Just gauging who else finds the “Advice is based on your recent activities performed on…” unhelpful. I’m a shift worker on 10 day cycles and when I ask for a suggested workout it considers what I might do on the days either side based on the previous week which means the workouts are always easier than what ends up being suggested on the day. Not a huge issue but it does hinder planning when riding with others and what route we’ll take.
I can see how it would be handy if you ride consistently on set days but as someone who has a broken body clock the main reason for using Xert is to quantify the freshness feel I don’t have.
Would anyone else find the ability to switch this off helpful? A toggle in the settings menu would be fantastic for me.
I’d contacted their support email and they were quick to respond but said I should use a desktop and manually choose my workouts in the planner, which defeats to reason for Xert for me. Strava Analytics is half the price.
Did they mean manually choose, or manually filter workouts? Filtering for time available (maximum, minimum) is really easy and something I do regularly for that reason. You can use the filter in any web browser as far as I’m aware; you find it in the recommended workouts section. And it still chooses the right intensity for the workout, just adjusting the time
Manually filter then choose, which is hard to do when you don’t know how long you should train for. My future day will make an assumption about my form which will be incorrect as it will account for potential rides that won’t happen.
For instance, it says on Sunday I should aim for a 150XSS ride but if I do it for Saturday instead it says I should aim for 180XSS. Won’t I be more rested after another day off?
Removing this extra ‘feature’ of guessing my week for me would be a real help.
While it’s not a big issue for me, I would also prefer to just get the top advice regardless of weekday. I’ve always thought that this was something thrown in by a software developer just because it was easy to implement and it would make it look more advanced.
I can’t really see who would benefit from the weekday advice. As said above, you can always filter or scroll down if the suggestions are off. I hope there is a better reason for keeping it besides “sunk cost”. Maybe I’m missing something?
I agree that the weekday advice is (for me) obsolet as my available time fluctuates very heavily. Nevertheless why not just ignore it
I look at the focus time xata says I should aim for and my xss deficit. Say I have a 150 XSS deficit and should aim for a rouleur workout I then decide:
Am I short on time but feel really good and am on blue stars? Then I choose a shorter rouleur focus workout maybe 1/2 to 1 star more difficult than my star-rating would suggest but is timewise a bit shorter and try to minimize my deficit.
Do I have more time? Then I simply choose a longer workout fitting my star-rating (or I go crazy and choose a longer, harder workout )
Am I short on time and feel tired and can’t match my recommended xss? Life stress is obviously too much and I have to dial back my improvement rate as annoying as this is.
30xss more or less is really not that much of a big deal. I really like the idea of xert that you can choose a fiiting workout based on your available time on the day and are not on a fixed schedule. This of course comes at the cost of having to choose your workouts for yourself.
I might be wrong but from what I can see it’s a rolling 7day average of the expected XSS that you should have. Therefore if you did a big ride on a sunday last week, your xss will drop a lot on Sunday this week requiring another big effort to meet your goal unless you’ve done a bigger than prior week effort earlier in the week then it’ll bring that into it too.
If you know a week is going to leave you with a deficit because sundays ride won’t be big, then look at what the estimated xss required for that day is then pick a workout that adds an extra 10-20xss to it.
The algorithm for automatically selecting workouts can only use what it has available, other than selecting it manually I’m not sure how it could work for different shift patterns.
Thanks everyone for their input. Hopefully Xert take note of how keen their community is to help.
What you say Donna makes a lot of sense. I assumed when it says “based on recent activities performed on x day” that it was over the whole 6 week fitness signature but overlaying the 7 days form over that would make sense.
I’d still like to know why form can’t just follow the normal decay and not predict what I may do. A toggle for “Natural” vs “Predicted” decay or something.
P.S. Todays example was good. Auto-generated a workout for today a couple of days ago and it suggested a recovery ride (big ride last weekend) yet this morning when I set off it gave me 90XSS in 90mins! Haha. Only had an hour to ride.
Doesn’t seem right to be recommended a recovery ride a few days out, unless you had done a massive ride, or are pre-populating your planner with activities in between? If you’ve not planned anything, it won’t be projected or taken into account.
Other possibility is a mismatch of activity time… pre populating the planner is based advice off your selected ‘usual activity time’, and if it’s an early usual time then it’s possible it predicted you’d still be fatigued at that time, but when you looked at the current training advice you weren’t…
My usual time was set to 5am and I took off at 4:30am. As a test I’ve changed it for tomorrow to 12:30pm and it says I have a deficit of 180 with a workout goal of 130 and has assigned a ride of 150. With a difference of 20 that might explain the 60 recovery ride turning into a 90 workout as the goal might have been in the middle. Will report on all three figures tomorrow. Even clicking the auto-generate workout cycles between workouts of 130-150.
I agree Nemo, day of the week advice confusing and not helpful. I’m on a 5 day schedule/rotation and being forced into 7 days makes the advice feature worthless.
I see that I forgot to report back after my last post. As expected, the deficit was correct and a ride was suggested within +/- 30 XSS of the workout goal.
The deficit seems to be correct no matter how far I look ahead so that seems dependable.
The workout goal seems less so. I haven’t done much riding lately so I can’t test if there’s much advice error when going past 7 days but when looking at the Workout Goal for 8/9/10 days ahead I see workout goals of 190/294/137 with increasing deficits as expected. Nothing planned in the calendar. The day with 294 I usually don’t ride on as I look after our child.
My approach now is to choose my own workout with an eye on the deficit.
If the “Advice is based on…” could be removed though it would be clearer.
