It’s interesting that just as a fair bit of discussion regarding effective use of TR focuses on “which plan should I use?” or “maybe you chose the wrong plan so try another one next time” etc, I see similar discussion over on the Join thread over just which plan to choose.
Major room for improvements in this regard.
While I try not to dismiss the “TR made me burnout” commentary - this forum lost it’s collective sh1t when TrainerRoad made the plans “easier”, and one of the current active threads is about recovery intervals being too long!
I’m not saying people didn’t burn out, but that can be related to non-TR stuff too - mainly Life! Stress of work/ family/ sleep etc etc can all impact on my ability to complete workouts/ feel fresh. I’m having to get up at 5.30 to complete workouts at the moment - this isn’t going to be sustainable for me, and while circumstances should change, if they don’t and I crash and burn, it won’t be TR’s fault. So I don’t think it’s entirely fair that TR’s plans are always blamed as the cause.
I mesh commuting 2-3 times a week, some short outside rides and the turbo. All really easy with TR. Sure, outside PL contribution would have been nice, starting with 1.0 across the board was very midly annoying but soon got the hang of it and now find it very useful for choosing workouts.
Perhaps going against the grain, I’d like an account option with less features. My partner uses the trainer maybe once a week and doesn’t ride with power/hr outside, doesn’t need the plans and isn’t interested at current pricing. Multi-profiles/ a house hold account or something, would be nice. Also appreciate why this is unlikely… really just wanted to say I’m happy with TR and happy to never do a ramp test again, so thanks for the recent changes. 
Preach brother! Don’t care if it isn’t as precise as a ramp or 20minute test as long as it’s accurate for training I’m happy.
You nailed it.
PL are interesting, but honestly a good power curve duration to address weakness would be interesting. Eg. I want to improve my 5 min power, no races, no goals, just improve my 5 min power for the next X time frame.
On a basic level, if a plan does not assume that people using the plan have lives with non-cycling things happening within them, is that not a fault of the plan?
IMO this is absolutely something that should be accounted for by the plan. Unless the plan is devised purely for word tour pros who ride and then lay down like kobe beef cows and get lovingly rubbed until their next ride…
In every use case scenario? I definitely haven’t been burnt out by the plans over several years when I haven’t been in current circumstances. So if it happens this time, it’s the plan’s/ TR fault? Rather than my prep and recovery not being sufficient, and me insisting on sticking with MV? fwiw I have had the AT adaptations when I have marked with a struggle survey (I default to “too intense”, where it is, eh, too intense for me).
No I wouldnt say in every case. If someone is smoking cigarettes and closing down the bar everynight before workouts…that’s a little beyond the scope of normal life. But everyone has stresses outside of cycling.
I have no idea of your circumstances, and Incant comment on whether this applies to your case, but I do think that the very generic “life stress” is a a bit of a copout used to defend training plans. Everybody has life stress…it’s just part of being a human.
And yet, despite the “too much intensity” narrative, one of the busiest periods I remember on here was when they revamped the plans and made them easier. With people complaining they were too easy, how do they stick with the old plan etc.
TR may be too much intensity for some, but I really think there’s more noise about it on line than the in the real world reality.
I strongly agree with this. I think people get enraptured by seeing quick FTP gains based on intensity ‘pulling’ FTP up rather than having the patience to sit on a bike for hours and gently ‘push’ FTP up. I look at Sweet Spot Base and Sweet Spot Build now and think ‘jeez’, I can’t believe I used to do that.
You need to do both the ‘push’ and ‘pull’, so I agree building an aerobic base in a moderate fashion then icing the cake with an intensity block would be a more sustainable way to go. But effectively, they’re in an arms race with other providers to see who can get the quickest gains for customers.
Well. #1 this is the internet. People complain; moreso online.
#2 - I’ve come to the conclusion that the intensity is fine, IF you dont plan on riding a lot. A trap I’ve let myself fall into is prioritizing these hard rides/workouts as more valuable than volume. So after I do these hard workouts, I’m too tired to ride significant hour.
