Do What AI Can't: How To Adjust Your Workout In Real Time (#277)

OVERVIEW
Can AI optimize your training by determining if you should do more or fewer intervals than prescribed today? Artificial Intelligence can do a lot of things, but it's not great (yet) at advising changes to your workouts in real time. Coach Adam Pulford details the factors he considers when deciding to scale up, maintain, or scale down an athlete's daily training. More important, he teaches you how to evaluate your workout in real time.

TOPICS COVERED

• What makes up a good training plan and process?
• Factors to consider when deciding to change workouts in real time
• How to make changes when you feel great
• How to make changes when you feel bad

RESOURCES

• Tim Cusick: Periodization, Training Modalities, And Getting Your Training Rhythm Right - CTS
• How to Use Data to Make Better Training Decisions, with Tim Cusick - Fast Talk Laboratories
• Intensive vs Extensive Training Concepts:
  • How to Get Faster with "Intensive" and "Extensive" Cycling Workouts
• Interval Training: Knowing When Enough is Enough - CTS
• WKO5 and the Annual Training Process, Part 1: Early Base Extensive Aerobic Development

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HOST
Adam Pulford has been a CTS Coach for nearly two decades and holds a B.S. in Exercise Physiology. He's participated in and coached hundreds of athletes for endurance events all around the world.

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Website: trainright.com
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Facebook: @CTSAthlete

Chapters

• 0:06 Welcome And Topic Setup
• 0:48 Should You Change Today’s Workout
• 2:04 Can AI Optimize On The Day
• 3:20 What Truly Drives Fatigue
• 4:53 Elements Of A Good Training Plan
• 6:44 Communication And Self‑Determined Training
• 8:20 When To Use On‑The‑Fly Adjustments
• 9:58 How To Scale Up Or Down
• 12:10 The Warm‑Up Rule For Bad Days
• 13:05 Big Picture Takeaways And Reality Of AI
• 14:05 Final Advice And Listener CTA

