We're developing a cycling training app and looking for beta users

jkosir
jkosir Posts: 19
We're a team of computer and sports scientists developing a cycling training web application. We're now testing our first prototype with local bike clubs, but we'd like to get more feedback on it.

Other platforms mostly provide advanced analytics and are tailored to users with training knowledge. Instead, we are (as CompSci guys do) automating all of that behind the scenes to simply tell you when and how to ride, aiming for a significantly lower cost than hiring a coach. This is made possible by some cool new analysis methods that detect completed intervals, allowing our planning algorithms to modify the plan depending on what you're doing in your workouts.

All training plans are heart-rate based (for now) and Strava account is required to use the app (all workouts are then automatically synchronized as you upload them to Strava).

You can find out more about the app here: http://www.summittraining.org/
And access beta version here: http://beta.summittraining.org (also check out our "About" page, ig and fb profiles to find out more about the team).

We plan to officially launch in January 2018, there's still a long way to go, so we would really appreciate any feedback right now. Thanks!
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A signup code is required to sign up for beta, there are some below:
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FUfnqUR9NB9xafShS1uNs2Ru8
8OTDN8QxJKTseCKPkY2VE0OgH
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tAS9NZLjVfTFNprYgvDXJsWaH
PkavP9ChgTRB9VSAHimQZDJnk
hmMoK53EarXHdkZBgT5Ry7b8i
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Comments

  • cgfw201
    cgfw201 Posts: 674
    Looks pretty smart, just logged in and seems to work. Will see what it says as I add more rides into it.
  • stueys
    stueys Posts: 1,332
    Interesting concept, will be interesting to see where you aim to fit between something like today's plan or trainerroad.

    For me you need to make it power centric though, I suspect the majority of people who want to follow a structured training plan will be using a PM.
  • Harry182
    Harry182 Posts: 1,169
    This seems exactly what I've been looking for. I'm a fitness/recreational/strava rider, keen on monitoring/improving fitness but not serious/good enough to justify investing in a coach. Spent the (Canadian) winter indoors on rollers with a hrm riding to GCN videos. Looking forward to adding some structure to the training. I can see this web app being very appealing/useful to sportive riders.
  • kingstongraham
    kingstongraham Posts: 26,131
    All codes already used. Got any more, or do you have as many people as you need?
  • jkosir
    jkosir Posts: 19
    Stueys wrote:
    Interesting concept, will be interesting to see where you aim to fit between something like today's plan or trainerroad.

    For me you need to make it power centric though, I suspect the majority of people who want to follow a structured training plan will be using a PM.

    Yeah, power-based plans are what we're mostly hearing about from feedback and what we're focusing next. We didn't have time to do both, thus we went with HR so even powermeter users can at least try the concept.

    Today's plan has automated plan generation, but no real feedback and adaptation. Trainerroad has static plans or offers a custom-fitted workout library. Both are more into advanced-ish users, while we're trying to make something on the "just tell me how to ride" level. We're actually planning a kickstarter campaign soon to figure out if this would attract any interest.
    ---
    We want to offer the beta signup codes as lowest tier reward on Kickstarter, but here's some more:
    BDHqOXqU8RdYA87VYnj5Cyif0
    Bt1xXVKyMgDuvdK8LZd6b0TZr
    FW5VL7dZW6zIieysLD7sf4hEd
    48znuAeIxvwTilSVrmT9YcQZu
    3DYjv67ZUYHsNtbb3n0EZAH8k
    xA7J3kfwfz40OL7z74BHv9Ast
  • maryka
    maryka Posts: 748
    So out of curiosity, how do you schedule in races? Or rides that you've planned yourself (e.g., Sunday for a lot of people is a long ride day with a club or mates)? Or is it an all-or-nothing plan?
  • jkosir
    jkosir Posts: 19
    maryka wrote:
    So out of curiosity, how do you schedule in races? Or rides that you've planned yourself (e.g., Sunday for a lot of people is a long ride day with a club or mates)? Or is it an all-or-nothing plan?

    Well currently you don't, there's no such option yet :D Some of the ideas we're playing with are ability to swap rides in a week or replace a single workout (with e.g. a race). That would still keep the default simple approach but give you extra features if you want them.

    However even now if you do something else than planned, the plan will change accordingly. From simple stuff (if you ride on a rest day it will move 1 day forward) to corrections for multiple missed (or not correctly completed - e.g. no intervals done) workouts. Also if you miss a disproportionate share of work for specific ability (e.g. don't do any tempo intervals) next week will have a slightly increased tempo load, compared to other abilities.

