XATA training status indicators behavior

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1

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:

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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
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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 :wink: ]

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).

FormChange2days

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@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 :unamused:.

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
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I continue to test Xert… As much as I like the idea, I feel that implementations isn’t that great :frowning:

  • Web site on desktop requires strong refresh to make sure current data is shown… Forgetting to refresh means that you will be basing your decisions on stale data.
  • No mobile app and no PWA app - mobile site would be useful if not for its constant glitches - I caught it moving freshness feedback slider on its own, without any interaction!
  • Planner’s bar which shows freshness have a life of its own - it can show one status for the next day in the evening of the pervious day and then completely change its mind (usually towards blue) next morning - this makes it impossible to plan ahead
  • The attempt to overtraining continue on 3rd week - VO2max workouts two days in a row? Sure - Riders on the Storm - 90 and Killing Me Slowly - 90 - but why?
  • “Rest” day - since when Z3/Tempo workout is considered “rest” or even Endurance??

Example - here I am, quite tired of previous days and doing Elevation Evaluation in Zwift yesterday - good climb in Z4/Z5 - it tries to suggest me another hard VO2 max workout (like HOP - 140% and 75%), so I try to move freshness feedback slider all the way to the left.
The only way it would give me “recovery” ride (ex. After Midnight - 30 still with some Tempo intervals) if I set it to -10. Anything else and it wants me to do another Z3/Tempo workout (this is not Z2/Endurance!):

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I do not see any logic in trying to overtrain when I really just asked to maintain my current level of fitness.
I have surplus and did several days of loaded workouts already and it still suggest workouts with 4.5 difficulty?

This just seems like an algorithm behind XATA is targeted at 20 year old athletes.
I don’t think it can guide training properly - it does NOT measure many things like:

  • No heart rate analysis - completely ignores this training load component
  • No sleep or HRV analysis - which means it can’t judge how much rest I really need
  • Planner’s freshness bar algorithm seems to not consider that humans rest more during sleep but then accumulate more stress during the day - it just does some mathematical decay over 24 hours…

This is my 3rd attempt to use Xert over last 3 years and I am disappointed again.
The math and ideas behind it are probably great, but if the industry does not want to pick them up (regardless if they are patented or not) - there is no real value behind them.

Maybe next year? When “magic buckets” would work for indoor training in Zwift or TPV without Garmin device? This should be relatively easy to do now, since most Wahoo trainers support up to 3 BLE connections… I’ll keep my hopes high.

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I wanted to do a long ride in Zwift with a lot of climbing, so I decided to take couple of days off and then ride. I did not want to have a breakthrough or take any koms, the goal was just to complete this route, so it is more of “Xert Endurance” - really tempo/threshold workout. Loads of low XSS but still with some high and peak mixed in. I know for sure I would need to recover tomorrow, however Xert’s algorithm thinks otherwise - it is already sure that I’ll be fresh tomorrow night:
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That is bonkers. It has no idea how would I sleep tonight, how well I would recover… Maybe this sound good on paper, but this XATA advice is quite wrong in real life.

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I believe Xert uses the standard Bannister Model of human performance…nothing mysterious. Training Peaks does the same, as does Intervals.icu. Actually, as I understand it, Xert uses a 3-factor bannister… (low High and Peak.) So it’s a standard “model” and models can be incorrect from time to time. Xert allows you to override the model…to use your own “model”, your brain. You implied earlier that Xert is inferior because it doesn’t use HRV or sleep quality measures. I’d be curious to know which program you’ve used that does.

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Post the power chart from that activity.
What is your current status stars count?
Xert doesn’t know your individual physiological response but if I was at 4 stars and rode a 3-hour polar endurance ride at 65 XSS/hour I could very well be fresh by the next afternoon especially if I have been riding at that TL for weeks.
If you don’t feel fresh the next afternoon, adjust the Recover Demands slider to the right to pull in some yellow/tired. No, it doesn’t have numbers. Just slide it enough to match how you feel. Over time you may decide to slide it back.

