I’m going to bandwagon the mighty @mcneese.chad here, and agree that the ability to log strength training is a feature that I’ve jumped on, and indeed has kick-started my strength-training journey. After less than 2 months of 2x/week strength training, I’m already noticing massive improvements in my power on the bike.
I’m also going to second @AlphaDogCycling and say that an updated workout creator would be incredibly welcome! Surely there’s a way to do a basic text-based one, that doesn’t rely on ‘drag and drop’ or installing a separate program.
I’d love to be able to create a workout without taking my hands off the keyboard.
For me, all the time during outdoor season. First, I think TR overuses the term unstructured when what they really mean is a ride that doesn’t closely align with a TR workout. Just cause it isn’t a TR workout doesn’t mean it isn’t a workout. Many of my long weekend rides have multiple hours of dedicated zone 2, plus some structured work, and then maybe some tempo thrown in at the end. These are race simulation or similar rides, and because they don’t align with a TR workout, PLs become worthless. I am not saying TR offers no value, but a lot of their claims of offering the right workout for you are based on PLs. And let’s be clear, this is a self induced problem. They created PLs that don’t really tie to anything outside of the TR universe. And I guess they just never imagined a world where someone would want to do something other than their prescribed workout?
I can only speak for myself, but my best fitness of the year typically occurs in July and August, after I have a full summer of group rides and long endurance rides in the weekend.
Sorry @Power13 I can’t recall if you race or not. Is that feeling of fitness when you’re the fastest too? I only ask because I typically get my best race results when I’m not feeling the fittest, and I’m usually feeling the fittest toward the end of summer (southern hemisphere) when my structured training is at its lowest relative to group rides and longer endurance rides on the weekend.
Sure. I don’t know whether TR has chosen its priorities correctly. We don’t know how many people might want feature A over feature B and whether there are other factors in the decision making process.
From the outside it seems TR has pushed hard to get WLv2 done, it seems it wasn’t for the lack of trying.
That’s another important aspect: make something possible and easy, and people will start using it. I have subscribed to Dialed Health last month and it feels great. I did mobility training yesterday with my wife, and my left shoulder felt a lot better this morning.
Once TR integrates strength training into its plans, at least as an option, I reckon more athletes would adopt it. So perhaps it is a chicken-egg problem rather than necessarily a niche feature.
Since I don’t know what your training looks like, I don’t have the context to comment on that either way. From personal experience, when I do group rides or unstructured outdoor rides as part of my training, I practice things that are orthogonal to focussing on power. E. g. I might practice cornering, pacing and riding efficiently in a bunch.
Also, group rides usually started up after base and during build simply because of the weather, so I had already gotten a good base fitness. My fitness peaks around July–August as that is when my training plans typically end.
So I’d be more cautious to claim a causal relationship between my fitness and my group/outdoor rides. But again, I don’t know how you train and YMMV.
PS Especially people who do most of their training indoors should ride a lot outdoors. I wish I could ride outdoors more often (that is not a commute), but with three young kids and a demanding job, that’s not easy.
To be more precise here: to me an unstructured ride is a ride that is not a workout. It doesn’t have a TR workout. I’ve done rides where e. g. I rode for 4–5 hours in Z2, but added a 10–15-minute sweet spot effort every hour. That is still a workout.
An unstructured ride can still be part of training. E. g. I like to practice bike handling (like descending) and pacing (maintaining even momentum even if you need to adapt your power output). I don’t expect to get a stronger engine from those rides, but a smarter engine management unit
I reckon when we get WLv2, many of us will be disappointed by “how little we progress outdoors” in terms of PLs (apart from endurance rides). That’s because on unstructured rides, you usually don’t put all your eggs in one basket. If I want to attempt a PB on a Strava segment that is 30–40 km away, I’ll be really conservative getting there and accept I might have to limp for a good bit until I have recovered.
