Regardless of how easy I try to go, I can’t seem to do a gravel or MTB ride outside without getting a red or yellow light the next day. I live in a pretty hilly area, so staying in Z2 through the whole ride is virtually impossible. Typically try to keep my HR <150 with it occasionally up around 160 (167 threshold HR for reference). This is a typical week, where Monday is a rest day and Sunday is Alpine ski, but isn’t recorded.
Any thoughts? I want to trust the system, but doing the plan as prescribed doesn’t feel like that hard of a load and following the adaptations reduces my hours and TSS for the week.
Edit: also got a yellow light on Friday despite sticking to the plan for prior rides.
I guess the work-around is to ignore and reject any proposed adaptations to the plan that the system throws up if you’re confident you’ve not dug a fatigue hole for yourself that will bite you later on in the block.
I think it’s probably a fairly common thing that outdoor TSS hits harder in the system than the structured indoor workouts. Not entirely sure why, but could be a combo of different PMs and of course the very common experience that outdoors riders can put out a bit more power due to better cooling
Yep. All my outdoor rides generate red or yellow days. They all have a TSS and IF that are significantly higher than the TR workouts. IMO, the TR plan does not adapt appropriately for these outdoor rides. I’ve tried taking a TR workout, identifying it as a Solo Ride, then associating the completed ride with it. Despite the outdoor ride being somewhat similar in intent to the TR workout and having a higher TSS and IF, it does not change PLs even though completing the workout would have. The only adaptation I see after an outdoor ride is cancelling an existing workout a resulting red day.
Do today’s workout in such a way that it doesn’t impact your next workout.
It’s not really about the plan or how hard it feels or doesn’t feel, it’s about your body recovering and adapting from the workouts in a beneficial way.
If it were me, I’d keep the solo ride under 100TSS, but you’re not me.
I must have moved my Training approach up a notch last year most of my regular rides last year never triggered RLGL, although I’ve had a few yellow ones this year after longer rides.
It’s looking at the training stress in comparison to what you typically do. And training stress is cumulative, so it’s often the combination of multiple workouts triggering yellow or red. Ramp up volume gradually and it’s very hard to trigger red even if you are doing 300 tss days and 1000+ tss weeks. And I wouldn’t hesitate to do an easy endurance ride on a yellow day, just listen to your body. I actually triggered a yellow this past Thursday on my interval day and knocked it out fine. That’s very rare for me, just the way the week played out. Yellow is just a warning to be careful.
Trust the system over time, not for any particular day or workout. If your legs feel OK after an outdoor workout, and you do another decent ride the next day, the system supposedly “learns” from that.
RLGL is suggestive only…..it is throwing up a warning flag saying “hey….just be careful here”. At the risk of paraphrasing a certain ex-poster here it is “suggestive, not prescriptive”.
I think part of the problem is quick ramp ups in TSS. I would like to think my body handles them better than most, but that could be the reason for the yellow lights.
I just started TR and have only completed two workouts. Doing the Mohican 100k mtn bike race on May 17th, so I am still in bas training. The AI said my ftp is 198. My first workout was 1.5 hour and the 2nd was 3 hours at around 110w avg. My HR was hovering just below 100bpm and there was no HR drift in either workout. Riding in upstate NY I have to really take it easy to keep my HR in the 120’s. My wife saw my TSS scores on Strava and said to me if I am going to ride that easy I needed to do more chores around the house! Hopefully the workouts will get harder.
If you want to get behind the curtains a bit on measuring/monitoring training stress, consider loading your rides into intervals.icu. It’s free (or you can donate) and can be easily linked to strava to keep everything synced w/ outside rides and TR workouts. It will show you exactly how your training stress is trending and also how that balances with recovery. The red/yellow alerting in TR is similar to following your stress balance in intervals.icu (it’s called “form” in intervals). You are basically trying to keep in the narrow green “optimal” zone when training, don’t go in the red for too long at a time, and then let yourself recovery into “fresh” as you peak for your events. And yeah, I’ve been in the red a bit, but it’s worked OK for me as long as allowing proper recovery.
Hmm, that’s the opposite of what I see. I’m dipping into the red frequently in intervals, but rarely see a red day in TR (but plenty of yellow). And they are directionally aligned for me. Without knowing how TR is measuring/triggering, it’s hard to speculate why you are triggering red. How long is your history with TR? All I can think is it doesn’t have a good prior data set for comparison and assumes your stress is starting lower than it is. If training stress is consistent or ramping gradually, it doesn’t seem right and I’d recommend reaching out to TR support.
Realistically, the wonky RLGL is probably a function of being pretty inconsistent from November to February due to illness, travel, and injury. I’m about 5 weeks in to being more consistent. I’ll give it some time and see if it settles down. Thanks for your insights.
That makes sense. Still a little surprised that it’s not somewhat aligned with intervals, but I believe TR uses a non-weighted rolling 6 week TSS average for it’s “CTL equivalent” while Intervals uses actual weighted CTL (which gives more weighting to recent stress). Assuming TR uses that thier non-weighted approach and input for it’s Red/Yellow alerts, it would make sense that it may be slower to recognize current fitness levels.
