That doesn’t square with my experience. Now I don’t know whether I qualify as elite or not.
TR’s value has nothing to do with erg mode. Before getting an Elite Suito, I had a direct drive fluid dumb trainer for years, and used it with TR exclusively.
I still use my smart trainer in resistance mode for everything except Z2 workouts and occasionally longer rest intervals.
TR can be used and be valuable in a variety of ways. It is a workout library and workout player. And you can use AT to adapt automatically generated training plans.
Could many of us replicate that in a low-tech, low-budget fashion. Sure. But to me that’s like replacing Excel with a calculator.
I find the TR forums and podcasts very helpful but a Zwift subscription is a better value for me. Never used erg mode and rarely create any workouts.
I like to simulate outdoors as best as I can, long intervals on hills with gradient changes etc. I think if you can’t remember the workout in your mind it’s too complicated.
Re: no place for “elite cyclists”… does that even matter? An elite athlete needs much more volume than TR is going to serve up, so they’re not using it anyway. For your 3, 3.5, 4W/kg people? Yeah, erg is fine.
I am not an expert in training, but from everything I have digested from books, forums, articles, etc… essentially says that consistency in training one of the top (if not the top) practice in getting faster. So…having a tool that helps you nail one of the most important training techniques? Seems like a pretty good ROI to me!
Trainerroad is /was £20 a month last time I cancelled, which factors into all this.
There are only a few types of intervals sessions that anyone needs to do, they don’t change and they’re not that complicated. They just need to be scaled to % of your ftp.
That isn’t worth 20 quid a month.
TrainerRoad has hundreds of very complicated interval sessions, which could probably be boiled down to under 10. It’s meaningless complexity.
Also, so far, the ai component has no clothes, doesn’t do much at all as far as I can see other than occasionally let you skip an ftp test.
It gamifies things a little bit with the progress levels, which works well for some people, but the app isn’t radically changing or developing every month, and the hardware I connect to it hasn’t changed in years, so isn’t onerous to support.
I mean they’re at a far higher level in terms of competition, they’re serious athletes who ran a conti team until recently.
And Jessie finished top 5 in the elite road nationals in Australia.
They’re coming from a different place to most cyclists.
Also, being sassy and opinionated (and wrong) to the point that people argue with you in the comments is 50% of what it takes to become a pro YouTuber!
It was just over £17pcm last month after the pound recovered from the Liz Trust debacle. I get where you are coming from though and if pushed I’d set up a VO2max, Threshold and Endurance workouts in Garmin Connect or something but I prefer the variability of TR workout wise and not having to think to deeply about training. I don’t treat PL’s as gamified items rather items to allow AI to adapt my plan correctly. Correctly using PL’s means AI is much more than just skipping FTP tests. I’m also no coach but their plans rather than being static are supposed to adapt and be structured towards a target. The plans and calendar have probably adapted a bit since you last used TR at £20pcm. Much more over that would break the price elasticity for me and I would resort to manual stuff like you say to get me by.
The same applies to coaches and other services. Getting the ramp rates and the mix of workouts right doesn’t seem so obvious to me. For efficient data analytics I’d need to subscribe to TP or similar, which costs similar money.
Is there an ERG thread somewhere already? I’m wondering why ERG mode would be bad? I get it if you never ride in the real world and therefore have no idea how to regulate your power or what different zones really feel like. But I do have that ability and I still like ERG for most workouts in the winter except for things like 15/15’s or 30/30’s.
Don’t worry about whether you use it or not, your body doesn’t know the difference only your mind. Just done rely on it 100% of the time come race season.
The Zwift training plans are not great (though they are quite a bit better than they were), and their a la carte workouts are absolute dogfood. Their “60 minutes to burn” workouts can be something dumb like 2x20 at sweet spot or 2x15 at threshold and holy cow giving that to someone not familiar with structured training should be against the law.
For me, TR’s “Train Now” function along with Progression Levels has been an absolute godsend for me. I can train around my schedule based on how much time I have on a given day and/or how I’m feeling, while still making progress. As much as I wish that we still had a guiding hand like we did with Chad, I have to admit that the machine learning and progression levels has really turned TR into something I depend on for my training.
I haven’t looked at the Zwift training plans much but recently just want a workout on there for mostly endurance with just a few interval spikes just because I’m recovery from illness and wanted to test out how a bit intensity felt. But man the a la carte workouts have so many interval intensity’s jammed into one workout. I know in the past that zwifts intent somewhat was to keep things interesting for users. But it seems like they think everybody has ADHD and needs constant changes throughout the workout.
I agree TrainNow and PL are nice features especially for those of use who want the flexibility or just don’t want a plan
You could say that it’s an over complicated set of workouts, and there are plenty of athletes that don’t mind repeating the exact same workouts week in/week out. There’s a lot of people that want to follow a line up and down, or don’t want to see the same workout in a block.
If you compare platforms, TR has the streamlining of getting into your workout down to a fine art. Almost everything else requires you to create something, or to manually add a workout you’ve got stored from previous efforts.
Of course, value is a personal thing, and the monthly TR sub is a lot, but when you go and compare the other options there’s not as many as you think that are similar.
ERG mode is not bad. As others have said, your body doesn’t really know what it is.
Using it 100% of the time however, definitely not ideal.
There are numerous situations when it’s very beneficial to totally control your power output. Additionally, the faster you can upskill your endurance training knowledge the faster you’ll come to the same conclusion that most highly experienced coaches/athletes come to.
You could probably get to 99.99999999% of your best fitness with just 6 to 8 different interval sessions. Everything else is just lipstick. It’s to promote compliance. Folks in their garages staring at a number. Make number more variable. More folks stare at number…
Having a large workout library is a huge aspect TRs business.
They don’t have a virtual world to provide stimulation. They leave that to the user to sort out.
Personally, I think it would be very wise to partner up with the best available platform. TR would have a VERY compelling platform if they had a virtual environment. On a personal level, I’m not tied to Zwift at all. If TR bought IndieVelo or something similar and applied the same high quality job to the virtual platform as they do to their other products. I’m pretty sure I’d be very likely candidate to swap platforms. Even though I don’t need their training plans etc.
I’m actually very surprised it hasn’t already happened.
no erg for me also.