Another problem is that the order of things matters: it is one thing to smash out a hard threshold workout and then tack on 2 hours of endurance. It is entirely something else to reverse the order. How should TR score those two rides? (I have no idea.)
If I had to guess, these are two of the reasons why we don’t have WLv2 yet.
Do they? Not in my experience. If you realize you are farther ahead, you pick a breakthrough workout, see if you can do it and adjust PLs manually. PL’s are a great help to judge the difficulties of like workouts.
The primary purpose of PLs is to make it easier for you to select suitable workouts, not to measure your performance. Really, it is in the name: they are called progression levels, not performance levels (even though the acronym would work both ways). I don’t have proof, but I don’t think this choice is accidental.
Yes - generally when TR staff talk about “unstructured rides” I believe this is what they are talking about. But in reality it doesn’t matter if it has structure or not. If you do a ride, structured or not, that does not align with a TR ride, they advise you not to pair it with a workout. So the net effect is the same. I do very few true unstructured workouts. Maybe a group ride once every two weeks. But do a lot of outdoor structured workouts that don’t align with a TR workout.
Yes - they do become worthless. If Progression Levels are supposed to help Adaptive Training choose the best workout to help you reach your goals, they are no longer doing that. I AM. That is the whole point.
Right - see my reply above. I am saying that if TR wants to be a holistic training solution, they need to adjust what seems to be the backbone of what they claim to be their secret sauce (PLs, Adaptive Training) to respond to training/riding done outside the TR universe. They seem to acknowledge this as well given the promises that WLV2 is being worked on and coming. Yet you keep somehow defending it like it is not a problem. I just don’t follow.
That’s my current situation, the difference is that I probably won’t be back on TR, but zwift instead. I know they aren’t even comparable products, but I feel more motivated with zwift than Blue Bars. I will not get the “right workout”, but I know for a fact I’ll race, do some group rides, and workout.
I could benefit more from a structured training plan, probably yes. But that’s not the way my brain works. I need the visual and, more importantly, the “chase the guy” stimulus.
Are you still doing TR structured workouts as well (either indoors or outdoors)? I assume so, since if not then PLs don’t really matter anyway - their purpose is to help you pick the right workout but if you’re not doing TR workouts they don’t have much value
What kind of outdoor structured workouts are you doing that don’t align with TR?
I think the people who would most benefit from WLV2 are those who are fairly well balanced between outdoor structure and wanting to use TR indoors. E.g. they want the freedom when the weather is nice to go do a ride with a sequence of 3-8 minute climbs, where the climbs are done at VO2, the descents and flats are easy/recovery, but the fact that every climb is a different length means it’s not going to fit a TR workout. But they want the PL credit for what is very much a good, structured ride, so that the next week when it’s pouring with rain they can just jump on the turbo, pull up TR and get an appropriate workout.
Those who do all their intensity/structure away from TR for periods of the year shouldn’t really care about WLV2. It would be nice/interesting to see how that work translated to PLs, but if you’re not going to use that PL to pick a TR workout then it’s not really a big deal. Those who are mainly using TR workouts/plans/AT (indoors or out) and then sometimes dropping in unstructured group rides and racing shouldn’t really care all that much either since I suspect those unstructured rides aren’t going to move the dial at all on your PLs if you’re already following a structured, progressive plan.
I can probably help @OreoCookie out as well - think it’s safe to say that if you’re cranking out 4-5 hours of solid Z2 riding with hourly 10-15 minute SS intervals then you can have an Endurance PL of 10 and consider pretty much every Endurance workout in the TR library to be “Achievable” or “Recovery”!
This is a productive conversation . Collectively, you’ve captured different use-case scenarios of WLV2, why you will get faster with TrainerRoad as it stands now, what WLV2 will add and who will benefit most from WLV2 when it is released.
Here’s the state of that. WLV2 is used in some ML analysis in AI FTP Detection. It’s in a state that improves the accuracy of AI FTP Detection but isn’t at the level where it’s close enough to change what your next workout is.
