Does anyone use Xert for training plans?

joey54321

I am thinking about making the switch from TR to Xert, after being sold a little bit their marketing of being more specific to your 'fitness signature'. Does anyone else use it?

Typical Analytical

You don't need any software. ERG training already provides you all the insight you need into training status (fitness, fatigue, endurance).

Just perform your workouts at maximum sustainable intensity and this will automatically set and progress intensity as needed to continually challenge the body.

Endurance work is simply a matter of progressing duration and you can also base duration on cardiac drift although this is controversial on the internet.

The relationship between average work interval heart rate and cardiac drift can also tell you quite a bit about fatigue accumulation to help with balancing ramp rate and recovery week frequency.

maryka

I tried Xert for a while when I had a free trial of it, but try as I might I just couldn't get it to work for me and it seemed to take a lot more effort and thinking than I thought it should.

E.g., setting up my fitness signature with genuine best efforts etc. I could never actually get any useful metrics for doing short intervals using Connect IQ -- I would set out to do reps of some hill and it was always reading into the negative numbers on the Garmin well before the end of the interval (based on what it thought I was capable of), and I certainly wasn't gassed to the point of no return at that point!

Then my free trial ended and I decided not to pay for the privilege of having confusing and inaccurate information. And even if the confusion and inaccuracy was due to me not using it right, I didn't want to pay for the privilege of a steep learning curve to understand it well enough to make it work for me... I have Golden Cheetah for that, for free!

Lots of discussion on the Wattage group, including many posts by the owner and creator of Xert.

eeney

I've been using it for just over a year and really like it, here is a mix of fact and opinion. It is all based on power and your fitness signature, which it will calculate from historic power data and ongoing with every workout. I find the fitness signature is dialled in very well without the need to do FTP tests!

Note that it doesn't actually give you training plans, rather you provide it with a 'goal target date', from which is periodizes the plan. Each day it will recommend workouts based on goals, tireness, training phase, etc (you can plan workouts in to the future using recommendations in the planner calendar). In a lot of ways I like the idea of daily recommndations using up to date data, however I slightly miss having a planned out training plan with fixed workouts that I can mentally plan for.

Another thing I like and why I now use Xert workouts over Zwift workouts is tha the system has workouts graded by difficulty (athletic level and freshness), and recommends daily workouts according to your atheletic/training level and tiredness. Therefore the workouts I get allocated now doing 14 hours a week are much harder than when I started at half that training load 12 months back. My issue with other training plans, eg. zwift, was that everyone gets the same plan/workout regardless of rider/athlete ability, or if you choose your workouts then you need to judge yourself, and I don't trust my own self-coaching abilities.

Overall I really like it, but haven't used TR. It takes a little while to understand the benefit (for me) of how Xert measures training stess (XSS v TSS), and what MPA is (Max Power Available).

Also, it has a lot of workouts, all categorised on focus (eg. climber, road sprinter, etc) and difficulty. However, in the trial you don't see all the workouts and it can feel limited in the trial.

norry1

I'm bumping this thread as I am also considering using Xert. I've signed up for the month free trial but would be interested in people's views of it.

Cheers

g00se

I've been using it for a few months now. Very pleased with it but it takes a fair bit of understanding how to use it properly - especially decay rates and when to pin and flag activities to control your fitness. So I suppose my gripe would be that the FAQs and directions need to be better polished. Saying that, you get the feeling that they're not a huge organisation and spend most of their time working on the guts of the system which is commendable compared to some apps where the look and feel is the most important.

Definitely worth going through the podcasts religiously to get insights in how to use it. And the way their MPA (maximum power available) metric can be tracked on a garmin in real time is a bit freaky.

ugo.santalucia

I keep looking at people training using various plans they get for their smart trainers... broadly, they fall under two categories: those who grossly underestimate their power output and therefore end up doing training sessions which are useless and those who overestimate their power output and end up killing themselves with sessions that are too hard for their level of fitness.

They all seem to reach a plateau in their performance fairly quickly.

I think before choosing any training plan, you have to ask yourself what are you training for and to me it seems most people haven;t thought about it and don't have an answer.
You might also want to consider forking out for a coach, who might point you in the right direction once you have a goal in mind...
To put it bluntly, training programs shouldn't be treated like video games, that you try, enjoy for a while, then get bored and move on to another one