    Or at least it should. We are using various optimization methods for workout planning and still need to do a lot of testing, that's why we still have half a year of work to do.
  • kingstongraham
    kingstongraham Posts: 26,131
    Yeah, would need power for me to commit to it fully, and a way of doing the rides and rests on days that suit me. I'm not going out for a 3h15 ride today, and can't see the detail of what's coming up to possibly swap in something more suitable.

    I'll give feedback once I've got some rides into it, as I like the idea.
  • Bokers
    Bokers Posts: 37
    More keys please.
  • jkosir
    jkosir Posts: 19
    Okay, here's some more :)
    mcbEpk0qj3GBRNDlcWy8pYOpD
    J4zfnCMhJzEvVhTyD0Y9kEQwC
    VB1aQw6OLDS6ILRMYoOoKmtJO
    vuIXGk8IV6W0VhIowgNHrV8N9
  • Joshgav
    Joshgav Posts: 158
    I would suggest that many people who have invested in a power meter will already have some idea of creating a training plan, otherwise what's the point in having a PM.

    I like the idea of basing it off HR (but then I'm biased as I don't have a PM but do have an HRM).
  • jkosir
    jkosir Posts: 19
    Joshgav wrote:
    I would suggest that many people who have invested in a power meter will already have some idea of creating a training plan, otherwise what's the point in having a PM.

    I like the idea of basing it off HR (but then I'm biased as I don't have a PM but do have an HRM).

    Generally yes, but it takes some time to study training science, create your plan and include corrections for various changes. Some (myself included) definitely love doing this, it's pretty interesting. But we think others might like to have this done for them, and now we're trying to find out via feedback if that's true.

    Well we definitely need both HR and power. Power is actually simpler than HR to use for our case, detecting 1 minute intervals in HR data is really hard, due to lag in response to increased intensity. Power doesn't have that problem.
  • bobmcstuff
    bobmcstuff Posts: 11,196
    jkosir wrote:

    Well we definitely need both HR and power. Power is actually simpler than HR to use for our case, detecting 1 minute intervals in HR data is really hard, due to lag in response to increased intensity. Power doesn't have that problem.

    As has been discovered by everyone trying to do shorter intervals with HR :)

    I like the idea of this, it would be really cool if it tracked all rides (i.e., including races and long Sunday rides as mentioned above) and then suggested appropriate workouts based on your total workload.

    I'm a trainerroad user currently and one of the (relatively minor) flaws is that it doesn't know what riding you've been doing outside of their plan - their plans are designed with a progressive increase in TSS, but you can go out and do a load of really hard rides one week which the plan doesn't compensate for.

    Obviously this isn't a massive issue really since you can tell it you completed a workout outside or skip it if necessary, but it would be cool if the plan knew exactly what riding you'd been doing and adjusted itself to suit.

    What I've discovered from using power and HR on the turbo is that HR is pretty good for tracking over time; while the long term correlation between HR TSS (Strava "Suffer Score") and power TSS on turbo workouts is not bad, it can be quite variable between workouts. My data shows that power TSS can range between 1.5 and 2x HR TSS between one workout and the next, but the R squared for the dataset as a whole is 0.8, which is fairly good.

    So while you might struggle to detect shorter intervals with HR it still is useful to track how fatigued a rider might be. It might also mean that riders like myself who only track power on the turbo can incorporate fatigue from their outdoor rides more effectively.
  • kingstongraham
    kingstongraham Posts: 26,131
    Does it deal with multiple rides in a day?
  • jkosir
    jkosir Posts: 19
    bobmcstuff wrote:
    jkosir wrote:

    Well we definitely need both HR and power. Power is actually simpler than HR to use for our case, detecting 1 minute intervals in HR data is really hard, due to lag in response to increased intensity. Power doesn't have that problem.

    As has been discovered by everyone trying to do shorter intervals with HR :)

    I like the idea of this, it would be really cool if it tracked all rides (i.e., including races and long Sunday rides as mentioned above) and then suggested appropriate workouts based on your total workload.

    I'm a trainerroad user currently and one of the (relatively minor) flaws is that it doesn't know what riding you've been doing outside of their plan - their plans are designed with a progressive increase in TSS, but you can go out and do a load of really hard rides one week which the plan doesn't compensate for.

    Obviously this isn't a massive issue really since you can tell it you completed a workout outside or skip it if necessary, but it would be cool if the plan knew exactly what riding you'd been doing and adjusted itself to suit.

    What I've discovered from using power and HR on the turbo is that HR is pretty good for tracking over time; while the long term correlation between HR TSS (Strava "Suffer Score") and power TSS on turbo workouts is not bad, it can be quite variable between workouts. My data shows that power TSS can range between 1.5 and 2x HR TSS between one workout and the next, but the R squared for the dataset as a whole is 0.8, which is fairly good.

