I thought I would add my grain of salt.
I’m using both TR and Zwift after spending about a month on zwift alone.
Here’s what happenned…
In september I was looking for a way to train during the long and cold winter here in Quebec. At first I chose zwift. There was a couple of people in there I knew. A was seduced by the idea of their training plan.
So I strarted doig the build me up plan. Did it for 5 weeks and it worked wonders. Week after week my performance would go up and up and up. From 121 FTP to 154 in just a couple of week. And one day I couldn’t do the intervals. Not even one at vo2max. I thought I was just too tired took a couple of days of break. Retried. Not one interval AGAIN. I retested my FTP it was even below what I had started with 120 watts. I knew something very wrong was going on but could not get answer from zwift. The more I trained the more my FTP went down. Down to 107.
I started looking for training plans with more sensible progression. I checked SF and was seduced by the 4DP concept, but not the culture and not the vids and not the on screen messages saying hammer time when I started a 75 watts interval. I checked TR too. Looked into the whole plans and thought ok these guy know what they are doing.
I still use both TR and Zwift when I train. I hate riding 2+ hours facing a screen so I figured out I might as well make those ride more social. I get friends on Discord and we chat while we ride. I did the low volume traditional base. And it’s going good. in 3 months I went from 107 FTP to 134.
And now I think I’m good for doing a full cycle of SSB, build and specialty.
Now my two cents is this. The crowd interested in TR vs SF vs Zwift vs Fulgaz is not the same. OP is right in a sense. You guys have an amazing model for training. and to me the way to go in the way of development should be in customization of training. It’s the SF promise. But they fail to deliver in my sense. But nowaday with technology development I absolutely see no reasons you guys can’t develop an AI that would taylor each training plan and workout to an individual.
And answer for non trainers the stuff we need to know. For an exemple, how many TSS should I do now? After recovering with a full tradional base plan how should I go about progressing? Directly to build low or medium volume or an SSB if so low volume, medium volume. And how do I integrate my other activies, occasionnal Race, weekly martial art training. And what happens if I train to my failure point. Why wouldn’t the next workout take that into account next time? And in my progression looks much faster/slower than expected why not build that into the system? Example: From week 1 to week 3 my average HR workout to workout dropped by 3 beats per minutes. So the Mount Fields was noticeably easier than Slide Mountain even while I manually increased my FTP by 7 watts because I didn’t feel the was much work being done.
All this could be handled by a personnal coach. And going this direction for TR seems to me the right direction especially with all the user data TR already have.
The alternative for the guy who either can’t or won’t hire a personnal coach is spending hours upon hours of research to figure out what you guy already know in order to make the small decisions TR could make for the users.
Didier Bonneville-Roussy