Returning TR and Zwift subscriber now the integration is official. Did my first workout today and love the fact I can do TR AI structured training via Zwift. Gamechanger.
However, wondering whether I just use Train Now workouts to guide me for a while or should I dive in and get a Training Plan?
I love doing Bunch rides, Chop rides, Crit racing Plus Z2 long rides. I’m heading to the mountains in VIC in a few weeks for a week of climbing then a 145km Classic Ride so as you can see I’m doing a bit of everything.
Any suggestions on how I can use TR most effectively for my current and future training needs?
Unqualified opinion: Train Now, unless you have a very large amount of time to train per week and are very fatigue resistant.
It seems like you already have a lot of training, racing, stimulus planned and this will both raise your fitness and contribute fatigue.
I would plan out what you are going to be doing already and see how many days and hours per week are left over to do structured training. You can then assess what elements of your fitness you feel might benefit from progressing and see if it is feasible to do that in the time available, without doing too much.
Whether you opt to try a plan or just slot in individual workouts strategically could depend on your circumstances and how you want to balance having fun on the bike with developing your physiology, which might take a fairly focussed approach if you are already quite fit.
Sounds like a nice problem to have though, good luck!
Alternatively select a low volume plan with 2 hard workouts per week, and train around that. The plan will adapt and at least you have a forward looking view if the ‘unknown’ of TrainNow makes you feel a bit uneasy.
I’m new to TR myself and really like Train Now which I didn’t expect.
I did make Training plan but the start date for that plan is 2 1/2 months away.
In the meantime I used Train Now 4 to 5 times a week with weekends being longer workouts.
I keep the workout days the same days of the week that I will be training during my training plan.
You just have to make sure you keep track of the weeks and manually make the 4th week a rest week.
I do a lot of outdoor cycling with relatively few days to train on the trainer unless it’s raining so maybe Train Now is the way to go instead of being locked in to a plan.
It certainly sounds that way, but I would launch the custom plan builder and see what it recommends. You can delete, chop and change as much as you like. Could give you some insight…
If you are here to get faster, it may be worth looking at how you think about the cycling you do, because effective training is rarely simply an add-on to whatever you currently do.
use TrainNow if you are always doing different rides or don’t need to maximize your race-specific abilities and peak for specific date.
use Plan Builder if you focus on some type of rides during different periods (a la crits in spring, long distance in summer, MTB in autumn) because PB creates systematic progressive overload to develop your goal-specific capabilities. It also ensures tapering for events. To use PB efficiently, simply insert number of events into calendar and PB populates your calendar with appropriate plan that supports performing best way for next event.
This is a good question, and it looks like you’ve already gotten some good feedback. Here are my two cents.
I’d say that Plan Builder is usually a really solid option except for when an athlete really cannot follow a training plan due to inconsistent availability.
Something cool that you might not know about is that you can now change any of your planned TR workouts into Solo/Group Rides.
With this new feature, you could still use Plan Builder to build out a plan to follow and use the recommended schedule to fit your current needs.
For instance, for those long Z2 rides, you could either follow the weekly prescribed Endurance ride for that day or switch it to a Solo Ride if you aren’t interested in basing your ride off one of our workouts.
Similarly, if you have a really hard group ride once a week you could replace one of the “Hard Intervals” workouts with a Group Ride. The intensity assigned to that day will stick and we’ll assume that you’re still doing a hard ride.
The benefit here is that you have a little more structure to your week even in you aren’t doing a ton of structured training. Having a “training budget” of sorts gives you something solid to reference when planning out your weeks.
You could find yourself in a situation where you’ve run out of Hard Intervals workouts to replace with all of your hard rides and that might be a sign that you’re doing too much intensity each week. Similarly, if you find that you’ve replaced all of the prescribed TR workouts with Solo/Group Rides, that could be a sign of sorts that you might benefit from dropping one or two of those activities in favor of some structured training if getting faster is a priority for you.
Either way, there are very few (if any) downsides to building a consistent plan to follow.
Very interesting. IIRC before, the guidance was not to associate a non-structured ride to a scheduled workout. Now, we can and should, but what happens is TR treats it as if you completed the planned workout, with its IF and TSS, and does not consider the actual IF and TSS of the ride, correct? If true, then regardless of what was done in the ride, there would be no adaptions to the plan. A separate question is how does this affect AI FTP, assuming being past the requisite first ten actual TR workouts.
Sorry. I guess I’m tripping over the semantics. So, changing a workout to Solo/Group is not the same as associating a non structured ride with a scheduled workout. How do those two things differ in the way they are treated?
If you switch a structured TR workout to a Solo/Group Ride you’re telling us that you’re not going to follow the structure of a workout but are going to go out and simply ride your bike. There are no strings attached in terms of Pass/Fail, Progression Levels, training zones, etc. but the intensity (Hard, or Easy) will stick to the prescription of that ride.
Here’s something I pulled from a Help Center article that I’ve linked below if it helps:
If you swap a “Hard Intervals” day to be a Group/Solo Ride, it will change to a “Hard Ride”. Don’t worry about doing structured intervals that day, but try to go hard whether you’re riding in a group or on your own. And if that ride ends up being particularly brutal, Red Light Green Light will make sure you get proper recovery to avoid burnout.
For days that call for Endurance or Easy Ride, try your best to do what your training plan would have prescribed. If you know your ride is going to be hard, we recommend scheduling it on a day that would have been “Hard Intervals.”
