XATA training status indicators behavior

[dgcom (Dmitry Gromov)]

Hello!

Can someone help me out with this… I am trying Xert once again and observing strange behavior - the training status reported by different elements is different:

I do not have any training planned and planner is somewhere between red and yellow - and was changing my status from red/very tired to yellow/tired right in front of my eyes.
But Training pacer shows that I am fresh???
Also - why would XATA change Freshness Feedback by itself? I set it to 0 (or less0 and next day it indicates +2 - I was under impression that this is MY control, not application’s…
Moreover - Training Pacer shows that I am ahead of plan and since I was very tired 20 minutes ago, the recommendation was to take some rest… And all of a sudden it wants me to do 97 XSS (in addition to my surplus)? According to some other metrics, it may easily put me into overtraining territory…

Last time I tried Xert a year ago and it behaved similar or worse. Now, with updates to XATA and Zwift integration, I was hoping that it would finally make sense. I paid for another month of trial, it ingested all of my training and I set up my program - just maintain my current fitness level. I also asked for maximum of 7 hours of training per week…
But it looks like XATA has its own ideas… It overestimated my FTP (that’s known issue and can be easily corrected), but it started to load my training with about twice as much I was doing before… This week it wants me to train for more than 10 hours already even with the limit applied…

How do I take control of the recommendations? If XATA can’t achieve the plan I configured, it should tell me about so I can adjust. I was hoping that it would balance my training load across a week providing good workouts and enough recovery time… But even with increased recovery demand in my profile XATA recommendations seems to try and seriously overload my training… Which is surprising - if I want to MAINTAIN my fitness, the load should remain constant, however XATA is trying to ramp it up regardless…

Would appreciate any help here. I read most of the documentation, but some settings are NOT documented at all - for example, there is no information on how “Max Weekly Hours” works.
Setting for “Recovery Demands” goes into several links conflating things with Freshness feedback and do not have NUMBER associated with it - so if I change slider today, there is no way for me to mark the value I have set for tracking and future adjustment…

Would appreciate if someone clarifies why:

• my training status is indicated differently in Training Pacer vs. Recommendation and Planner
• freshness feedback changes by itself
• how “Max Weekly Hours” works
• why “Recovery Demands” slider do not have any values to it

[ridgerider2]

TL;DR No need to train at the moment especially since you have a surplus and are in Maintenance mode.

Status stars are yellow indicating calculated form is tired as of right now (subject to change hour to hour). Endurance is going to be recommended (if I choose to train today).
Training Pacer shows blue/fresh triangle which is calculated form 24 hours from now.
You current 107 XSS surplus reflects the needle position past Noon on the gauge.
Deficit/surplus does not carry over from one day to the next and is subject to change rapidly.
Why does my training deficit and surplus change so quickly? – Xert

Xert is a lot more flexible than a traditional TSS spreadsheet plan where you tally the numbers up at the end of a week to gauge where you’re at. Instead, the Training Pacer reflects a weighted moving average XSS over a 7-day window.
Falling behind plan would require consistently dipping into the red band or consistently pushing past 1-2pm position into turquoise (Ahead of Plan).
Your goal is to keep the needle in the 11am to 1-2pm position to maintain the Improvement Rate you have set (which can be changed at any time).
Since your IR is currently set to Maintenance you want to float around the same hours/week.
The advice reflects your recent history, your current deficit/surplus, along with what you normally train on same day of the week.
The needle may dip left and right during a week depending on your schedule and how regular your weekly hours are. For example, to the left during the week (limited hours) and back past Noon on the weekend (long ride).
To establish your 7 hours pattern you do indeed want to take control and manage your hours for a bit. For example, if you have been progressing recently and want to cut back or level out at ~7 hours/week, go ahead and establish that pattern on your own. By the end of second week XATA will reflect that pattern in the Advisor and Pacer needle position.
At that point it’s a matter of checking the needle position daily and assessing how much I want to (or can) train this week. But you can also draw outside the lines. For example, if I have more or less time to train on Wed compared to what I normally train on Wed, I’ll do it. Or I may decide to take the day off. IOW on some days I am going to advise the advisor or ignore it. Xert will adapt to whatever I decide to do.

When you configured Availability did you change Duration from Flex to Fixed?

