Training Advisor, Deficit and Recommended XSS

Anyone noticing the training advisor is recommending ridiculously long workouts? I currently have a deficit of 79 XSS to finish out the week. All the workouts that are being recommended are 200+ XSS and 3 hours long. Why so much? All the Small Things - 90, will get me 76 XSS.

I would imagine your athlete type, where you are at with your target event (build or peak), your improvement rate and possibly your decay rate may all come into play here, as well as what you have done in the last 7 days.
I have selected GC specialist for athlete type and am just hitting my peak phase and am seeing a lot of threshold work with XATA. No extremes for amount of XSS needed. However, I have also been orange for the past month and the last 10 days I have been decreasing my XSS/day to try to get back to blue.

Good points. I have my atlete type set to Sprint time trialist. I still have over a week of the base phase. My improvement rate is set to moderate 1. After today’s ride my ramp rate is .4 and I need 79 XSS to hit 1. So it confuses me when. It wants me to do a 3 hour ride and get 200+ XSS.

I’m not going to listen to it and I will be doing a 1.5 hour ride and getting just over 79…

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Hi @LeeZ ,

Can you show your XPMC and the training advice? It could be due to the recent changes we made where recommendations are influenced by your recent activities (and their type - e.g. Workout, Virtual (indoor) ride, and Outdoor ride). If you’ve done a few long/hard workouts recently, that might be part of it.

Cheers!

That’s exactly what it is then. I was doing an e-fobdo series every Sunday for 6 the rides ranged from 2-2:45 in time. They ended 2 weeks ago.

I recently changed to “sprint time trialist” IR = slow and got (in my view) some odd recommendations as well. Planned to ask in another thread but seeing it mention here.

A - did “the pretender” a 2-star saturday morning, after workout deficit = 91 AND a recommendation to do “Best of You” a 2,5-star - 137XSS

  • sunday morning deficit = 139, recommended “the pretender” at XSS103 and the “Best of you” not to be seen within the top 20 if I recall correct. All very light workout despite the 2,5 suggestion from the afternoon before. “Advice as of” = 22:59

Tried to auto-fill until may 7th (tue, thu, sat, sun), all but one workout leaves me fresh after the workout. When looking at the weekly stats the improvement is very low, and not matching the “Goal promise”

I’ve had the feeling that something is stuck in the system after the recent upgrade and the request to “clear cache”. The recent pursuiter challenge (IR=slow) had a quite different feel to it.

In Xert you don’t populate a calendar like other platforms.
The Planner can be is used for playing what-if scenarios a week in advance.
Many of us never populate the Planner and if we do (for next week) we aren’t tied to those activities. If you decide to do something different, the planned activity disappears after the allotted time slot “expires”.

Watch this portion of the Academy I3 video as it explains how deficit/surplus and form work with the Planner and how the Planner is designed to be used.
Episode I3 - Mastering Xert - Improve - The Adaptive Training Advisor - YouTube

Lots of newbie tips posted here – Beginner questions
Academy series videos are the quickest way to get up to speed – Discover + Improve + Perform
FAQs here – Support Home – Xert

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That’s likely exactly what it is. The system looks at what you have been doing and uses that information (along with the XSS surplus/deficit) to make recommendations. We try to avoid extreme cases by using a median value for the last several weeks. We did this since the activity type might often determine how much training you might do. I might not be bothered to gear up (especially in the cold) for a 60 XSS ride, but I would easily do that on the turbo. On the other hand, I might not want to do 150+ XSS indoors on the turbo, but that would be (relatively) easy to achieve on an outdoor ride! Hope that explains some of the logic behind the new feature…

You can still use the filter(s) to filer by activity type, duration, etc.!

Makes total sense. Most cases I typically try to go by what the system is telling me. I knew how much XSS I needed for the end of the week so I just filtered the workouts down to meet what I needed.

Over the next few weeks those rides should be pretty distant as I get back to a more normal schedule.

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I’m aware of that, and only did it to test/try the planner as I did when I started using XERT 5-6 weeks ago. I don’t recall that IR=slow resulted in a negative ramp rate at any point or that TL ended up being lower after a month. Just curious if that’s as expected?

slow “sprint TT challenge”, according to “Goal” end TL should be 68,5

30-day Challenge ATP = when you are not training with a specific target event but wish to challenge yourself to meet a particular improvement rate, or a particular Threshold Power (or Athlete Type Power) over the next 30 days.

You’ll see workouts recommended at the target focus duration when form is fresh/blue.
You selected Sprint TT which is in the endurance quadrant at 20:00 minute focus duration.
Both The Pretender (Endurance - 15:05) and Best of You (Endurance - 19:28) are Sprint TT workouts.

2 to 2.5 stars TL with a focus duration in the endurance quadrant should feel relatively easy with short recoveries required. That’s why frequent fresh form is predicted.
If you’d like to up the ante and can afford the extra time required, you could bump IR to Extreme. Or pick a focus duration point 10:00 minutes or shorter to increase intensity on fresh days.

Auto filling the Planner for weeks on end doesn’t generate a training “plan”. In normal use you are actively engaged in making decisions and monitoring the pacer needle to manage your deficit/surplus.
To view recommendations for tomorrow after completing an activity today, double-click the next day on the Planner. This assumes you don’t use auto-fill to tilt the wheel. The advice will reflect your default As Of time, but if you alter Start Time the list may change depending on calculated form. In your case you’ll be floating within the endurance range regardless.
Slow IR is likely less than an hour difference over 30 days.

Thanks. I’m actually not suggesting that something is wrong with the algorithm, but rather that there was/is an “it” problem (maybe just with my account?). I used XERT exactly as you described for the first month for a pursuiter challenge. Then changed to Sprint TT for a week to get at small “break”. Last week I had the sense that something was stuck in the system. It was not just the recommendations that felt off, the following was seen:

a - Changed my signature, change not active the day after
b - A strange +10W TP spike was present on my signature graph on a day I didn’t train - no BT associated
c - Athlete type not auto-updated on EBC. I changed from “Sprint TT” to “Break Away” this monday or tuesday and the “Athlete type” got auto-updated.

Perhaps it was a glitch with your account or XO as there is a similar post regarding a mystery change.
If you notice something odd in the future, you can file a support request directly by contacting support@xertonline.com.

EBC syncs to XO when you first start the app or if you swipe down on the home page when it’s up and running. You could, for example, change Athlete Type under Goals (on XO) while the app is up and running then swipe down on EBC to update the app immediately. Swiping down also updates the recommended workout with any new workout/session selection made on XO.
On the iOS version you can also change Goals settings under the Train page. If you do that and want everything to appear in sync, swipe down on the Activities page on EBC and refresh the browser page for XO. Otherwise, the views reflect cached info.

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