I’m new to Xert the last couple of weeks so still trying to figure the system out. The system has had me at very tired every day. The planner actually had me down as “fresh” but my main profile had me still very tired. Why the contradiction? I felt 90-95% on the ride so took the opportunity to do a few moderate efforts.
i’ve been on and off the bike the last 8-9 years, almost no structured training just riding. I’ve now got the time and desire to get back to my former self so have been averaging 20 hours a week the last few weeks doing long endurance rides.
I’ve got Xert cranked up all the way, it’s telling me I need less hours. I want to do a more polarized plan, should I follow Xert to the letter and do my 1-2 hard days when I’m fresh? currently sitting at 3+ stars if that matters.
How much ride history with power data have you imported into Xert?
When was last BT (breakthrough) as indicated under your name on main page of XO?
What does “cranked up all the way” refer to?
What are your settings under Goals?
Is Freshness Feedback set to neutral? (0)
Starting at 3-1/2 stars with 20 hours/week will certainly affect predictions.
Base training is well established if those were mostly endurance weeks at a polarized level (LTP-ish).
You don’t actually “follow Xert to the letter” like a prescription. XATA is a set of guidelines to consider with a range of possibilities on a day-to-day basis. You decide which direction to take things based on your time to train, freshness, and what you’d like to do today.
What has been the change in your Training Status/Load most recently? Say the past 6 weeks? If you are open to posting a picture of your XPMC and period stats, that would help.
When I signed up I imported the last 3 months of training, tried to do more but couldn’t get it done so moved on. My last BT was about 8 weeks ago, since then I was off the bike for nearly a month with vacation and surgery (gallbladder removed).
What I meant by “cranked up” is I have setting at extreme 2. Freshness feedback hasn’t been touched, it’s set to 0.
Almost the entire past 3 weeks has been endurance, only on a few group rides did I push the pace a little,
Since posting the initial question I’ve watched 4-5 more of the academy videos so it’s making more sense, I have 3 left to view.
I was off the bike for nearly a month for vacation and surgery. I did ride 12-15 hours unstructured a week leading up to that time off for a couple months.
No problem posting that info but I don’t know what it is.
For XPMC chart select Progression tab on home page at xertonline.com, select 3 months in the drop down on right, then scroll down to the chart, select XPMC, and make a screen grab of that chart to post.
If unable to import more than 3 months history, you can file a support ticket with support@xertonline.com.
If you have more than 3 months, set the stats range for chart to show Year-to-Date instead.
Thanks again. I’ve now watched all the videos and understand how everything works. Now I have some questions on the garmin IQ app. Can you point me to the right location? I was going to use it on my ride today but I was concerned it wouldn’t record all my gps data as well? does that run in the background? shortly before this 2 months of data I took 6-8 weeks pretty easy, didn’t ride that much or that hard so my fitness fell off a cliff. For reference, before I took the last 8-10 years mostly off the bike I was getting close to cat 1 road upgrade with FTP at 340-350 at 145 lbs.
It’s normal for form to decrease as Training Load increases - this is the nature of Progressive Overload!
I’m actually in a similar position - I had a bit of a break towards the end of the outdoor season before jump-starting my training again (starting from a TL of ~40 or so). At a Moderate - 2 Improvement Rate, I’ve juuust been skirting the edge of red status for the last couple of weeks… in fact, I just hit red status after this morning’s ride for maybe the second time in 5 weeks or so:
While progressive overload is generally how we increase our fitness levels, doing too much too soon can sometimes have a negative impact - such as increase chances for illness, injury, or burning out. In fact, I’ve personally experienced burnout in years past from other platforms when doing high-volume training plans. Increasing training load through high Improvement Rates is okay, but requires you to focus on adequate recovery between training sessions.
