Red Green Light reactivity

Training
1

Hi,
I recently rejoined TR after my injury and I am getting used to the new red/green light feature.
Today after my daily commute I checked my calendar and the day was green and showing my planned workout for today. Tomorrow also appeared green. Since I had time, and felt good I did my SS workout, and found it easy enough ( moderate). But at the end of the workout tomorrow turned red.
I can’t rest tomorrow as I am commuting by bike but I will keep it cool. However, I find this pretty annoying. How was I to know that tomorrow would turn red after a planned workout? AT did not propose me to change the workout or skip it.

Is this a bug?

thanks

Dave

2

here is a screenshot from my calendar. I actually rested completely yesterday and the day before. So I fail to see how tomorrow should be a mandated rest day.
According to interval.icu I am at the top of the gray zone

Screenshot 2024-05-22 at 20.31.50
Screenshot 2024-05-22 at 20.31.50789×563 29.1 KB

3

Hey Dave!

Welcome back! Excited to hear about the progress you’ll make with Red Light Green Light (RLGL) :laughing:!

I had a look at your Calendar, and I’m seeing that you have a Yellow day tomorrow. Can you try refreshing the page to see if you’re now seeing a Yellow day too?

Let me know, and I’ll look into this if you continue to see differently on your end.

Why is RLGL showing a lot of Red and Yellow Days as you’re getting back into training after time off/injury?

RLGL uses data from your training history to assess how much stress you can productively manage at a given time. The amount of stress you can productively manage will change with consistent training and as your fitness improves.

If you haven’t been training as much or as intensely in recent times due to injury, RLGL will adapt your training so that you are progressively adding training volume and instensity at a sustainable and productive rate.

What if you feel that you are able to prioritise recovery, and therefore able to handle a more aggressive progression?

You can adjust how aggressive your progression is in your account settings.

  • Sign in at TrainerRoad.com
  • Go to Account
  • Click on Adaptive Training
  • Cick on Training Approach settings

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Good luck with your return to training! Let us know if you have any other questions about this :slight_smile: .

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4

@SarahLaverty I’m having a similar issue, although I’m not “returning to training” just returning to triathlon. TR gives me scheduled workouts for the week. I follow the prescribed schedule and keep having my long run days, and other days turn up red. Why would TR prescribe work that will result in red days? Why not prescribe easier work, that won’t result in red days if compliant with the plan? The long run/rides are my bread and butter workouts, really need to get these done. I’ve been ignoring RLGL until I have a rest day lately because of this. I lost like 3 weeks of long runs trying to comply with RLGL. I read on another thread that maybe it wasn’t great for multi sport just yet?

BTW, I LOVE the product. Just having a hard time getting used to RLGL with the multisport plans.

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5

Looking into this for you, now @DanF! :slight_smile:

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6

Dear @SarahLaverty
thank you for your reply.
I just refreshed the page and tomorrow (May 23) is still red.

7

Thanks for bearing with me while I looked into this @DanF!

First off, returning to triathlon will naturally cause a significant increase in training stress- you’re juggling 3 sports as opposed to 1! With that said, there is only so much stress you can productively add, regardless of where that stress comes from. It may just take some time to adapt to that and settle in.

My next thought - are you following the Training Plan exactly as prescribed?

I’m seeing quite a lot of extra activities.
This is not a problem per se (we want you to do what you enjoy too!), but the training stress does add up and something has got to give.

Either your workouts are adjusted by RLGL orrrr you accumulate an unproductive level of fatigue :upside_down_face:.

If I look further down your Calendar, it looks like it was the latter?:eyes:

I can see an annotation on the 8th and 9th of May that says you were sick/ feeling tired. Perhaps that might not have happened if you had accepted the adaptations? It’s hard to know.

While the cause of sickness can be out of our control, it is very often a consequence of doing too much, getting run down and therefore unable to fight the bug.

During the week that you were sick, your TSS decreased by more than half. RLGL will use that information to determine how much training stress you can handle moving forward.

My suggestion for you moving forward?

Accept the adaptations from RLGL. Let yourself settle into a consistent training rhythm. You will progressively be able to handle more training stress without interruptions from sickness or injury. Be patient until you get there.