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After Midnight and Back to Blue include too much tempo time for you?
Are you basing that assessment on RPE or strict HR zones?

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That hasn’t been my experience and I’m certainly no spring chicken. :slight_smile:
I followed a XATA phased progression (Base-Build-Peak) for 4+ months with these results.

Continuous ATP is essentially floating in Build phase with suggested HIT workouts at or around your selected Focus Type when form is fresh/blue. Or endurance level (easy to moderate) when form is yellow/tired. Or rest/recovery when red/v. tired. TL increases or decreases at the ramp rate you control.

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Busy Sunday, couldn’t respond earlier…

And that’s an issue, don’t you think? BTW, TP/Intervals don’t have recommendation engine, so interpretation of the PMC is left to me, in contrast to Xert. If I start adjusting Xert all the time, why do I even need it? I would use my brain then all the time. If Xert would be right for 95% of the time - fine, but in my experience it is 50/50 at best…
I use Polar Pacer Pro for sleep tracking and started using Elite HRV for morning HRV. This summer I plan to upgrade to newer Polar watch - one of the models which now supports HRV tests… Intervals can read HRV and sleep data from Polar. Not yet ideal integration, but better than nothing. I only wish Xert could integrate that! BTW, I use Polar H10 HRM and I believe most apps can record HRV data during taring as well.

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And here are the zones:
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As I said - the goal was to complete this, by far the hardest route I did so far in Zwift. I also did 100 mi before, but that was mostly flat and in pacer group, and it seemed easier even that it was longer.

I have three stars. No idea why this is called “competitive” - no explanation I can find, and I am not, at all, competitive. :rofl:

Yes, and that’s my point - Xert had no idea (it didn’t even try) to understand my physiology. Poorly documented “recovery demand” setting helps to some extent, but it is not enough in my opinion.

These were earlier, before that ride, just my observations on workout tagging in Xert - why calling workout “Endurance” when it is actually Tempo???
After this Zwift ride - I checked in the planner - it was recommending something much harder for the next day. I did 1 hour recovery ride, but Xert still wants me to do SMART - Iron Man - 30… But bigger issue is that I need to do another climbing route later in the week and also a race. I do not see any way I can tell XATA that I plan some demanding rides in a week - I have to manage this myself (as I did all the time before).

@ridgerider2 - I know you been posting on this forum a lot for the last several years. I been reading discussions here. If you are not working for Xert - I commend your vocal advocacy for the app. I am glad Xert is working for you. Me - on another hand - I try to look at training holistically, trying to understand what each platform does and how that correlates with well-known coaches advice (ex. Joe Friel and others). And there seems to be a disconnect - many apps are too focused on pure mathematical models, often winded up to push high volume/high intensity of training. But is this good? And not from just load perspective, but - can one “universal model” apply to everyone?
There is a new podcast episode on The Time-Crunched Cyclist podcast - “Joe Friel on Fundamental Truths and Practical Training Takeaways for Cyclists (#235)” - I suggest you may want to listen to it. Training should be individualized. When you work with coach, you provide plenty of feedback so your plan can be adjusted properly. Xert does not even collect RPE - there is no way it can make any informed decisions, but only calculate form decay and change some triangle color…

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Check out the podcast Armando did with Jack Burke. There’s a section in there where Jack asks about whether Xert uses any of that ‘extra’ data such as sleep data or HRV data. Might find it interesting.

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I have listened to this episode back in December. But I listened it again after you have mentioned it, thinking maybe I missed something important… Nope. This podcast is perfect confirmation of all what I been saying above:

  • Xert focuses on math only
  • Still uses traditional approaches, just renames things - PMC chart, progressive overload, critical power…
  • High/Low/Peak are very much the same as zones, just split differently…
  • Ignoring HRV or sleep data is on purpose - I guess, it is too hard for Xert to implement, this was not clear, and somehow that data is not part of human physiology - that was surprising

Don’t want to spend time on detailed review, but would also recommend people to listen to it, just ignore what Jack says and focus on Armando’s explanations carefully.