Right now the roadmap for features is → RLGL in Plan Builder (volume recommendation), WLV2 on TR workouts, WLV2 on outside workouts.
We have prototypes of both RLGL plan builder and WLV2 on TR workouts. We’re doing TR workouts first because there are less variables and it let’s us validate WLV2 on a larger scale.
Generally I will follow TR’s workouts during the week, either indoor or outdoor, depending on time of year. And then on weekends, I would either be racing, perhaps doing a race simulation ride for an upcoming race, or generally just 3-5 hours with usually some structure in there. Could be the suggested TR workout with additional Z2, could be rack up 2000kj and then do 2 x 20. Could be hit every climb at threshold. Basically I would like for TR to work as you describe in the bold portion above. Can it do it? I don’t know.
I think we have been talking past one another. I’d like WLv2 yesterday. It is definitely a gap that TR needs to fill. The only thing I disagree with is that the lack of scoring for outdoor rides makes PLs worthless.
Technically, my understanding is that they call any ride that isn’t a workout an unstructured ride for the purpose of their database. But that doesn’t mean the ride itself had no structure, just that TR doesn’t know about it.
Maybe it is semantics, but what matters in my experience is whether a ride had a particular purpose (connected to your training) or not. Plenty of my “unstructured rides” had structure and/or purpose.
Other rides were just for fun where I could do whatever I wanted. Were they good for my training? Who knows. Were they good for my soul and gave me pleasure? Yes!
Let’s explore a hypothetical here: consider the workout Disaster as a proxy for a very hard outdoor ride. Nobody would deny that if a ride profile looked like that, it’d have structure and it’d be HARD. Let’s zoom in on the threshold portion: it consists of 4 x 10 minutes at 98–102 % FTP with 8 minutes of rest in between. In isolation, this is easy. I haven’t found an exact match, but if this portion were its own workout it’d like be Threshold PL 4.x: Goethe (PL 5.3) is 4 x 10 minutes at 98–102 % FTP, but has much shorter breaks. Saint Elias -1 (PL 4.1) has 8:30-minute break and 4 x 10 minute intervals, but at a slightly lower power (95–99 % FTP). So scoring this bit in isolation as Threshold PL 4.x seems reasonable to me. In isolation, that part isn’t particularly hard, it is a middle-of-the-road threshold workout.
We could repeat this exercise for each of the other parts of Disaster, and I reckon we would reach similar conclusions.
My point is that Disaster is a combination of many, many workouts of intermediate difficulty. If you manage to complete Disaster, how should AT take this into account? Obviously, if your Threshold PL is < 5.0, it seems likely you will not survive Disaster But how do you include that in your threshold progression? More precisely, what threshold workout would be suitable next?
Moreover, the order matters: each prior effort incurs fatigue, even doing a 2-hour endurance ride prior to the 4 x 10-minute threshold effort will make it harder.
All of that being said, here is my hypothesis on what happened to WLv2. Imagine you have an unstructured ride whose intensity distribution looks like that of Disaster. Undoubtedly, this was a hard ride. You really pushed. I reckon that if you ignored fatigue, the individual pieces (all threshold efforts, all VO2max efforts, etc.) are scored lower than your current PLs in each of these systems. What made this effort hard was the fatigue you incurred during the ride — like you wrote later, a PL 5.0 threshold workout is harder after spending 3 hours at endurance pace than if you were fresh.
That leads me to believe that one central piece of WLv2 is to keep track of fatigue (hint: RL/GL), because you need to quantify the fatigue you have incurred. But for many unstructured rides, simply because you spread your effort across many different zones. So you’d have to train an algorithm on a very weak signal as in many cases it’d result in no — or, at best, small changes to your PL. That, I think, is the reason why we don’t have a public release of WLv2 — yet, despite working on it for 5+ years now (going from memory).
