I’ll start by saying that I’ve used TR for 6 years and have experienced the best performance of my triathlon career. Adaptive Training really changed the game for me, workouts now flowed from my actual performance and were a quantum leap from before.
Then came Red Light/Green Light.
At first, it seemed like another improvement, warning me if I was on the verge of overdoing things either because a workout that was supposed to be easy suddenly felt hard or because I added in something extra that the plan hadn’t factored in. I followed the instructions of every “light” and again, had a solid triathlon year. This year, however, I threw in a change that the light system wasn’t able to handle. I began to substitute a 30-40 minute bodyweight strength routine in place of a scheduled swim. I didn’t delete the swim workout, I just skipped it as I wanted TR to adapt my swim training based on skipping the workouts. Well, RLGL would set the next day to RED every single time! I find it hard to believe that a 30 minute strength routine (bodyweight, no less) would be more stressful than the prescribed 45-60 min swim session. I plan to get around this issue by setting my Adaptive setting to “aggressive” (which did seem to eliminate those guaranteed red days) but it makes me doubt the accuracy of RLGL if it can’t properly account for the stress of a strength workout.
I can’t remember which podcast I heard this - so please take it with a grain of salt - I think it was the EF eductation first pod - anyways they basically said that Strength training can be considered to be on the same level as a VO2 max session (might have this wrong) in terms of intensity and need for recovery.
This could be why the Reds were appearing as it was adding another day of intensity that was more taxing than a swim could be.
I’m just guessing here based on that podcast as I know nothing about how the RLGL algo attributes strength training in terms of intensity and if it hadn’t appeared on your calendar prior
That really makes sense. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a way to differentiate between “light” or “heavy/intense” strength workouts (e.g. 6 bodyweight squats is treated the same as 6 reps at 300 lbs). Also, it means I can’t do very much endurance training if I also want to do strength work unless I set things to “aggressive”. Which, thankfully, they have provided as an opti
That information really does help explain why a strength workout is seen as so intense. Thanks!
Nate originally said that you should basically be doing all working sets to failure, and if you aren’t, you shouldn’t include them. If this is still the case, including an easier workout might be disproportionately skewing your stats.
Makes 100% sense! If I trained to failure I can see why TR would suggest I take the next day easy or off. Which is the reason why I don’t train to failure as it means I would have to skip too many rides and riding (endurance) is my goal, strength is only secondary. I will now stop entering my strength workouts as they shouldn’t unduly impact my recovery. Thanks to everyone for your takes on this.
All good. I’ve been educated that strength workouts are implied to be done to failure (or at least with 1-2 RiR) and otherwise not to enter them in the calendar. This solves my issue!