I’ve been playing with the fitness planner, trying to understand the impact different improvement rates over the next several weeks. It would be very helpful if Xert could automatically add the recommended workout for many weeks into the future, without having to click on each day. I’d like to simply tell Xert how many days to plan, and Xert would add the recommended workouts into my calendar. Why? So I can get a general idea of the hours needed and how training strain is distributed over the upcoming weeks. I would likely change each workout, however looking at what the ATA would plan would be very useful.
And since plans are never followed, I should also be able to bulk-delete planned workouts for a given date range, so I could re-plan anytime.
I think this doesn’t fit with the XERT philosophy of dynamic training. On the podcasts the guys emphasise that it isn’t a training programme set out on a particular day looking far ahead. My understanding on the training demands based on moderate 2 is basically a near-doubling of time required between base phase and peak phase (9.5-10.0 hours) during which I’ve gone from two to three stars. Im sure others can advise if a similar ratio applies with easier and tougher improvement rate settings.
This is sort of how we originally imagined it. We had a roadmap all set out to automatically create workouts and allowing users to go into an elaborate calendar tool to allow you to define what days and times you have available to train and to lay out training plans that fit into your availability and update everything at the click of a button, using an optimization method.
In the end though, we’re glad we didn’t go this way because it would have been an immense project and wouldn’t really have yielded better training in the end. It’d be novel to see what our system would yield in terms of a predefined training plan but you’d probably hit the UPDATE button after every workout. What’s in the plan would always just be what it was the last time you clicked UPDATE and not reflective of what you’d likely be following (at least for the vast majority of people who don’t follow their plan exactly).
What works best is to understand what’s needed rather than be guided blindly by a plan. This is what we help you do. It’s the give a man a fish vs. teach a man to fish thing. Mapping out a few days is good to see how things work and maybe plan out a week, max, if you are in need of knowing when and what type of workout you need to prepare for. But deciding on a given day what you’ll be doing accounting for what your training demands are but more so how you feel, what time you have availalble and are there others riding that will boost your motivation to train, are going to allow you to get much more out of your training. If your plan says do 1 hour Endurance but you have 2 hour availalble, you ride for 2 hours, always, always … unless you’re in a taper timing things leading into an event. Just a simple example of how any predefinition is not really viable.
Thanks for your response. I don’t disagree at all, however I simply wanted an idea of what a training week would look like a few months in advance if I chose an aggressive vs a moderate improvement rate. I did not expect a cookie cutter plan.
I was able to find my answer and it looked like the aggressive rate was way too aggressive for me, however it took a lot of mouse clicking. I also noticed that the forecasted training for both improvement rates becomes less and less realistic, as the system assumes that I would improve at the forecasted rate, but this is understandable, since it is designed to use feedback from my actual performance to do short-term planning.