Will TrainNow rides eventually change future scheduled rides?

Training
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So I have my plan set up at low volume and I have workouts scheduled the next few months. When I complete a workout sometimes there’s an adaptation and sometimes not.

But if I add a workout with TrainNow or if I add an outdoor workout and complete it I have never seen an adaptation occur. Is my training plan just going to blindly ignore any workouts I add as if they don’t exist? It seems like that’s both not terribly smart of the system AND a recipe for burnout if the system doesn’t adjust to me doing a hard outdoor ride. In the latter case is it completely up to me to know myself and realize I should adjust my planned workouts?

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It’s a bit of a black-box. No one can really tell you exactly what to expect. Every plan has different progression.goals, and your survey responses are factored in to determine how you’re adapting.

Since you’re on low volume, the general advice would be for you to add z2 rides to build out volume instead of adding more hard rides. Assuming you’re adding z2 rides, I wouldn’t expect any adaptations unless you’re adding really big TR endurance rides. And even then, it’s only likely to adapt the endurance rides. Counterintuitively, when I was doing lots of extra z2 volume over the summer (mid vol plus 6ish hours of extra z2) adaptive training was pushing my scheduled endurance rides down in PL. I was completely fine with this.

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Hey @tempo36,

Good questions here!

Here’s a summary of how TrainNow works from our Support document.

"TrainNow will recommend workouts based on your recent TrainerRoad workouts and non-structured indoor/outdoor riding. It’s important to note that while TrainNow will look at your most recent workouts when making a recommendation, it does not consider periodization, fatigue, or other factors . For instance, i t will not recognize if you need a recovery week . If you are looking for that type of structure and periodization, we recommend using a training plan. TrainNow is primarily intended for athletes who aren’t on a training plan, or for those who like to supplement unstructured riding with occasional structured workouts."

Essentially, TrainNow is a great tool, but needs to be used with some awareness of where you’re at in your training. In my opinion, it’s better to have a slightly higher volume plan on your calendar which allows you to do the workouts that you can each week (sometimes all of them) than to use a lower volume plan and rely on TrainNow to accurately fill in when you need it to.

As for unscheduled outside rides, it doesn’t look like you’ve done much that would prompt adaptations thus far. I see you’ve matched your 20-minute commutes to TrainerRoad workouts, which we don’t really recommend unless you’re following them as Outside Workouts with either Power or RPE.

Either way, they are level 1.0 workouts which aren’t increasing your Progression Levels at all and thus not requiring adaptation to your future workouts, so no worries there! :sweat_smile:

In the future, if you pair an outside ride with a TrainerRoad workout, it’s best to ensure that you’ve followed the structure of the workout as closely as possible to avoid artificially inflated Progression Levels, which will likely make your scheduled workouts a bit too long or difficult to sustainably continue training with.

As I mentioned earlier, sometimes, in this case, it’s better to have a higher-volume plan in place to give you a sort of training budget to follow each week. If you’re going to do an unplanned activity, you need to replace a scheduled workout with it to ensure that you’re not taking on too much stress and burning out, as you mentioned. This gives you a sort of limit to your hard and easy workouts for the week to follow. From there, you can adjust your training volume to fit your needs as you find what works for you.

Let me know if this helps and if you have any other questions. I pretty much always find a way to get each of our athletes set up in a way that works for them! :grin:

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It does for me, I have low volume base and build in my schedule and do at least one extra 1hr hard workout a week, it usually adapt future workout levels up

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Yep! Completing TrainNow workouts will not cause Adaptive Training to adapt the schedule of your Plan Builder training plan, but they will contribute to your Progression Levels, which could lead to adaptations of workouts in your training plan.

This isn’t exclusive to TrainNow, though. You can knock out any workout of your choosing and if your PLs increase, you might get adaptations to your plan in response.

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