fall and winter but a lot of outdoor fat biking in the snow (all year outdoor with power meter). I have for the past year felt good about weeks with a TSS of 400-600.
As I enter fall and TR rides I have been using the Ridenow as the selection of workouts in the 60-90 min range…but now that more rides will be indoor I like to use plan builder to lay stuff out. The outdoor rides end up being a regular weeknight and then fair amount of weekends.
How do I intermingle? Should I select a masters, short power build mid volume at 275 weekly tss knowing I will get outdoor rides ranging each between 100 and 250? Or go high volume knowing that I will be swapping out outdoor rides when they happen and TR will deal with it? Or just keep using trainnow on the fly? Issue I have with that is that trainnow uses a different focus depending on day of week vs where I am in my own path.
It depends on what your outdoor riding will look like… do you want to do some of the prescribed workouts outside, or keep them free for endurance rides?
I’ve had good luck mixing MV and LV blocks depending on my outdoor plans. LV leaves time for spirited group rides. MV eats into that time, but works if I want to take some of the workouts outside (or do them all indoor). I tried HV once, and as expected, it was too much (and it says as much when you select it in PB).
TR will use the outdoor rides to calculate weekly training load, it just doesn’t use those free rides to adapt your progression levels. So as long as the unstructured rides are more endurance than race-pace, that’s fine.
thanks for the input. There is one thing I know for sure, when I go outside, due to the nature of MTB and fat biking in snow, there is no way I am going with a plan to match some sort of prescribed effort. Its usually always with a partner or multiple people and the terrain is wildly variable. It is almost for certain to be high TSS though.
I’d probably pick MV in Plan Builder, enter my 2024 events (or at least the first few), and then manually adjust each block (picking slightly longer workouts on the weekend). That should give you 2-3 weekday workouts of 60-90 min each and then 1-2 weekend rides of whatever duration you picked. On the weekends, either do the workouts if the weather stinks, or go have fun outside and don’t worry about the workout.
I’m currently giving Polarized a try, but my weekend rides tend to be 3+ hours moderate/steady pace (and I’m training for a 100 mile gravel race in March, plus assorted XC and other gravel races). I’ve used Sweet Spot plans in the past (renamed to General Base?) but frankly I hate Sweet Spot workouts - I’d rather do fewer higher intensity intervals and then load up on weekend long rides (even if that’s a worse overall plan, I just enjoy it more).
Other athletes have nailed it with the recommendations here.
We tend to advise picking a Low or Medium Volume plan and then working in your unstructured riding around your planned structured workouts. A masters plan could be great too, which would give you even more flexibility to get in your higher TSS outdoor rides on the fatbike.
At this time, Adaptive Training won’t adjust your plan based on your unstructured outside riding, so we’d only recommend associating your outdoor rides with a TR workout if you actually go out and complete the workout as prescribed – otherwise, it can get messy with your Progression Levels and consequent workouts in your plan.
Try to aim for 3 “hard” sessions per week max – so if one of your unstructured outdoor rides winds up being intense, go ahead and replace one of your planned structured workouts with that ride so you don’t pile on too much intensity.
Hope this helps! Feel free to let us know if you have any other questions.
what do you mean by associating your outdoor rides with a TR workout? My outdoor rides show up in TR and are factored into AI FTP as I understood it. Are you saying I should not have my outdoor rides syncing with TR?
If you mark a scheduled TR workout as “outside” prior to uploading an unstructured ride, it will auto-associate the unstructured ride to that TR workout and you will get “credit” for the workout, including progression based on survey, etc. As noted, only do this if the outside ride included the intervals in the workout. It’s basically honor system, TR is not looking at that ride to see if there is any match to the scheduled structured workout.
If you don’t flag the TR ride as outside, there is no link between the 2. The scheduled structured workout will stay on your calendar as uncompleted and your unstructured ride will show in your calendar just like it always has. AI FTP will look at that ride and the TSS will show on your calendar, but adaptive training will ignore it (until they release AT 2.0).
At least that’s how it works for me, there are likely some other ways to work the system that I’m unaware of.
Don’t associate an outdoor ride with a workout (manually or automatically) unless you actually did the workout.
Let’s say it was 20x2 Threshold. Did you go outside and actually ride two 20 minute threshold intervals? If it was 6x3 VO2 Max, did you do 6 x 3 minute VO2 Max Intervals? Did you execute the prescribed intervals in terms of time and power targets? Or did you just “Ride Hard” and shoot for a high NP overall? The latter doesn’t work and doesn’t count as completion of a workout.
It’s a lot easier to execute intervals / workouts on the trainer, and then just do free tempo / endurance / fun volume rides outside.
(Edit - Response was supposed to be to @Chuck_Tatham , Sorry!)
Fellow Mountain Biker here. What I do is keep the quality sessions and delete the rest. My power profile on the MTB resembles more of a seismograph than any thing in the TR library. So if my endurance PL takes a hit so be it. If the weather is bad or get home late and I need to ride on the trainer, I just pick a ride I feel is appropriate for my training needs and fitness level.
I do the same with MTB workouts outside. Say I do 6 x 2 min up a techy XC climb that requires a lot of power… I still don’t associate it. With anything in the TR library. I mentally count it as a hard workout (and mark it hard in the survey) and don’t worry about it. The next workout will keep PLs in the ballpark and if not, I have no problem picking a harder one in Alternates when PLs drop too low.
I think it is important to be flexible in training, and even more so as a mountain biker when skills are so important and need to be practiced as well.
Thanks all, learned a bunch about how TR treats outside rides. @Jolyzara thank you for pointing out the survey on outdoor rides! Didn’t know I could still do that with outdoors. What purpose does it serve? If you don’t do it, I see it times out after 7 days…what is the impact of not giving that input?
Not used today as far as I know, but could be used at some point and might be worth populating if you are already in there. I could see potential benefit of these data points to help shape future individualized training. I might be reading too much into some past podcast comments, but I think the TR team is a proponent of exposing/capturing as many data points as possible for possible future use in their AI tools.