And I do not argue that there are very interesting ideas in Xert… Its the implementation and ignoring anything individualizing user and its response to training is the issue.

BTW, Jack Burke seems to be an influencer on many social media platforms, the only useful information out of him in this episode - confirming that Xert plans target younger pre-trained athletes well sometimes.

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Xert isn’t simply renaming things. For instance, critical power isn’t the same as HIE. if you’re gonna be Negative Norm, at least fully understand the concepts.

A question for you. When HRV Elite tells you to take a rest day, do you cancel your ride? What’s your process?

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Of course critical power is not HIE! HIE is in KJ and CP is in Watts. Please, if you compare - use things which are actually comparable :slight_smile:
CP is Threshold Power - same as FTP - and when Xert pushes workouts to Zwift, it uses this number as FTP for workouts. And yes, I know that Xert’s TP should not be treated as FTP, but is really is its reflection.

I do recovery or lite Z1/Z2 ride. I can do higher, but nothing over TP.

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So when the HRV app flashes a warning, you take it easy that day. I used to do that too, using a competitor’s HRV product. Then I learned more about HRV. I learned (actually, the founder of the product wrote as much) that simply swallowing during the measurement can affect your HRV. Ate spicy food last night? That can affect it. It happened to me many times Bottom line, HRV isn’t really useful day to day in prescribing a workout. It CAN be possibly useful over time, over weeks and months, to see trends. That was when I started measuring and keeping my data in a spreadsheet, using different types graphs and trend lines to try and pull useful information out of it. I eventually gave up on it, as I didn’t find it useful. I’m sure plenty of Xert users use HRV in different ways to improve their training. But back to you…a little information can be dangerous. Negative Norm needs to become Informed Norm before he dishes out critcism the way he’s been doing!

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You asked about HRV… But that is not the main and only thing I look at.

I wear Polar watches with HR/Sleep monitoring for ~4 years now - believe it or not, but I find bits of info it provides interesting… Over these years though I can now understand how did I sleep without the watch. And I don’t mean regular feeling after sleep, but how rested I would feel mid-day…
I started doing HRV just recently and I am trying to correlate its data to my sleep first.
I measure in the morning - and so far values were quite stable, without any significant fluctuations.

And another important parameter - I question myself before doing workout - how do I really feel?
I look at the route I planned or workout and think if I am good to do that. RPE of the last workout is part of this - I remember how did I perform last time and consider this as well…

So no - I do not use HRV as the only indicator. My feedback to Xert was (and still is) - it needs to consider real physiological feedback from several signals and this is not the case today - it ignores almost all of them. And if you think about it - the ONLY feedback it uses is the freshness/tiredness - and that is not enough to make an informative decision.

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Another example of XATA giving conflicting recommendation…

On the left, it recommends pure endurance workout with XSS of only Low 120…
On the right it hits me with “Mixed climber” with high and low XSS and higher difficulty.

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Only way to have XATA to show workouts matching recommendation - tell it that my freshness is -5.

There is probably some excuse for that, but it doesn’t make recommendation any better - we now have THREE different, conflicting states on the same screen - one is textual recommendation, another one is recommended workout and the third one is some guess about tomorrow.

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I think you have a legitimate gripe here. I never liked the way Xert does this. Too complicated and confusing. I do understand it, but I’ll let someone else explain. i think it should be revamped. It"s learning when and how you workout, and recommending a workout based on your usual schedule…I guess in case you forget lol. I can’t explain why it would be showing you a Climber activity. I’m sure someone else can.

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I suspect that there is a deficit of high/peak due to me taking some time off… But then the left side should reflect the same :slight_smile:

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@CarmenV - I wonder if you have listened to the most recent episode of Fast Track podcast - How to Use—and Not Use—HRV in Your Training - Fast Talk Laboratories

If you are using HRV, it may be a good info. BTW, swallowing during HRV is mentioned there - but in relation to optical HR sensors :slight_smile:
I use Polar H10 - although it takes time to set up, it should be more reliable. But after listening to Dr. Brad Lichtenstein, I may need to change my protocol…