In the glossary for Training Deficit and Surplus it says this: The value is calculated based on your past week and doesn’t carry over, meaning that if you missed reaching your target the previous week, you don’t have to make up for it this week. Similarly, if you went over the previous week, it doesn’t mean you can stop training this week. The amount of training you need to perform is calculated on the current week (exactly 1 week ago).
Is this week one calendar week rather than a rolling 7 days, so the target gets reset every Monday morning?
Also, what is the point of the “Training Status/Advice as of” time setting? It seems to me that people should only need to have a deficit/target for each day and anything else is unnecessarily complicated … but maybe I am missing something?
Rolling seven days. There is no reset. Carrying a deficit is normal.
Goal is to keep the needle pointing up between 11am-2pm dependent upon your current IR setting and how much you can train today and moving forward (over the next seven days).
If consistently falling behind (towards red) or ahead of plan (towards turquoise), adjust IR to reflect how much you can train at this time.
Should probably change to be a toggle (End of Day or Start of Day) and remove option to set a specific time (an original design consideration).
I think some users may prefer to set the time to their normal workout time.
Perhaps three options – day end, day start, and normal workout time for that day of the week (automatic detection) or would that be confusing as well?
Thanks! But I still don’t get why anyone would want their As Of time to be anything other than the default. For example - say you set it for the morning when you typically do a workout, what’s the benefit of seeing your target change as the day goes on? Seems like you would be trying to hit a moving target.
To answer my own question after a little more thought (as usual!) I guess this is so you can get the “perfect” workout suggested at that point in time. But this seems like perhaps a case of over precision, and that the training pacer (and planner) would be a lot simpler to use if it was just fixed on some middle point of the day.
I was confused by the training pacer for literally years because I had set my As Of time to the mornings for some unknown reason.
Rather than fixing the “as of time” to specific time of day, actually I would rather have it as “as of now”. Not only it is simpler, but also enables one to look at the status at anytime (e.g. before and after a workout) without having to change the settings.
Wouldn’t that be more confusing, especially for newer users? You’d check the advisor to see what XSS goal you need to hit, go out for a ride and get back only to find that your XSS goal had changed.
This is actually how the Training Pacer originally worked. As @guyc mentions, most users complained that you were always trying to hit a moving target, as XSS would change dramatically over the course of the day (as rides from the previous week moved out of the rolling 7 day window). Now the deficit still changes behind the scenes… we just report the value as of a singular point in time each day. Hope that makes sense.
FWIW, I just set my to end of day (11:59pm) and aim to keep my pacer needle closer to 11-12 o’clock position. I also generally have Sundays on my off days. The pacer works really, really well for me and helps me to avoid large swings in training (either far too much or far too little) for a nice steady progression. For example, here’s my progression since late October:
Pretty much been following a dedicated Moderate - 2 IR every week since then. Had one big week that pushed me into the red (Strava Festive 500 week), followed almost immediately by a ~8 day sickness (probably related to traveling + Festive 500). And 2 #NoDecay breakthroughs
what is interesting in your tracker progression is the frequency of breakthroughs. As probably one of the most expert Xert users that is a telling feature of your training. So from that I my imply that breakthroughs need not be overly frequent, and yet your TP has progressed upward without that. Mine looks like the rockie mountains…so maybe my decay was too high? I recently switched to no decay/ training load matched which seems better.
Actually that is exactly the other thing that I’m also having issue with, i.e. XATA is too sensitive to past workout patterns. This makes current deficit/surplus suggestion less useful, as I have to check tomorrow’s status before determining what I need to do now.
For example, if I have +10 surplus before a workout now, I still need to check what XATA is expecting tomorrow. If it is giving me huge deficit tomorrow (because of epic ride that I did the week before), and if I know I won’t be able to repeat the epic ride tomorrow, I would have to adjust today’s workout to have more XSS.
For me it would be better if Xert calculates the moving 7 day average and then distributes the XSS evenly across days (or hours, seconds). This way it’s easier to do mental calculation of what is the expected daily load.
With that in place, the as of now wouldn’t have the problem that you mentioned.
That’s what I did. The problem is it doesn’t show your true current freshness form (if I understood correctly, the freshness/tiredness indication is also affected by the “as of” time? If not then yeah, enroll me to that “confused Xerters club” ) Before a workout I’d like to see how my current form is, and not my 11:59pm form.
Anyway, rather than suggesting what the solution should be, here are stuffs that for me will be nice to have from XATA:
To see my current surplus/deficit and form before doing a workout, and later after doing the workout, and maybe at anytime I want (IMO this is just natural and it’s what my sport watch is showing me if I look at it at anytime)
To see daily XSS target not fluctuating too much because of past days workout patterns.
If you’re ok doing some arithmetic, the daily XSS needed, assuming riding every day, is pretty much just your current training load + ramp rate * 60/7 (or + ramp rate * 9 is near enough)
Ramp rate is from your improvement rate, slow is 1 per week, mod-1 is 2 per week etc. going up by 1 each time
It would be difficult though to do mental calculation of your accumulated XSS deficit/surplus for the past 7 days in order to determine your current deficit/surplus, so if XATA does it for me that would be nice.
I guess the 7 day rolling average that xata uses in the math to determine the next days list of workouts and a individual’s perceived fatigue at the time of workout can differ to a large degree, especially for a older cyclist, needing to be more cognizant of recovery, the obvious is the ff slider.
While xert touts no days off, and for a individual that doesn’t have a true understanding of the system and is determined to follow xata, this will likely fatigue a older rider.
For me being competitive at 20 and 64 is a whole different skill set and rhythm, I think requiring a little more bending of exrt to get the best results.
True. I guess the problem is because I don’t have a strict schedule that I follow. Sometimes I ride big on the weekend, sometimes I don’t. I’m bad at following any training plans. But hey, that’s what make me attracted to Xert in the first place!
There are two numbers talked about in XATA: a deficit, and a suggested / ‘you should consider’ target. The “blending” you refer to is only relevant for the suggestion, where past riding patterns are considered. The deficit is exactly the shortfall over the last rolling 7 days, at the time you select - which seems to be what you were after in your earlier post? Maybe I’m missing what you are after
) Before a workout I’d like to see how my current form is, and not my 11:59pm form.
