I have recently switched from TraininPeaks and I find Intervals.icu a far superior tool but there are a few use cases that are a bit confusing (maybe I’m just biased by the TP way of working).
In particular, I love the way you can add planned workouts (the workout builder is definitely the best I’ve seen so far, compared to both TrainingPeaks and TrainerRoad) and race events, but when I execute the workouts (and/or the race event) the entries in the calendar remaing separate (although the percentage complete on the uploaded activity correctly reflects the initial planning). Is this by design? As a comparison, in TrainingPeaks the entries are merged with planned and actual values showing side to side and I have grown used to that but am happy to change my way of operating. The same applies to planned races (at least when I use those to classify virtual eRace events on Zwift).
The ability to re-order planned workouts on a single day by simple drag and drop would be a nice to have feature.
Finally, in this pandemic time and with the growing popularity of eRacing platforms, the missing virtual race category would be a nice addition (with virtual race events marked on the fitness curves and in the calendar for easy identification same as real life race events).
Tx. Intervals.icu totals up all the planned workouts for a day for the same sport and compares those to what you actually did and gives all the actuals the same percentage. I did it that way to handle the common case of separating warmup, race and post race extra Z2 riding around … they all count against the plan which will usually be a single workout. Also the workouts are in Intervals.icu but the rides come from Strava and it is not easy to automatically match them up. Still I am open to suggestions on how to do this better.
I have “add time to workouts” on the todo list which would help with your ordering of workouts feature. Even if you just did AM and PM.
Intervals.icu uses Strava’s “race” flag for races. So a virtual ride can be a race. You can click the activity icon or name to open a dialog that will let you set the race flag. The fields edited in that dialog are pushed back to Strava.
Hi David,
thanks for the explanation. I’ve realised now that the activity categories mirror the Strava ones so all clear on that side.
Regarding the planning and matching of activities, I understand your approach, it’s just slightly different than what I am used to with both TrainerRoad and TrainingPeaks calendars, which is not a problem at all.
While I do see the benefits as you explain above, I can also see some drawbacks. For example, if you have a warm up, race and cool down planned (and I tend to keep those separate for ease of analysis) and then upload the corresponding activities, you end up with 6 items on the same day which expands your calendar view quite a bit.
I am not suggesting that you change our approach but for the sake of clarity and something to possibly consider in the future:
both TP and TR use planned vs actual values for key aggregate metrics (principally duration and load but potentially also distance, average speed, IF, etc)
adding an entry to the calendar sets the planned values
activities are matched (either from Strava in TR or via direct upload in TP) simply in chronological order (this obviously requires the ability to order items in the calendar which I understand is already on your todo list)
TP offers the ability to unpair planned and actual values (in case you plan for a day and then do something different without updating your calendar or in case you have a bike computer mishap in starting/stopping recording)
compliance to plan is shown on a per activity basis rather than on a per day basis (although having both would be even better)
Finally, congratulations for the awesome tool, it has really impressed me so far, far better than anything I’ve tried before.
I agree with you @Enrico, we can see that both entries are linked, but would be nice to have a way to visualize a planned workout with the activity it self. I have one idea:
No doubts that David is doing an incredible job! Thanks man!
I remember seeing this post and couldn’t find it anymore.
I think the proposal of @Eduardo_Pires is what we should aim for.
When I look at each athlete calendar it’s sometimes hard to remember what the plan looked like and matching planned workout with activities would be idea.
Took quite a bit for TP to get it right and I don’t doubt there are several hurdles, but ultimately would be the ideal solution.
After having used Intervals.icu for some more time (and having ditched TrainingPeaks for good), I think the best approach for this would simply be to forget any automatic pairing of planned workouts with actual activities (which would require some logic to do the matching as well as some code to do the unpairing to fix issues) and simply add a feature to manually pair and unpair a planed workout with an actual activity (simply a one to one reference) with an updated to the calendar graphics to show planned versus actual values for the target metrics (duration and load principally) when paired.
Thread resurrection a bit here, but better than writing a new one.
I’ve been using the plan ahead feature (really like the ability I create some simple workouts in the library that reflect what I do and then it’s super easy to drag and drop … much faster than anything else I’ve used)
That then leads me in to a place where I have the planned two workouts each day in the plan, the the rides copied in from Strava.
My sense is that if the rides are copied in from Strava and marched against planned tss already, that it feels like the planned workout can be deleted now - especially if we’re marking percent complete inside the incoming file from Strava.
Tricky one. I do know I’d rather just have the actuals afterwards as an ‘outcome’ ideally without having to go in an manually delete the planned ones.
Good call.
So just a few clicks to change the view from what ‘has happened’ to what ‘will happen’
I guess that means when I’m displaying ‘current’ I then don’t see the planned (after today) workouts into the future but it would declutter that view.
Ideally the ‘matching’ process could result in there only being one workout after that matching but this is still an option.
I am going to move the compliance stuff to be “for the day” soon instead of trying to match to activities. That gets tricky when people log warmup and cool down separately and so on.
Thanks @david — i use the planned activities as a way of ‘seeing load’ into the future and then once the day happens I’m then only really bothered about what the actual load ended up being.
Must be so many ‘use cases’ though. I k is in the last I used to like seeing Training Peaks ‘match up’ workouts but that was aesthetic, not functional