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:06

From the team at CTS, this is the Time Crunch Cyclist Podcast, our show dedicated to answering your training questions and providing actionable advice to help you improve your performance, even if you're strapped for time. I'm your host, Coach Adam Pulford, and I'm one of the over 50 professional coaches who make up the team at CTS. In each episode, I draw on our team's collective knowledge, other coaches, and experts in the field to provide you with the practical ways to get the most out of your training and ultimately become the best cyclist that you can be. Now, on to our show. How do you know if you should change your training for the day? Should you do more or fewer intervals than prescribed? And can AI help you do this? I'm Coach Adam Pulford, and this is the Time Crunch Cyclist Podcast, the show that helps you understand complicated topics and endurance training in a short amount of time. Today we'll discuss how to determine if you need to scale up your prescribed workout on the day or dial it down. This is something I call self-determined training. Or you could simply stay the course. This topic in question comes to us today from Brian, a local high-level masters athlete. He's the guy that uh connects with the coach on the group ride and then asks all the questions about training and uh recovery and all that kind of stuff. And then he attacks and he rides away from people. So just kidding, but kind of uh Brian's a really good friend. He's coached by another CTS coach, and he has a curious mind about training. The questions I opened with today were exactly what he asked me uh last week on the group ride, and it builds off some topics that we've been learning about on the podcast recently. So let's dive in. Can AI optimize your training by determining if you should do more or fewer intervals than prescribed today? Yeah, there are some AI programs that can adjust the day based on inputs, but also no, because I haven't seen anything that optimizes or even does a good job of it, uh, or at least compared to a good coach or a highly aware athlete. So, in short, no, I haven't seen anything that works really well in this way. But in order to do this, I mean it's a curious question in itself. And so, in order to do this, AI or anything else needs to factor in not only the current fatigue status of an athlete, which is really hard to do, but also know the intent of the workout, what the goals are in the next two to three days, what the goal of the training phase is and bigger picture stuff like uh history of training, uh where it's all heading in the next several years, things like this. Now, some of that can be figured out. But let's just start with how to determine fatigue, and just by adding up a couple things, at least that I think of when I uh try to determine if an athlete is fatigued or not. So some of this can be figured out, but let's also acknowledge that fatigue can still be pretty mystical. Here are some simple factors that go into calculating fatigue for a time-crunched athlete. The past five to seven days of training stress score, or TSS, the past five to seven days of sleep quality and quantity, the current CTL, ATL, and TSB, health status, like are you sick or getting sick, perceived stress levels from work, family, and life, HRV, resting heart rate, mood, motivation, and other subjective feelings. There's also glycogen status, hydration status, and just the countless other things that go into actual fatigue, but those are all things that I calculate in my brain or think about when I'm trying to determine what to prescribe for an athlete on the day or how to change training. Now, we humans and coaches still can't fully predict fatigue and performance. If someone could, they would have all the gold medals. So if AI could, then AI would probably have all the gold medals too. Now, that being said, this is a complicated thing that science and technology haven't been able to solve for yet. But good coaching and experience or the science and art can help us get there. So let's talk about the science and the art, because I believe that that goes into a good training process. And part of that good training process starts with a good plan. Now, assuming that you always start with a good enough plan, you're setting yourself up for success. What is a good plan? I've I've talked about this on previous episodes before, but uh just to hit on some of the points in previous podcasts is a good plan has a progressive overload approach. It has individualized training uh purposes, okay, starting with where you're, uh determining strengths and weaknesses and developing those in that progressive uh overload approach. It also builds from general to specific performance demands. And then it also uh determines training based on the proper time courses of adaptation to training stimulus and recovery, which is a huge topic in itself. And I'm planting the seed for a future podcast here. And there's also just like a ton of other things that go into a good plan. Now, I don't have time for all of that, but good communication of the intent of training is a huge part of that plan. So this is where you can start to gather uh the fatigue status indicators that I mentioned just a couple minutes ago of the athlete so that either the self-coached athlete or the coach are in the know of what's going on from the fatigue status. Then you use trial and error and get good at reading your body on the fly based on these uh, you know, good and bad vibe indicators. So if you don't hear anything else, I mean, a lot of this on the fly, uh how you get good at on-the-fly decision making is using trial and error. Okay. So try it. If it doesn't work, change it, do it again, right? So, what's a good direction to start in that uh trial and error on how to read your body on the fly and make some of those decisions? Well, I talked about this in an episode just uh a couple weeks ago uh where I encouraged everyone to scribble outside the lines a little bit more. And that what that referred to was move days around to match the training status for the day. Meaning if I'm feeling really good uh and I've got an easy workout plan, I'm gonna select the hard workout and move the training around. But you still stick to getting the total training done within the week, and that keeps us on track for the overall plan. Now, today we'll get into how to adjust for the day's workout based on the inputs you may be receiving. As I said, this is something I call self-determined training. It's a boring probably title, uh, but it's a simple idea, and I and I think I stole the name uh of it from Tim Cusick. But it's a it's really referring to helping the athlete determine if if they should adjust training for today or not, and if so, how? Like I said, it all starts with communication and