Another point I’d like to ask about is about the intensity of your rides… or what Focus type do your rides/workouts have? Are they all free-rides (outdoors, Zwift, etc.), or are they structured workouts? If so, which workouts? If you find yourself often riding at/above threshold every single ride, you could easily find yourself in a perpetual red/yellow status, since that wouldn’t offer your high (HIE) or peak (PP) systems any chance to adequately recover! In those cases, it would be very helpful to add in a few sub-TP (or better yet, sub LTP) rides into the mix… those rides continue to build your Threshold Power while simultaneously allowing your high/peak systems to recover for your next high-intensity ride!
Regardless, you should probably consider how you’re actually feeling in addition to Xert’s calculated training status. If you are genuinely feeling fatigued/tired, it could be a sign that you need to reduce your Improvement Rate & weekly training volume. If you’re not feeling tired, then I would consider using the Freshness Feedback slider and moving it towards the right. This will tell the system that you’re more fresh than Xert thinks, and provide different workout recommendations.
Thanks Scott. I’m a level 2 USAC power certified coach but I haven’t coached anyone in close to a decade. I understand everything here just trying to figure out the mechanics of how to use it. I can not for the life of me figure out the Garmin IQ app, its really irritating. I’ve watched the video and read the info on the links provided, it’s clear as mud.
Today I started by putting a workout on my schedule for today, then connecting to my garmin 520. However, it still has a ride I had loaded from the last time and I couldn’t get it off of there. I finally gave up and just went on my ride then noticed my gps wasn’t working on my garmin. Turns out the Xert app was running in the back ground? I had to stop, stop the xert app, then restart my garmin messing up my ride data.
First, I need to figure out how to load a workout onto my garmin properly. Do I download the file from my pc into garmin file? if yes, which one? It wasn’t working from my phone today so I tried this and it didn’t work either.
2nd, I want to be able to ride before and after workouts without losing my overall ride and gps data, how do I do that? really frustrating like I said. I can’t start using Xert for training until this is figured out.
In the mean time, I’ve only been doing long rides staying under LTP the entire time. I’ve only jumped above threshold on a couple of group rides during that time. I have been going by feel as well as what XERT has been telling me, that is why I was questioning the “tired” analysis because I haven’t felt that bad riding below LTP.
The other question is decay, I lose a point of my LT every day. An LTP ride will push it up 2 and I lose 1 to decay before the next ride. Normal? Threshold seems like it’s right around 300 watts right now.
Still clear as mud. If I want to do an actual workout, outside, how do I do that? Do I place it on the schedule right before getting on my bike? Do I load it from my PC or from phone somehow?
It should not be this hard. Maybe I can find a 3rd party video on YouTube.
You can either schedule it and set the time. Or you could press the “Play now” button on the webpage. It was called ‘select workout’ a while ago and it still does that. It selects the workout you want to do so that you then can run it in the app (Garmin/Android/iOS). You don’t have to transfer any file or anything, just start the app and it will download the selected workout, in case of Garmin by using the connected phone, so that has to be there as well, just when you start the Garmin Xert App though.
I think the whole confusion is due to there being several ways to use Xert.
You always need one of the mobile apps (Garmin/Android/iOS) to actually run the workout and if you use iOS or Android you can also use that to select a workout you want to run.
In addition to that you can select a workout on the webpage or schedule it in the planner.
In parallel to the mobile app you can use several forms of remote player web apps to view the workout and stats and/or video or in case of multi user events chat and rankings and such.
The mobile apps send the data to the Xert web server and the web app displays it alongside other stuff on a big screen of some kind.
That makes much less sense outdoors of course. And even indoors it might not be what you like. It certainly is not necessary, the data is shown in the mobile app as well and that might be what you want or like best.
This makes some sense, I’ll try this tomorrow. Thanks. My goal by Sunday is to be able to get the correct workout onto my garmin and complete the workout without messing up the Xert data or my garmin ride/gps data. I can then start training using Xert next week. Until then I’m just riding low threshold endurance rides.
Thanks, I watched this one this morning. He didn’t cover the part I’m struggling with however, which is to get the correct workout onto the garmin and get it started and ended without losing any data.
