Does anyone here use Trainer Road AI Cycling?

[Alan]

I have used TR for the past several years mainly to get in shape by Memorial Day. I like the low volume masters plans. You can do indoor training during the week and then ride outside on weekend. I don't have a power meter on my bike so I just do my own thing on the weekends but I am not really training for events specifically.

Following TR is probably not practical on group rides but TR will calc your numbers from power and HR to calc TSS etc.

If you want to maximize performance I think you need to be on a trainer or on your own outside w a power meter and actually do the specific workouts.

Everyone uses TR differently depending on your goals. Mine are simply to get in shape as much as possible by Memorial Day as I do an event every year.

Alan

[weaponsgrade]

How does TR deal with deviations from the training plan? Let's say my goals are just to generally increase fitness for longer rides and TR gives me plan to follow. I follow the plan on my indoor trainer, but on certain days outside with my crew I wander well out of zone 2 and ride a lot harder/longer than planned. Would TR then automatically adjust the plan?

[sheepdog84]

Originally Posted by weaponsgrade

How does TR deal with deviations from the training plan? Let's say my goals are just to generally increase fitness for longer rides and TR gives me plan to follow. I follow the plan on my indoor trainer, but on certain days outside with my crew I wander well out of zone 2 and ride a lot harder/longer than planned. Would TR then automatically adjust the plan?

It does. If you go way hard on an outdoor ride, it will automatically adjust your next few workouts to be easy endurance rides, or just straight up cancel/reschedule sessions and give you a rest day.

All of that is a relatively new feature and works quite well.

I wish they had more in-between plans. The Low volume feels too low, and I sometimes end up missing a session or two on the Medium volume - just due to fatigue.

If I were to give OP or anyone advice, it would be stick to low volume, and make sure you get plenty of outdoor riding time in as well. If you didn't know already, you'll quickly learn that substantially longer rides can often be filled with basically no effort especially if you're coasting frequently.

Whereas indoors, you're almost constantly putting power through the pedals, where as outdoors it's much more dynamic - so you may accidentally end up cooking yourself too soon, unless it's your intent to do an indoor session outdoors.

For example - I rode indoors a ton over the winter, but still felt somewhat lacking when it came to outdoors in terms of training stimuli and ended up having cramps because I wasn't used to the stop/start nature of riding outdoors.

[Jdm]

I want to ride in between the low and mid volume plans. Customer support said to either follow the low plan and manually add a weekly workout (I added a weekly long endurance ride) or follow the mid plan and skip/delete one workout per week.

About outside ride tracking and AI, the app currently just incorporates TSS to adjust future rides and red yellow green tracking. It doesn’t see how much VO2 max or other type of training you did.

For outside rides, I either follow the prescribed workout or I just have the app count the TSS. I do not associate group rides with a workout. This was a big learning for me from their support team.

[Alistair]

Originally Posted by Turkle

This is all correct, but because my outdoor rides are unstructured, I wouldn't expect them to have the same benefit as a structured interval ride anyway. To me, it's not at all a contradiction - two different styles of riding with different benefits and measurements.

Yep, I do the same, just wanted to call it out, since many people will assume all power data contributes to the progression levels.

[Alistair]

Originally Posted by weaponsgrade

How does TR deal with deviations from the training plan? Let's say my goals are just to generally increase fitness for longer rides and TR gives me plan to follow. I follow the plan on my indoor trainer, but on certain days outside with my crew I wander well out of zone 2 and ride a lot harder/longer than planned. Would TR then automatically adjust the plan?

It does a few things...

At the top of the list is red-ligth/green-light - if you have an unusually hard ride, TR will ask you to change the next day or two to easier workouts (usually a day off or an easy endurance ride).

It will feed that data into the AI FTP engine, so if you hit really good numbers, those contribute to FTP changes over time.

But, unstructured rides do not feed into the progression levels, as I mentioned earlier. They're working on that, but have said that for 2 years now. So, if that fast group ride looked like a VO2 workout, it still won't force TR to pick a harder VO2 interval next time.

A few general tips...
- Don't match unstructured rides to workouts unless you actually did the workout.
- If you're doing a workout outside, load it on your GPS, so it pairs seamlessly. If you forget, you can do the workout on your own and pair later if needed.
- Pick the lowest volume plan that makes sense (for me, that's flipping between low and medium - high volume is HIGH for non-elite athletes).

And TR plans usually start with a pretty easy base block. Rate the workouts correctly in survey after each one and it will adapt. This can take a few weeks - easier to let it do its thing than worry about it.

Use the alternate workout selector - you can find shorter/longer/easier/harder workouts that are similar to the default selection. So, if you have 60 minutes and the workout is supposed to be 90, use an alternate instead of JRA with no goal.

Add as many events as you can, and mark them as A/B/C correctly. A races will have a full taper. B no taper, but a leg opener day. C no change to plan. It won't let you pick A races within 8 weeks of each other (due to the taper).

Halfway through the Plan Build wizard, you get the option to adjust each block - dont' be afraid to play with this (you can adjust the plan again later without rebuilding from scratch). Example: I started with a low volume plan but bumped the longest available workout to 5 hours on Saturdays - this rep the low volume in tact for intensity# of internal sessions, but let me get long endurance rides.

Also, the TR staff is SUPER responsive in the forum and via email. If you screw up your plan somehow, they can often revert or fix it without having to start over.

[Alistair]

Originally Posted by Jdm

I want to ride in between the low and mid volume plans. Customer support said to either follow the low plan and manually add a weekly workout (I added a weekly long endurance ride) or follow the mid plan and skip/delete one workout per week.

Have you looked at the Masters plan options? Master medium might work.