If you feel like you would like your progression to be more aggressive, adjust the settings as I described above, as opposed to ignoring the adaptations. Remember, this has been designed to make you faster! :slight_smile:

I hope this helps! Let us know if you have any other questions!

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8

And so glad you LOVE the product!! :heart_hands: :heart_hands: :face_holding_back_tears:

I’m certain you will equally LOVE RLGL once you experience what it can do for your cycling performance! :muscle:

1 Like
9

Thank you for taking such a deep look into this for me! I’ll take this all into consideration moving forward.

10

Ah, that discrepancy was due to some settings I had adjusted on my account earlier. So not to worry! All is looking good :).

Like I mentioned earlier, RLGL has taken into consideration data from your recent training history as you have been returning to training. Today, you did more than double the volume that was prescribed by your Training Plan, which is why tomorrow was tipped over to a Red day. I realise this was your commute but it is still a stress on your body, and will impact your ability to recover.

Is it possible for you to do your scheduled workouts on your commute so that the commute doesn’t add so much additional training volume?

11

You are so welcome! All the best with your training :muscle:

12

Dear @SarahLaverty there is still something I do not understand.
I resumed training with two legs off trainerroad in week 15. During weeks 16, 17 and 18, I progressively increased power and did respectively 5, 8 and 6 hours per week. Then I had a 10 day break because of travelling. So no workouts (but I was still somewhat active) during week 19.
On week 20, I did 4.5h even if I started mid-week. And now at week 21, I get a red day after 2 hours of training in the first half of the week. I am having a hard time understanding the logic behind this.

13

You know your body right? RLGL is not mandatory. Why not reduce the slider as mentioned above and see how that looks? Or you could even turn it off if you wished.

15

yep, that’s what I am doing. But still I generally like TR’s suggestions. So I would like to 1) figure out why they seem to go against logic in this case and 2) possibly improve the feature through my feedback, and 3) avoid doing too much :wink:

16

You did a planned workout and then a number of outside rides, stacking up to approx 140 TSS. Obviously can’t see your training history but I expect, to the machine, it looks like you’ve had a hard day compared to what might be “normal”.

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17

Hey Davide,
@Crownan hit the nail on the head :hammer: :raised_hands: .

On Wednesday, your commute was over 1 hour in total. Then you completed a 1 hour Sweet Spot Workout. For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to use TSS for easy comparison, but please note RLGL consider more than TSS.

You Training Plan prescribed 60 TSS yesterday. You completed 138 TSS, which is 230% of what we thought was optimal. Not only was that way more than what was optimal, it is almost double the TSS you have recorded in one day in the last 12 weeks. In addition, you’ve had only a few days of structured training under your belt.

As I mentioned earlier, RLGL is working to ensure that as you return to training after injury, you are progressing at a productive rate so that you can make consistent progress.

18

@SarahLaverty , question for ya about the color prediction…
Is this purely going off TSS or does this look at time in zone, hr, etc? Looking back at my last few days, I had a 130ish TSS sunday ride, monday zwift recovery ride(not sync’d to TR), tuesday threshold intervals (97 TSS), weds “easy-ish ride” (73 tss…1:15 long ride, majority in z2 HR, had some power spikes from hills and whatnot). Today its recommending yellow. Purely off TSS, its a bit higher than my last few months have been but Id hardly call 1:15 z2 heart rate ride “taxing” on the system. Does the system recognize 77tss at z2 is easier than 77tss threshold, or is it simply looking at overall tss? Thanks!

19

well the machine

Blockquote

Thanks for the explanation. But if I look at the overall weekly TSS it is not greater than what I had before. My 230% TSS came after two days of complete rest, so I was indeed fresh, and the workout indeed did not feel taxing at all.
So I am wondering whether I shouldn’t just listen to my body, and use RLGL as just as a mere suggestion.

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20

And I have another question. How does RLGL determine my TSS was too high. Is it based on my TSS in previous weeks or is it based on the prescribed TSS for my TR plan?

21

I’m only guessing but I think its based on your previous weeks looking at my calendar. I’m on a LV masters plan and one of those wo is often replaced by a short club TT so my target TSS is quite low but I consistently do more riding on top of that and things only go yellow. I think is it was based on target TSS rather than typical TSS there would be a lot of red in my calendar.

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