TrainerRoad teams — making it useful?

There is a section “Teams” on website.

It is not very useful for most people, though. Do you have any ideas to make it more useful to more people?

I know that there are coaches who are making specific workouts for their members, there are closed forums. What else do you find useful?

Sometimes groups of friends will create a Team to see each other’s rides, similar to a social feed on Strava, for example. It’s also a great way for users to share custom workouts with friends or a spouse.

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Papuass - I agree that the teams function on the website is not terribly useful yet. There was a recent post about this started here: Public / Private / Team Private Feature Request - #2 by hammerkill
Nate himself chimed in on the thread and indicated that the team function is going to receive an overhaul, but that completion of this overhaul is not scheduled soon. Since this is a web function and not an app function, it may be developed/administered by a different team than the app, I have no idea. The benefit of that, I imagine, is that it shouldn’t require an app update to be pushed out to all users in order to achieve the improvements.

You ask about ideas to make it more useful, and to me, the number one useful “team” function relates to the monitoring of team member workouts. Experienced TR users have a lot to share with those new to it, and especially to those new to structured training but who haven’t got a paid coach. Shared experiences of users leads to more successful implementations of TR and more successfully completed workouts. At present, in order to functionally monitor these workouts, without a working team sharing function, a user has to search through oodles of workouts performed in the relevant time range (itself a problem due to time zone differences,) and try to find their team member’s workout among them, assuming that they’ve told you the exact workout name and that they’ve made their workout data public. The situation is clunky at best, and failure in these search efforts is common. Aside from functionality, there are some reasons that TR users may not want their workouts to be globally public to all users. The resolution to the low functionality of the team function should also accommodate this preference.

My team members have noted my performance improvements while using TR, and have been adding indoor training with TR to their regimens, and it is they who sought out the team function to connect with what I’ve been doing. I think that is a small indication of avenues of potential user growth for TR, and as mentioned I think it leads to more successful implementations and workout completions. We’ll see if the TR team agrees and develops this team function.

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The TrainerRoad user community used it for Worlwide Disaster Day. There are 113 members. The event took place on December 14th, 2018. Over 50 surveys were returned of how awesome the event was.

Teams Thread:

https://www.trainerroad.com/teams/8931-worldwide-disaster-day

Event Thread:

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If you can accept the caveat of having a fully public profile (I understand that is an immediate deal breaker for some), the current team access is at least functional.

Team Overview:

  • This page shows any discussion threads for the team.
  • It also has a feed of the recent rides (around 6 shown), with access to all of them via the [View All] option at the top right of the section.
  • It also shows any newly added workouts at the bottom, with access to all of them via the [View All] option at the top right of the section.

You can access specific members (via simple scroll or search) as desired, if you are looking to follow someone in particular. The team specific forum allows for direct info sharing and discussion.

I know it’s not perfect, but there is a fair bit of functionality in the current version.

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I’d like to be able to push all the workouts that plan builder gave me to my team so we can be synced up and decide which of them to do as group workouts.
Hahn Rossman

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