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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.
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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.
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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).
- Inclusion of others sports in the calendar and training plan, especially strength training. Given that @Nate_Pearson has announced they will be releasing a new calendar as public beta soon, it seems likely TR is laying the groundwork for that, too. (Edit: the new calendar is live as an early access feature.)
- 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.)
What do you think?
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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.
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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.
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I’ve noticed a few of you saying you felt like RLGL was beneficial, maybe as much as you thought WL2 would be. Can you explain how?
I ended up leaving TR when RLGL was released instead of WL2 because I just couldn’t find any benefit in the whole “red means stop. Ok, now that a lot of you have questioned this, let’s say red means stop, unless you decide to go forward, and that’s ok sometimes because it may mean you get a green the next day after riding on red three days in a row, so you should listen to RLGL, but not really, but sometimes definitely, and if you still don’t like the results there’s a slider so you can make it go easier/harder on you” approach. I just couldn’t get my head around that at all. It feels like everything is a “maybe”, and if it all comes down to “go with how you feel that day and choose an alternate if needed”, then it’s no different than before RLGL.
I now feel the same way about strength and the whole “only count your strength work if you do every set to failure” approach. As an aging cyclist and not a bodybuilder, I just don’t see any benefit there at all. All the strength work I do that isn’t to failure doesn’t induce fatigue?
I don’t mean to be snarky, but I do feel being critical is justified when I don’t feel like the company is adding any additional value (for my use case) over the last few years but prices keep going up.
What am I missing? (And yeah, I know I might get flamed for sharing my current view, but I want to hear what approach you’re taking and how these things are adding value for you)
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Again, wise words.
And again, the point isn’t the state of the product today, but the unfulfilment of a “promised” feature. I think they should not have announced it as clearly as it was. All of this noise would’ve been avoided. Living and learning.
From the training standpoint: I think I would largely benefit from this feature as I tend to deviate from the plan or get bored at intervals when the summer arrives. I still do my hard work, but mostly “unstructured”. I might be the 1% that isn’t worth the work to contemplate, who knows?
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Personally I use RLGL to compare against how I feel (curiosity) and sometimes consider putting a brake on me if I get too ambitious in training.
The strength training thing isn’t intuitive and I don’t use it. But I’m not strength training really. Couple of days a week I just do 1 set of push-ups until my body shakes and I can’t continue without losing form. I’d consider that 1 working set to failure for upper body (maybe full body?) but I guess it’s not really worth logging…maybe I should?
@Nate_Pearson:
I assume my case is not the target audience for that feature…and would not make a difference on my bike training… Maybe there should be a one click stop “I did pushups to failure today” on the calendar to make that feature more accessible and easy to use for the casual crowd but on the other hand I want TR to focus on the bike/triathlon part making me faster and while strength training seems nice on the one hand it also seems to add some noise.
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I would say there are at least two levels to this feature: one is simply documentation, i. e. I did this sports-related thing today. The second is to include it in the fatigue computation or in your training plan.
I completely agree that the current UI involves too much manual labor and would benefit from integration with officially endorsed TR strength plans. I have started subscribing to Dialed Health and am doing the bodyweight program for beginners as well as the mobility program. With most exercises I have no idea whether they are full body or so. And I don’t have the patience to input all that manually.
On the other side, while the Dialed Health strength training plans have been great so far, support is non-existent and the “workout player” is, hmmm, very rudimentary. (I think DH has two employees and they seem to have grown quite a bit, too much for Derek to keep up with support.) Sounds like Dialed Health and TR could both benefit from working together …
Is the problem the feature or the lack of trust in the feature?
In my experience, RL/GL is spookily accurate and I generally listen to it. On yellow days it recommends I do an easy endurance workout if I have something harder scheduled and on red days it recommends a rest day. The feature really makes a difference as I have started to commute a lot (i. e. a lot of rides outside of my training plan, mostly in Z2). So I initially had a lot of Yellow Days.
The UI still feels a bit clunky and I couldn’t find a way to accept a recommendation after initially refusing it. But overall, the feature has been working very well for me (≠ you).
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Possibly a wild assumption, but it looks like the calendar for tr-test-kyle01 can provide some insight on the backend workings of WLv2. (I needed to switch off the early access calendar to be able to view it.)
Yes I know your use of Disaster was simply to furnish an example of the hurdles of WLv2, but I actually came across this whilst I was looking at workout compliance, & trying to determine which degree of stupid it would be for me to partake in the madness on WWDD 
:
Those progression levels give a very different outlook compared to the 8.3 in Z5 & 1.6 other zones offered to the rest of us.
Also, the intervals named “Fake” refer to the Z1 intervals.
Then there’s this example of Red Slate -5 on the same account, again with its very different resultant progression levels. Also in this particular example: how the system copes with a three-second latency.
The strava rides would be fascinating to see, alas, imported strava files are not clickable for me. 
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I wouldn’t pay too much attention to those rides behind the curtain. 
There is a lot going on there that isn’t obvious to those who aren’t involved in testing. 
Consider the HR data in the image you provided… 
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Oh yes, I saw the fairly constant HR data. I’m aware it’s very grain-of-salt stuff, just interesting to look at. 
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