Trainer Road for indoor, Xert for outside rides

General
1

Autumn is here where I live and I am moving to indoor rides during weekdays, with outside rides during weekends.

I decided to renew my Trainer Road subscription, because for me it works better than Xert for indoor rides. In TR, indoor workouts feel just right, like the software knows how to push me, without killing me. No fiddling with internal settings required. With Xert I often failed indoor workouts, I just couldn’t seem to get the difficulty right, despite trying different settings. This eroded my confidence and trust in the Xert system- I often dreaded indoor workouts on Xert, which is not a good place to be.

Also, the week structure on Xert is unpredictable, whereas TR has a repeatable week structure, which just fits my life better.

However, I am keeping Xert subscription, at least fo now, because I just love Magic Buckets. Having this little “game” during outside rides motivates me wonderfully to push hard. I feel like I am training, instead of just randomly riding.

TR is not perfect by any means. Workouts are very repetitive, with strong sweet spot and threshold bias, and the FTP prediction tends to overpromise, which leads to frustration. And of course TR doesen’t have anything like Magic Buckets. But getting the indoor difficulty right is very valuable to me.

Workouts are way too hard – could my Fitness Signature be wrong?
2

I appreciate that many people have a good experience with TR.
Mine was the opposite.
I didn’t feel as annoyed as others by the fluctuating FTP prediction, but I struggled with getting workouts that matched my abilities and even simply getting a plan with a sensible progression.
After trying a few other approaches, I ended up putting together my own training plan. That was the point where I’d had enough.
So, I really understand how frustrating it feels to spend a lot of time pointing the training platform in the right direction, rather than using that time for actual training.

For me, Xert delivers where it matters most: Providing me with workouts that match my ability.
I found the difficulty score of the workouts a good predictor for how I will feel afterwards.
Although the visualizations of the workout structures sometimes looks intimidating, my experience is that when the difficulty score was in a range I already had mastered, I will succeed with the workout.

Have you tried XFAI?
Together with appropriate restrictions of your weekly availability you can create a repeatable week structure similar to what you are used to from TR.

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