The Freshness Feedback slider likely got moved unintentionally especially if you use a touchscreen or while scrolling in mobile view on a phone. I have reported the issue (too easy to knock the position.)
However, the FF slider only affects the recommended workout list as of right now. It does not affect form calc gradient bar on the Planner.
If you notice something isn’t matching refresh your browser to ensure you are not viewing cached content between the Training page and the Planner.
Form calc on Planner is affected by the Recovery Demands (RD) slider which allows you to adust the gradient sensitivity to better match how you recover compared to the middle default setting. To see this in action slam the slider to the left, save, then refresh Planner page. Then slam to right, save, and refresh Planner.
The RD help article does show the FF slider but the image was created during the XFAI Beta before the slider was relegated to the Training page with function limited to suggested lists. Xert needs to update that article. [Attn: @ManofSteele ]

As noted above form does change by the hour. Here’s an example of my calculated form over last two days including fresh yesterday before my two activities that pushed me to yellow/tired returning to glue/fresh earliet today then briefly to red/v.tired after completing a 90 minute endurance workout today. I’m back to blue 2 hours later leading into tomorrow…
This is due to how Xert tracks low and high/peak recovery (unique to Xert).

[dgcom (Dmitry Gromov)]

@ridgerider2 - Thank you for the detailed response, appreciate it.

Looks like I forgot that Training Pacer shows freshness indicator shows status for the next day. This (meticulous) dependency of Xert/XATA on current hour and showing so many indicators on one page is extremely confusing. When I finish my current workout or ride all I want is to see what do I need to do tomorrow… Yes, I realize there are people who do more than one workout a day and really need their current status, time point for the status should be either clearly visible or changeable to show next day load only.

It appears that my previous gripe with XATA still exist - its advice should be ignored in many cases.
XATA calculated my load based on my training right before I decided to re-evaluate Xert and if I was over-training at that time (and wanted to have Xert to balance my training better), it would gladly keep my previous load and continue to attempt to over-train me… And if I follow current advice, XATA would gladly bump up my hours even more! As you said - if I want to have 7 hours per week pattern, I have to largely ignore training advice and manage training myself - but why would I need Xert then? Disappointing…

Availability - this is also interesting… Initially XATA set quite a restricted schedule, less that 1.5 hours most days (this is probably because I was doing heavier work for shorter time). I kept it flex, but extended my availability to 2 hours per day most days, hoping this would open up more options to balance work/rest. The result surprised me - the workout recommendation now complains that my availability is restricted!

Freshness Feedback slider - no, I am positive I did not move it myself. I do not interact with the web app on touchscreen and I try to pay attention to this carefully. This ability to provide feedback for the current moment is one of the better improvements, BTW, but it needs to behave!

Browser refresh before working with the web app - oh, this is a must, I know this for a while already, but it still can bite. There are sections of the site which misbehave with refresh, for example - Ranking would show different results if I refresh or if I select the same values from the drop-down, so I am not sure what values to believe .

Recovery Demand - as I said before, these are great controls, but not having any numbers attached to the slider is very bad design. I can’t test/document/remember my changes over time!

Still not clear what Max Weekly Hours slider on profile page does - not even sure it it even works with XATA.

I also played with Forecast AI - it behaves a bit more in line with what I would expect, but it still tend to ignore max weekly hours later in the plan. I think Continuous/Maintenance can be approximated with 1W power increase goal over longer time period…

Couple of other things I have noticed:

• Xert increases TP by 1W every day - not sure if this is a bug or feature, but I do not think this is the right behavior.
• Zwift integration isn’t bad, but if it is enabled together with Strava integration, it results in “Zwift activity is duplicate” alerts
• Option Show Reports and Summary Data on Strava does not work anymore, not sure if this is due to Zwift integration or some other failure

I guess, I’ll need to send some of these questions to support…

Overall feedback after restarting Xert use since last attempt 1 year ago and using it for 2 weeks:

• Zwift integration is good, but Xert isn’t the only app which has it now
• Revamped Program editor is great improvement
• There are some welcome web app improvements, but the reliance of XATA on the hour-by-hour status is still source of the confusion
• XATA did not change much, will over-train if followed blindly, still requires self-coaching raising the question why it even exist
• Forecast AI would be much better with continuous improvement option