Some questions from a newman (app, calender, tss, form and fitness)

Training
1

Hey good morning from over here in europe,

first of all, I’ve been using trainer apps for about a decade, starting from the native tacx software, over to zwift, sufferfest, back to zwift (a few month ago) and now I am very new to trainer road.

I know everyone is slightly different.
Sufferfest was great, but it was very hard to achive. And the most of all, I got bored riding again and again the same workouts, as their library is kind of small.
My last experience was that even after riding a TT plan on Zwift, my FTP decreased. Thats… let’s call it ‘sad’.

So here I am. Standing in front of Trainer Road, but I have a few questions.
I already took a look in the FAQs, but I wasn’t able to figure some things out.

TSS Graph - FTP Change:
Black marks show FTP-Changes. Ok, but do I have to make a FTP Test (Ramp Test) to get new values, or is this done time by time doing the workouts?

TSS Graph - Form/Fitness:
Is there a way to display Form and Fitness improvements, or fatigue like in TP?
Or will I still need to monitor all of this in my TP account?

Calender - Trainingpeaks:
Is there a way to synced planned workouts to Trainingspeaks OR Garmin Connect, or plan them in the Calender and sync them onto my garmin watch?
The reason I ask is, that the non-cycling workouts are just plain text, and the intervals need to be planned manually regarding to the descr. in th text to be synced onto my garmin watch.

Trainer Road App Apple Health sync:
Is it possible to sync Apple Health bio data with Trainer Road?
Most needed value here is weight.

Combining workout day:
Is there any recommendation on how to handle workouts? I know, recovery is important to increase improvement, but sometimes it’s just not possible to train so I want to move the workout to another day and maybe do two sessions on one day. Is the Trainer Road conecept allowing this?

I know these are some very specific questions, but maybe you’ll find some time to help me.

Cheers,
Michael

2

Welcome!

FTP changes: you can either change it manually via your profile if you think you tested wrongly but usually you do an FTP test during one of the plans and you have the option at the end of that to update it automatically.

TSS, Form & Fitness: don’t think there’s anything in TR yet to do this but many on here use intervals.icu. It’s free and the developer posts on here. You’ll need a Strava account (free will do) to let the activities sync up.

Calendar -TP: I don’t think TR & TP sync to each other. You can send workouts direct to some Garmin devices for “Outdoor workouts” but I don’t know which ones are compatible.

Apple health: don’t know.

Combining Workout day: You can move individual workouts by simply dragging the workout from one day to another. There’s no restriction on the number of workouts per day. When setting up a plan, either a single plan or through Plan Builder, you have the option to change the training days so for Low Volume instead of Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday you can have Monday, Wednesday, Thursday if that better fits with your personal schedule. You can also move whole weeks forward and backward in the calendar.

1 Like
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Thank you so far @bobw

Calender - TP: I know about this, but it’s not enough as run workouts in TR have no intervalls, you have to build them by yourself, either in garmin or TP, also runs are not synced back from garmin to tr and uploading them manually tr does also not work. I am a bit disappointed about that, because I dont want to invest that much time in administrating things.

Combining workouts: I ve seen that too, and I am also aware of that function, but the question is: is it legit? Are the trainingplans all about TSS or also about the recovery times between them? sufferfest for example is targeted on not doing to much tss in a row because your body wont adapt that much training without a proper recovery.

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@mixtape, Nate commented in another thread a while ago that TR is thinking about / working on integrating runs and swims better, but they ‘don’t want to do what others have done - they want something better.’ I think that was pre-COVID, though, and TR has since been focused on group workouts to add some social aspects.

With all of that said, I still use TP to plan all of my workouts (I’m very schedule driven). As you know, TP syncs directly to Garmin so your other workouts are already there. Depending on how important it is to have your workouts on your watch / head unit will determine whether you do your planning in TR or TP.

5

@rkoswald
thanks! thats good news for me. schedule driven and number driven would be the most precise descriptions for me too :wink:
some workouts like “just run 40 minutes base” are easy to get done outside, but if there are intervals or more precise notes i need to go deeper in planing. while doing an activity I dont want to think about much whats next, then keeping the numbers until i get reminded to do the next interval.

and the more intense the workout is, the more helpful i find it to have a ringing watch that says “ok man, blood is running out of your nose, but you managed your sprint intervals and now get slow” :wink:

Let’s see what the dudes from TR will do next. The social thing was important, I can clearly understand this.

6

Depends on what the workouts are. For instance in Sweet Spot Base Mid Volume the Wednesday workout tends to be an easy aerobic recovery session. From various notes and comments on the podcast you can either add that to the end of another workout as a prolonged cool-down or if you can only commit to so many days omit it all together and move the Thursday workout forward a day.

So long as you have some rest/recovery, I’ve seen somewhere that coach Jonathan packs his workouts into the working week, then you should be OK. Ultimately if you start feeling overly tired and/or start skipping workouts on a regular basis then you are overdoing it.

Most of these programs/services/companies are competitors so it can be a big ask to get them to work with one another.

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Does anyone really use the calendar feature to add in non-TR, non-cycling activities to get a better sense of weekly TSS? If yes, what’s your threshold for inclusion (e.g., a strength training session vs. taking the dogs for a regular weekend hike)?