awareness. And as a coach, I try to communicate the best I can by talking with them on the phone, using data, using their data and sharing articles to teach them about training. I'm trying to get them to think more like me, essentially, so that they're equipped to make better decisions on the fly when I'm not there with them. And as a remote-based coach, I believe that that is crucial. I then communicate with weekly goals each week on training peaks to remind them of what we're trying to accomplish for the week. For example, increase FTP or increase CTL, improve VO2 max or something like this. I then build the workouts, and then in the description, I type out how to adjust on the fly with some examples of feeling good, normal, or not good. I typically encourage the athlete to make these adjustments during the build phase of training or some period where we're going or we're doing max efforts, uh testing phases or something like that, versus a base phase or a race phase. In the build phase is really where this matters most because we're trying to increase the density of training. We're really trying to push hard, make them tired. In the base phase, it's like if you have more time to ride in zone two, then go for it. We'll adjust volume or we'll just rack and stack it there. But it's a little bit more simple. Additionally, in that race phase or the competition phase, hopefully we have it figured out by then. So the athlete doesn't have to determine a whole lot on the day, but we're also trying to be fresh for an upcoming day soon. And so I'm gonna use less self-determined training so I can predict uh performance and freshness a little bit more. Hope that makes sense. Overall, I think it's really important to listen to your body and make some micro adjustments on the day based on the prescribed plan, knowing where you're going in the next few days as well as how it applies to the current training phase. So here's my quick tips to any athlete, time crunch or time rich, on how to scale it up or scale it down or keep it the same. First up, if you're feeling great, stick to the plan, but add more. Okay, now more comes with an asterisk here. I generally think of kind of two bins of what I'm trying to work on with an athlete is intensive training or extensive training. So if I'm trying to intensify training for an athlete, that usually means more intensity. Okay, so I'm talking about higher power or more intervals at that same high power. So what you can do here is add another interval or two or three or increase by five to ten watts on each interval to intensify the training. An example of this would be a power interval workout, and power intervals should feel like a nine or ten out of ten, and they're shorter. So if you have 10 by one minute prescribed, add another two or three intervals and really make the push if you're feeling good on the day. Try to overload your body. You're having a great day, you have great legs, don't waste them. Another example, if we're trying to improve extensive training, this refers to more duration. Okay, so if you're feeling really good, uh, what you want to do is keep the power the same, but add more time and zone. Okay, adding total time is what we're trying to accomplish. So an example is of this would be if it's a tempo workout and you have two by 20 minutes prescribed, you can scale it up by two by 25 or 2x30, or you go one by 40 minutes or 45 minutes with no recovery period. That's a great way to extensively develop your training. Now, if you're feeling normal, stick to the plan. Don't change it. Just do the workout. Keep it simple, don't overthink it. Recall, if you start with a good plan and you have a good process, you will get good results. Nothing, nothing further said on that. Finally, if you're not feeling great, change the plan. A highly mature athlete will not go hard or send it on a day where they know they don't have it. If you have hard intervals, for example, planned for the for the day, and you're feeling sick or mentally you're not there, you need to adjust. Use the warm-up rule to further assess yourself, meaning do the prescribed warmup, do a couple openers, and then if you're still feeling bad, then ride easy or just ride home. The overall takeaway is this a good process in training, in my opinion, involves changing the training sometimes. Knowing when and how to do it is crucial. And I hope you all learned a bit more on how to do that today. Because if you're waiting for AI to do it for you, it's not there yet. And I think that that is actually a long way out. So for Brian and the rest of you thinking is AI going to solve a lot of uh our problems like this. Well, I I hope it starts solving some human problems soon. We have a lot of them, but in the way of changing training, uh it's definitely not there yet. So, in summary, this may not be groundbreaking for some of you because you listen to this podcast and I've gone over uh some of the concepts I have uh that I have before in previous podcasts. But for some others who may not have had coaches or instruction allowing them to change the course during a workout, it may come as a big shock. But I do know that all of us need to be reminded of this because all of us are type A endurance nerds that are short on time and usually default to because my coach said so. And if you keep on going hard with bad sleep, high stress, and high fatigue because the plan or the coach says so with no adjustments, then you will not reach your goals. You'll just get tired and burnt out. Now, if you have a coach or you have a good program, keep doing that. It's better than not. And I've gone over all that before. But the next step to all of this, the next level to increase your performance is to have enough awareness and confidence to give yourself a bit more on your good days, to stick to the plan on normal days, and to dial it down or just go home on the bad days. So that's it. That's our show for today. If you liked it, I'm stoked. Share it with a friend or a writing partner, and that helps to grow the show. If you have a question yourself, uh just ask me on a group ride, like Brian does, or head over to trainwrite.com backslash podcast and click on ask a training question. That will get sent directly to me, and I'll do my best to answer it on a future episode. Thanks again for listening, and we'll see you back here next week for more Time Crunch tips. Thanks for joining us on the Time Crunch Cyclist Podcast. We hope you enjoyed the show. If you want even more actionable training advice, head over to trainwright.com backslash newsletter and subscribe to our free weekly publication. Each week you'll get in depth training content that goes beyond what we cover here on the podcast that'll help you take your training to the next level. That's all for now. Until next time, train hard, train smart, train right.