    So while you might struggle to detect shorter intervals with HR it still is useful to track how fatigued a rider might be. It might also mean that riders like myself who only track power on the turbo can incorporate fatigue from their outdoor rides more effectively.

    It does track all rides, i.e. everything you upload to Strava. The plan will adjust for all riding you do, even for workouts that were not planned or if you do something else entirely. :)

    How did you calculate HR TSS for this comparison? This formula, or something else?
    gZZfxkK.png

    Of course it's useful to track yeah. Using TSS and similar metrics to optimize training load and plan form peaks is something I'm most interested in actually. I analysed data of couple pro (WorldTour and continental) riders and tried to predict changes in FTP based on TSS with Banister model in my BSc thesis. Turned out it's useless.
    I believe it's mostly because while TSS seems to be good for tracking fatigue, it's not really useful to predict different types of adaptations. E.g. 2 hr coffee ride has the same TSS as 0.5h of VO2max intervals, but the resulting adaptations and changes in performance will be completely different.

    Through our app we can access all training data, rather than working with just one number. Together with some sports science researchers we're working with, we believe it might be possible to model different performance metrics (e.g. 1min max power, 5 min max power, FTP...) with data on what tempo intervals you did, how many and how long FTP climbing repeats, how much endurance riding... That's where our automated intervals detection comes in play. If we had such model, we could turn it around to see what's the best training to do if you want to improve a specific ability or a mix of them.
  • jkosir
    jkosir Posts: 19
    Does it deal with multiple rides in a day?

    Uh no, at least not currently. If you upload a second ride in the same day it will replace the previous one. Will be fixed sometime before we launch :)
  • robu
    robu Posts: 26
    Erm, any more codes for the beta trial?

    Looks good.

    Thanks.
  • kingstongraham
    kingstongraham Posts: 26,131
    What does the number above the ride represent?
  • jkosir
    jkosir Posts: 19
    What does the number above the ride represent?

    The something/10 one? That's supposed to be a grade you get for your ride, reflecting how well you did the workout planned. Depends on duration, intervals, intensity... Still needs some work yeah :D

    Some more codes:
    fArBvicevnPTdQ7Hko5vr9m6S
    BFuyWTupgiGgVPQOQnehcHG0W
    fiZqG9Oxc9GpNrSJlDWNCEIiw
    tWyBkNr5QA0Ry6BhCPge5utdE
  • bobmcstuff
    bobmcstuff Posts: 11,196
    jkosir wrote:
    How did you calculate HR TSS for this comparison? This formula, or something else?
    gZZfxkK.png

    Strava suffer scores https://support.strava.com/hc/en-us/art ... e-Premium-

    Which just uses time spent in each HR zone - I just found this article which back-calculates their formula http://djconnel.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/ ... coded.html

    I looked at a short ride I did and that method does seem to be what Strava is doing. It's basically the same method presented on trainingpeaks here https://www.trainingpeaks.com/blog/esti ... score-tss/ which is a method I've used to estimate TSS on rides where HR data didn't get onto Strava (recorded on Fitbit with no GPS), the numbers come out roughly similar (which is as good as you're going to get, and realistically all you need for fatigue tracking).

    This makes sense as Strava doesn't ask you to set an LTHR, just your MHR (although you can manually tweak the zones if you know your LTHR).

    Using the formula from your post on the same ride gives just under double the "TSS" - actually much closer to the power-based TSS figures I get out of TrainerRoad, which is interesting. If I have some free time I might recalculate some of my numbers using that formula so that I can compare power-based and HR-based figures from the same rides in TrainerRoad and see what the correlation looks like (I assume it will make no difference though since it's just a different way of cutting up the same numbers).
  • kingstongraham
    kingstongraham Posts: 26,131
    jkosir wrote:
    What does the number above the ride represent?

    The something/10 one? That's supposed to be a grade you get for your ride, reflecting how well you did the workout planned. Depends on duration, intervals, intensity... Still needs some work yeah :D

    Thanks - I was surprised to get 6/10 for a 30 minute commute yesterday when it thought I was going to do a 3h15 endurance ride. :)
  • stueys
    stueys Posts: 1,332
    Joshgav wrote:
    I would suggest that many people who have invested in a power meter will already have some idea of creating a training plan, otherwise what's the point in having a PM.

    I like the idea of basing it off HR (but then I'm biased as I don't have a PM but do have an HRM).

