I’ve read countless pages.
I’ve watched some videos.
I’ve tried to both understand - and - maybe have had and “Aha moment”?
When I had a coach - they gave me a week/month of schedule and I followed it and it worked. Using XATA, I don’t have a plan, I know that I’m supposed to ride XX hours this week, and I’m supposed to both use my brain (I have 1-1.5 hours these days, 3-4 those days, etc…) and show up and see what workout is recommended? I can let it pick one, or I can pick one from a list?
If I go “rogue” and do a group ride, Xert/XATA will autosense my crimes against the humanity, and the next day, will suggest something … based on my current status?
Yes, XATA factors in whatever you decide to do and moves forward from there.
I may have coined the term “un-plan” in one of my posts, but only in the sense you don’t have a populated calendar to stare at. The traditional “plan”.
Plan logic does indeed operate in background with XATA analyzing your activities and making daily recommendations based on the settings you have currently configured. Notably program type (TED, Continuous, Challenge), improvement rate (IR), and focus (Athlete type).
I don’t suggest automatic selection which randomly picks from the top four list. I like to choose based on what the thumbnail charts look like and sometimes from the Load More list. I will often drill down to view the workout in Workout Designer to see what’s what, namely difficulty and MPA graphs and how long the high intensity work intervals are.
ALL of the recommended workouts are viable alternatives today. As is your option to ride outdoors whether you try to replicate the gist of a recommended workout, free ride to focus, or simply add some more base miles, or enjoy a group ride on a sunny day.
Choosing a group session workout does not throw you off-course. You can be selective by noting XATA recommendation versus the group ride workout. Often, they are on the money in terms of difficulty (diamond count), focus type (endurance, etc.), and duration or XSS points. Why not ride with a group today? More fun than a solo. Chat when they are easy endurance. Share the pain when they are hard.
And speaking of easy/hard, that is a driving force in your “un-plan” progression. Go hard and easy will be recommended next. Go easy and sooner or later hard will be recommended. You can manipulate how hard or easy through your selections. If don’t feel comfortable doing that for now, go ahead and enable automatic. If you disagree with the selected workout, you can always go rogue.
Keep watching those academy videos and plan on watching them again after you have some weeks of experience training the Xert way. You won’t pick it all up at once. It is a journey of self-discovery. It gets better and better over time as you adapt to the elastic-fantastic way to train.
It might just be wording, but XATA is following a plan. It’s not recommending random workouts. There is a training philosophy behind the recommendations.
The power of Xert is that it can make recommendations in real time, aligning reality with the ideal.
That is a great suggestion - because watching 2 hours of videos and not being able to play with it is like blind folding yourself and trying to rebuild a refrigerator.