A central piece is quantifying an athlete’s fatigue, and I reckon the “fatigue meter” that TR has built one as part of WLv2. You can judge fatigue by e. g. completion rates of workouts after this effort and hence, the algorithms that measure fatigue could be trained on a clear signal in the data. Put another way, TR found out it worked and decided to spin it off as RL/GL.
Moreover, if my conjecture is correct, then WLv2 would not really change the training for most athletes — except when it comes to fatigue. And RL/GL has that covered. Again, I’m not excusing anything or claiming that we don’t need WLv2. It is an attempt to understand why and what it means for our training?
This is a good example, I’ve done similar workouts (during the specialty phase). Even if I tried to score this effort manually, I wouldn’t be sure what to do. In my mind, the ability to endure hard efforts in a fatigued state is its own thing, something you have to train for.
So if that’s what you mean by “Unstructured workouts don’t matter for your PLs.” (paraphrasing), then you are right, this isn’t captured by PLs as there are currently no TR workouts of that sort and hence, there is no way to build a training plan around it.
If I had to guess, TR’s plan for WLv2 is as follows: They have abandoned the WLv2 in its present form. Instead, they will fold it in with dynamically generated workouts. That would do away with seemingly infinite variations of the same workout. AT would specify the workout type such as threshold intervals and AT/AI FTP/WLv2 would dynamically generate a workout that is “just right for you”. Add -2, -1, 0, +1, +2 buttons and presto. Perhaps PLs will be done away with entirely then, or, at least, no longer be visible to the athlete.
Maybe this will open the door for more workout types, too, where you smoosh together e. g. an endurance workout and a sweet spot workout. This would explain why there seems little activity as to replacing the ancient workout generator (which, if I am not mistaken, is built on top of Adobe Flash, which has been abandoned by Adobe several years ago!).
Of course. In practice, my endurance PLs are limited by the amount of time I can ride in one sitting during the weekend
In practice that won’t matter. Even if I can complete 5±hour rides easily, I don’t want to spend more than 3 hours on the trainer in one sitting. (I think I completed 3:30-hour endurance workouts, but typically they are limited to 2 hours.)
I’d love your guess to become true! Sounds a bit like Xert Smart workouts.
But after that long time a more pessimistic alternative opinion would be that TR is struggling with technical debt, human resource, complexity etc. and that we’ll only see super tiny changes along the existing workout library and soften the original promise of WLv2.
Wise words @OreoCookie, but I have to point out that:
MY VISION AND USE. If my training program is incapable of accounting for unstructured rides, it’ll be inaccurate. That’s the technical part of it.
The business part of it: Even if I won’t benefit from it at all, the company promised to deliver this, and I don’t care if I’ll use it or not. It shows an inability to deliver a promise, and that’s not cool!
As said by someone, don’t buy anything based on a software update promise.
I think perspective is important: even in industries flush with money (think semiconductor industry), it is hard to hire people who have a background in ML and have subject matter expertise. And those people are really hard to find and not cheap. When I worked in the semiconductor industry, we were constantly understaffed and customers wanted progress yesterday. The biggest two problems of my former employer were to ship orders and to find qualified staff to meet their growth goals.
My impression from the outside looking in is that compared to its competitors TR seems to be at the top when it comes to basing its ML features on a solid footing (i. e. backed by a good and sufficiently large dataset). At least what I hear from competitors does not fill me with confidence in that regard (I remember one competitor’s feature being “validated” on 6 athletes and about 100 workouts …).
I have avidly followed a few threads on competitors’ products and it seems none have cracked it. (There is also the issue of customer service, and in my experience, TR’s customer service has been top notch, on par with the best brands out there.)
“Everything is inaccurate and imperfect.” The question is whether and how much it matters. Only people at TR know the answer to that one at the moment. Very often things matter that laypersons would not think about while others don’t.
