The Matchbox podcast episode 180 promised a question on Xert breakthroughs. Unfortunately it didn’t promise to give a useful answer.
The question was “how does doing lots of shorter intervals using Magic Buckets compare to doing the traditional 5 or 6 minute repeated intervals”
A good question but the response completely ignored the question and proceeded to demonstrate their lack of knowledge of Xert. If you want 15 minutes of waffle listen to the podcast.
Suffice to say that they didn’t even know what the Xert equivalent of CTL might be called. They continued to plug Training Peaks and ignored Xert completely.
I’ve spoken with Dylan a few times and I think he likes the concepts that we have but he leans towards TrainingPeaks for very simple reasons. TrainingPeaks is a coaching platform more than self-serve training platform. Athletes can buy training plans from Dylan and other coaches so there is a strong motivation to stay on TrainingPeaks if you’re a coach.
Some new users come to Xert with the expectation that it should work like something they are familiar with. These users sometimes find it “complicated”. If you come to Xert without expectations, it’s actually not that difficult to understand. On the contrary perhaps because the concepts all make sense and are intuitive. Yes there are concepts to learn but that’s no different than FTP, IF, TSS, NP, CTL, ATL, TSB etc. … and there is definitely some heavy lifting there to understand these btw, including a whole book at about them (TARWAPM) that you should read.
We plan to work on more coaching features to better attract coaches to use our platform. We have coaches on the system today that use it very effectively and have been hugely successful with it. There is work though to turn it into a full-fledged coaching platform, something we’ll be working on in the not-too-distant future.
I don’t know why they even pretended to answer the question posed which was something like what do you think of xert. The answer was people are losing the forest from the trees, knowing your data doesn’t make you automatically faster, so I just use trainingpeaks because that’s always what I have used and nothing really matters.
You’re right that the question was a good one. You’ll have 2 scenarios where you get to a certain LTL, HTL, and PTL, either by doing “structured” intervals or through Magic Buckets. The question is, is there an additional benefit from the structure and progression of the intervals?
I don’t think Xert says there is. I’m imagining copy/pasting a plan in vs. using Forecast AI and the metrics of both would theoretically be the same, ie Focus, load, hours, etc. You would necessarily have more intensity time as you built to a peak, but it wouldn’t be anything like, 3x5, 4x5, 5x5. Having said that, the workouts would get harder in the same way, and the intensity density (?) would have to increase, just like in the structured plan.
Really interesting is when you’re doing almost all sub TP work. A “standard” plan might have you doing long SST or threshold workouts, and in theory, if you could flex on time, you could get to the same LTL in Xert off much lower intensity. Please correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think the modelling in Xert takes a position that you would be any less fit.
Correct. Xert sees 100XSS done at 60XSSR (just under LTP) to be the same as 100XSS done at 80XSSR (Sweetspot). You can make an argument that 100XSS from both don’t produce the same adaptations but you’d likely get arguments in favour of both approaches as being “better”. The truth is probably that the differences aren’t material to long training plan anyway. Unless you plan on doing only 60XSSR or only 80XSSR for weeks on end, you likely won’t see any difference in the end. If anyone has any comparative data, or even anecdotal, I’d love to hear it.
Note of course, you can choose how to do your low intensity days yourself so if you have a bias, by all means…
.. as far as my training goes, I’ve been doing a bit more intensity on my easy days this year compared to last, mixing up LTP with Tempo.
Their answer really just showed they didn’t have a real understanding of the program. When I first came to XERT I thought it was pretty complicated because it is a lot more information and is expressed in a different way than what I’d been used to with Training Peaks or WKO. But I took the time to study the videos and the information about the platform. I have now seen the benefits work on myself, as well as seen it on my teammates who were using it before me. For people who make a living on coaching they are never going to give a full throated endorsement to an AI training program. That would totally undercut their way of living. I paid for coaching the last 5 years and never made the progression I have made with XERT since last September. I am a true believer in the XERT platform now. I run a DET team and have been singing it’s praises to all the guys who ride for me.
Yikes. Gave it a quick listen and it does seem like a relatively uninformed take, unfortunately.
This comment stuck out to me:
“Sometimes I just think that people are losing the forest for the trees… I think they are getting way too bogged down in the weeds of these training platforms and its not actually helpful for the end goal of doing better in a bike race or getting fitter.”
Is that not the exact opposite of what Magic Buckets does? We dont care about the weeds (e.g. you have to do 4x4’s at exactly XYZ% FTP or with exactly 2 min recovery or your intervals were a waste of time, or I need to progress my VO2max intervals by XYZ duration each week to improve…, etc.). Magic Buckets doesn’t care about any of those weeds. Just fill the buckets and you’ll get fitter! To me, training doesn’t get much simpler than that!
He later goes on to say “at the end of the day, are you applying the appropriate stresses to your training?”. That’s entirely what the platform is designed to do! If you want to improve your 5 min power, you need to apply progressive overload to your Low/High/Peak systems. Xert and XMB help you do that. If you want to do progressive VO2max intervals, go for it.. we just don’t think you have to obsess about those details to improve.
Last comment… I don’t think your performance has anything to do with the metrics you use to analyze your training. Obviously nerding out about metrics doesn’t make you fitter.. its the training that makes you fitter.
We dont care about the weeds (e.g. you have to do 4x4’s at exactly XYZ% FTP or with exactly 2 min recovery or your intervals were a waste of time, or I need to progress my VO2max intervals by XYZ duration each week to improve…, etc.). Magic Buckets doesn’t care about any of those weeds. Just fill the buckets and you’ll get fitter! To me, training doesn’t get much simpler than that! 