    Kinda, most of us can have a good stab at creating a training plan and understand zones, intensity v volume, etc, etc. The real art though is adapting your training plan as you go based on TSS, progress, life, etc, etc. I understood the app was going to adapt, for the vast majority of people that would be useful and is probably the key benefit you get from a coach (in theory).
  • jkosir
    jkosir Posts: 19

    Thanks - I was surprised to get 6/10 for a 30 minute commute yesterday when it thought I was going to do a 3h15 endurance ride. :)
    Yeah, 6 is the current minimum, in a "better do some riding than nothing" way. We'll rework the grades to either reflect actual benefit you should be getting or use some other sensible scale in a few weeks.
    Stueys wrote:
    Joshgav wrote:
    I would suggest that many people who have invested in a power meter will already have some idea of creating a training plan, otherwise what's the point in having a PM.

    I like the idea of basing it off HR (but then I'm biased as I don't have a PM but do have an HRM).

    Kinda, most of us can have a good stab at creating a training plan and understand zones, intensity v volume, etc, etc. The real art though is adapting your training plan as you go based on TSS, progress, life, etc, etc. I understood the app was going to adapt, for the vast majority of people that would be useful and is probably the key benefit you get from a coach (in theory).

    Yep exactly, if you don't want to bother planning workouts this might be interesting to you, as an alternative to a coach.
  • Do you have any more codes, or do you have enough beta testers now ?

    Regards,
    Gordon
  • jkosir
    jkosir Posts: 19
    Do you have any more codes, or do you have enough beta testers now ?

    Regards,
    Gordon

    Alright, some more :) :
    YqHo2KuChd6SzseCY1ebcXfTc
    ClhMSW1clav4pNAgqSgLAOMKd
    jh3B1SF3xyCLRIMeM723uCXrD
  • topcattim
    topcattim Posts: 766
    I signed up for this and have about a week's worth of data uploaded. I'm not sure how you're going to be seeking feedback from beta testers, but thought you might like some from me. I realise, before I say anything else, that this is in beta, and is free, but it does feel as though there are a few things that could do with changing.

    As a non full time athlete (i.e. somebody who fits my training around commuting and family) I need flexibility to be able to move workouts around to suit my diary. I can't (currently) do this but if I was to sign up and pay for this sort of service, flexibility would be a must.

    Secondly, I'd find it helpful if the session titles had planned duration in them - again that would help me plan my week. I know I can see that by clicking on them but, well, I'm lazy!

    Thirdly, as has been said above, I think it will be great if and when you include power data in your planning and analysis.

    Fourthly, I like what you're trying to do, looks valuable and interesting, thanks!
  • jkosir
    jkosir Posts: 19
    topcattim wrote:
    I signed up for this and have about a week's worth of data uploaded. I'm not sure how you're going to be seeking feedback from beta testers, but thought you might like some from me. I realise, before I say anything else, that this is in beta, and is free, but it does feel as though there are a few things that could do with changing.

    As a non full time athlete (i.e. somebody who fits my training around commuting and family) I need flexibility to be able to move workouts around to suit my diary. I can't (currently) do this but if I was to sign up and pay for this sort of service, flexibility would be a must.

    Secondly, I'd find it helpful if the session titles had planned duration in them - again that would help me plan my week. I know I can see that by clicking on them but, well, I'm lazy!

    Thirdly, as has been said above, I think it will be great if and when you include power data in your planning and analysis.

    Fourthly, I like what you're trying to do, looks valuable and interesting, thanks!

    Many thanks for comprehensive write-up!

    For lower volume plans (6-10h weekly) we're planning some sort of a workout list, rather than calendar scheduling. Like "this week do these workouts", in arbitrary order or maybe we'll set priorities. As for moving workouts around in calendar, I agree it would be a nice feature, but we need to find a way to adjust other workouts around it.

    I'll add duration to workout titles tomorrow, just need to figure out how not to ruin the layout, some workout names are long enough to span whole "day" already :D

    Yeah, power plans are definitely among the first things we'll focus on next.
  • Any chance of another sign up code for the beta?

    Thanks
  • jkosir
    jkosir Posts: 19
    Any chance of another sign up code for the beta?

    Thanks

    PM'd you one.

    Also now we have workout duration displayed directly on calendar, as it's been mentioned a few times. Tbh looks kinda cluttered, but we'll go with this for now. We're planning a bigger user interface redesign during beta anyway, haven't put much work into that yet.
  • jkosir
    jkosir Posts: 19
    So, we're now finally on Kickstarter! :)

    While we have given beta codes to anyone asking here, we still invite you to check out our kickstarter page (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1725424103/summit-training-automated-road-cycling-coaching) for more details about our future plans and maybe support us to gain free usage for a year after launch or an exclusive look behind the scenes.
    Thanks for all the feedback again! That's how we will be able to continuously improve our app.

    Also, here's one signup code to access tester mode (check kickstarter page for details):
    rptlvm0hzqb0hd3y1WUhbUByX