Some of the disagreement in this thread revolves around how much utility most athletes would derive from a fully featured implementation of WLv2 that includes changes in PL. If my conjecture is correct, then WLv2 would not have as big an impact on the majority of athletes than e. g. RL/GL. Of course, nobody outside of TR knows, but to me it sounds like the most plausible theory (and knowing something about machine learning and handling expensive data sets).
Of course, I could be wrong as I base my hypothesis on circumstantial evidence. (It is very easy to find post hoc justifications that are entirely wrong.) If someone else has another theory as to why WLv2 is such a hard nut to crack, I’d really love to hear your opinions
There are two interesting aspects, one is corporate communication — something I know nothing about. Was it wise to pre-announce the vision to such degree? No idea. Likely, @Nate_Pearson was very optimistic that he’d deliver on that promise much faster. I’d just add that Nate’s style of communication does not just have downsides, i. e. there are situations where this really pays off. (Maybe he is reading this thread and this very post for inspiration?)
The other question we can speculate about is what TR should have done: imagine you have a project that the company has invested a lot of money into (sunk cost fallacy?), but has hit a wall. Hard. Several times. Pressure is mounting. What should you do if you were in the product manager’s shoes?
Lower your quality threshold so that this product can be released after all, and hope to improve it over time.
Keep going until it is ready.
Can the project outright and give up on the idea?
See what parts of the project can be re-used and shift focus on something else, in the hope you can revisit it?
I’m glad TR did not opt for the first option. I remember hearing that some incarnation of WLv2 was “close”, so much so that “close” has apparently become a forbidden word (this was a joke on the latest podcast episode). From that I infer that TR could have released “something” and hoped to improve it as time goes on.
Instead for several years they went with option 2. And now they have decided for option 4: From public communication we know that RL/GL came from “WLv2 tech” (not sure about the exact wording). If I were in charge, I’d look at all the features I could build with bits of WLv2 and then focus to build those features:
Custom volume training plans are likely enabled by what underlies RL/GL, for example. If my hypothetical is correct, RL/GL would likely give you a lot of the benefits of WLv2 (as a fully featured WLv2 would include a fatigue meter).
Strength training features are a big one. Nate seems to focus on strength training these days, which means he he’ll have some first-hand knowledge on that subject. I hope he will hire someone like Derek Teal for training plans. Imagine applying TR tech to strength training. That market is quite big and if TR leveraged its tech and experience, it could become a player, too.
One more thing about dynamically generated workouts: maybe it would be useful to turn things on its head and not focus on WLv2 to (also) build dynamically generated workouts. But instead, directly try to build dynamically generated workouts instead and see what tech you actually need to make that a reality. (I. e. you narrow your problem space and approach it from the application end.)
Personally, I would ask: has the product gotten better (≠ perfect) consistently in ways that matter to me? (Obvious counterexample: Strava.)
Interesting points from the ML side: I deal with devs and software development daily (tech support monkey), and this resonated with me from talking to them.
Short answer: yes.
Longer (yet still pretty succinct) answer: yes, RLGL and adaptive plans have 100% been an improvement for me and potentially more important than changing levels with outside smash fests. I doubt much of my outside work ever improves anything specific, it does improve fitness overall but it is probably not measurable within any particular zone each time.
Caveat, I’m nothing special and I suspect others can deal better with the load so might see less benefit from RLGL and everyone is different.
The thing with WLv2 is not just unstructured outside rides. How motivating could it be to join a Zwift / indieVelo / whatever virtual race or group and just make it an ITT at threshold or sweetspot for as long as you feel it or incorporate resistance intervals by RPE and then see some TR levels after the fact. Could be a good alternative motivation instead of just doing a fix set workout.
Obviously that would be a deviation from following a strict plan but it could be incorporated along the latest feature for plans with outside rides and might make following a plan more fun/compliant.
. Collectively, you’ve captured different use-case scenarios of WLV2, why you will get faster with TrainerRoad as it stands now, what WLV2 will add and who will benefit most from WLV2 when it is released. 
.