Switching things up for next year. Volume is the constant, intensity added in as fatigue allows.
That’s the ideal suggested approach, and maybe at some point things got overcomplicated.
My limited knowledge is that 6/8 weeks of Low Intensity High Volume below LT1 with some sprinkles of intensity. 1 vo2 each 10 workouts as maintenance.
SS being a good banf for the bucket, in order to create enough endurance stress could serve as a replacement for 2 hours endurance rides. Something kind of 45/60 min SS. But not all 5 workouts. 1, maybe 2. that’s it.
Keep an eye on Efficiency Factor and then move on to the build, where threshold starts to shows up frequently. Another 8 weeks or so.
Increasing duration, reducing recovery times gradually and not doing the same workout more than 2 times. Eg. SS 4x8, next week, 2x20, then 3x15.
Yea. I’m taking a radically different approach to training.
I’ve historically topped out around 10hrs a week with a LOT of intensity. Probably too much.
This year…planning to be more like 13-15hrs, with 1, maybe 2 hard days. That would likely be 1 interval session, and 1 hard group ride. 1 of those might be cut, or I may end up just going with slow group rides where I can get a couple long pulls at my threshold pace on the front, and then just sit in the rest of the ride at zone2/tempo.
I am not sure this is true, it appears Xert is growing every year and offers exactly what most people are wanting in this thread. It is however a very educational undertaking to learn.
Yes, Xert is adaptive to your daily needs based on how you direct the system. It also has Smart workouts that adjust “live” as you do them.
Xert has a few nice features, but the main issues I had with it was:
These are valid points - but as I said it has a taxing learning curve.
Too hard Workouts - are you sure your TP was correct? I found TR workouts much more difficult to complete/follow. I also have discovered I am horrible at SS and the ideology of the TR training platform. I find Xert to hit the workouts based on my collective and clean data and my narrative to be a great choice just about every time.
Breakthroughs - this is when you need to know how to use the system and be intuitive with your goals. Changing to Small Decay or No Decay is needed depending on the time of year and what you are doing. This can also be directly related with your other comment about the workouts - you need the system to decay so you can properly complete workouts. You have peak cycles and I find its decay method to be fantastic to how my body is recovering/building towards my goals.
Workout Player - I cant disagree with this, some people hate the WP. I use my phone for my training apps so it doesn’t bother me for everything to function on my phone. I know some users want it on a big screen in front of them.
Regarding too hard workouts, I think the problem was that I was at five stars. Xert will the suggest the most difficult workouts where you HIE is drained almost entirely multiple times.
What would be really good to have is a simple way to specify per day how much time you have to train and let TR figure out when to train and when not to train. Not only specify the days at the start of a plan, but allow to enter the available time per day in the calendar, which does not automatically mean that all available time should be used as training time.
This feature is available in the app I use now (join), but I will move back to TR as the plan/ workouts themselves fit me better ( more SS based )
Xert is better than TR in many ways but the interface lets itself down.
In 5 years of using Xert in parallel with WKO5/ TP/ intervals .icu. Etc Xert has always been spot on within my FTP.
I find the workout outs too hard but otherwise it gives me everything I want.
TR is much easier to use but no better IMHO
We got really close with an approach, but there was that 10% at the end that we couldn’t close. We had a bit of a “fix this problem, create a new one here”.
So what we’ve been doing is combing an ML approach with some algorithm work to try to move in smaller steps.
In the next week or two we’ll be updating some of the current TR workout levels that we believe are outside the norm are are rated too high/low. Once we move these, we can check performance and validate what our ML has come up with for the right levels for these workouts.
That then gives us a better base for an algorithmic approach to scoring outside workouts. And we can also release “WLV2” for TR inside workouts first (multi zone), then deal with some of the outside challenges later (different power meters, bikes, altitude, motivation, etc).
We haven’t taken anyone of this project…we’ve actually added more people. I’m more involved now and am the product manager of it and getting into the weeds.