I’ve read pretty much everything I can now on here and facebook and the 101 and am still not sure how to best use the training advisor?
I have my athlete type set, I have my target date, I have my progress (Moderate-1) I have a years worth of data and think my signature is spot on. So my questions are:
Do I get to see a target XSS for the week so that I can plan my week or is that an old idea and I should plan it based on projected ramp rate?
Do I need to add all my workouts for a week at time to the planner to be able to see this? Really I’d like to know if I’m aiming for 650XSS in a given week and it’s Saturday and I only have 325XSS so I need to generate another 325XSS on my outdoor rides, which I can use the IQ data field to monitor.
I thought the advisor was supposed to have an idea of how much available time you have on a certain day from historical data. I only generally have an hour to train on a weekday yet the advisor is always suggesting workout at least 1:30 and more often over 2 hours, for example “SMART - LUCY IN THE SKY WITH DIAMONDS - 95”
In m y goals it says 7.6hrs of training, this is fine for me to split across 3 x 1hr weekday sessions, then the reaming 4.6hrs split across Sat and Sun, but how do I implement this into the planner? Do I manually choose 1 hour workouts for the week and add them to the planner.
I guess really I was hoping to let XATA do its things and just do as asked but my main issue is the length of the weekday workouts and not knowing the goal for the week.
Thanks for a great tool and I’m sure I’ll get the hang of it.
Hi Jamie. Thanks for your questions. There is a bit of a shift of thinking when using the adaptive trainer on a daily basis. In its most simplest use case, when you want to train, you login and either do the workout recommended or choose from the list of recommended workouts, perhaps based on your available time or what you may feel like doing on a given day. They are ranked in order of how well the workout matches your given needs. When you look at the pacer, if the arrow is pointing right of center, you’re just fine. If you see it in the red, you’re falling behind and may need to put in more time to meet your improvement rate goals. If you’re all the way into the blue, you’re training much more than you had planned.
If you keep the arrow point up and right, you’ll improve at your improvement rate. So if you’re at 50 TL and want to get to ~70 TL in 4 weeks, set it to Aggressive-2. XATA determines how much weekly XSS you need, tracks it and tells you if you are behind, on-track or ahead of that goal. All the math is taken care of. Now you may get a warning that your improvement rate isn’t sustainable at some point but that should not be a concern. You can either decide to take some added recovery time by reducing your improvement rate temporarily or if you are looking to overload for an event, set your Freshness Feedback left and push through for another week, for example, knowing that you’re taper week is coming afterwards.
If you want to see what can happen into the future, you can use the planner and the weekly stats. Drag workout or activities on to your plan and monitor your Training Status and pacer as you do. If the pacer is right of center at the end of the week, you’re good.
XATA should weight workouts that better match your daily average workout duration but this can be fuzzy. Use the Load More button to find one that is aligned with your time available if this is the case. If the XSS you do in your workout is lower, that’s okay as XATA tracks this and will likely bump up your workout goal next time. If you do a bigger workout end up with a big surplus, that’s ok too. XATA will adjust. Getting a bit of a surplus is great since XATA will continue to give you reasonable workout goals so you can extend upon the surplus you happened to generate (Workout XSS is always a reasonable workout XSS target).
Thanks for the reply Armando, that all makes sense. You say XATA determines how much weekly XSS you need, but is this figure visible anywhere? I just think it would help inform me more in my choice of workouts as not all 1 hr workouts will have the same XSS and I’d like to know what I’m aiming for. Thanks