I have been using Xrt for almost two months now and I can’t say I went beyond the surface yet. I am curious how can get start creating a training a plan based on my current signature and goals. I was hoping I could do it without spending a lot of time to understand all the details. Is there a quick guide? If not, do you plan to creat one? Thanks.
The simplest approach is to go through your list of activities and find those that you will be doing as part of your training. Make them favourites. Then go through the list of workouts, and favourite those that you like or have done before. Choose those that are both easy and hard (by rating) and have a variety of different focus values.
Now go to the calendar, and based on your Training Status on a given day (number and colour of stars), drag and drop your activity or workout on that day based upon your availability to train on that day. If Training Status is red, you should either skip the day or at most put in a Recovery ride. If Training Status is yellow, you shouldn’t schedule a difficult or hard workout or activity, at least not on a consistent basis. On blue or green days, feel free to schedule whichever workout you would like to do. You’ll find that as you schedule this out, your Training Status (number of stars) will increase and you’ll need workouts with greater XSS scores or longer duration to keep your Training Status increasing. Try and match worko ut rating with your Training Status otherwise you may find yourself having a hard time completing the workouts when it comes time to do them. As far as Focus is concerned, look to do workouts that are at to your Focus Athlete Type the closer you get to your Target Event Date. The further away you are from your Target Event Date, the more you can schedule lower “base” training efforts.
One thing to keep an eye on is the value below XSS/day on the weekly table (amount of increase over the Training Load from previous week). If it’s red, you likely have too much training scheduled that week. If it’s green it’s good. If it’s blue, you’ll be losing fitness that week. This can happen normally, if you don’t have a lot of time to train, where you’ll plateau and won’t be able to get a very high green XSS/day increase or start seeing blue. When this happens, you’re going to have to make workouts harder (higher ratings) or add more workout time to your plan.
Good luck!
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Thank you Armando! This was very informative.
Thanks for the guide Armando! For me this capability is a breakthrough as I don’t have a good intuitive feel for what increase in TL I can handle.
It also occurs to me that I can create a simple weekly periodization (Easy Week, Hard Week, Medium Week) by adjusting the plan so as to control the increase in TL / week.
Exactly. In our plans for an automated planner, the increase in TL/week will correspond with how challenging / demanding / strenuous the the plan is you wish to follow. This means that someone that is prepared to really push themselves, the increase in TL will be more than someone would like to take things easier. People are different and can handle varying amounts of training.