The Freshness Feedback slider enables you to fine-tune Xert’s freshness algorithm by providing you the opportunity to input some personal feedback and more accurately reflect how you are feeling.  This, in turn, is used by the Adaptive Training Advisor in establishing whether you are ready for high-intensity training and at what difficulty. It can be accessed from the ‘GOALS’ tab on the My Fitness page.

 

Xert’s Training Status,  where the color of your training stars indicates your readiness to train, can accept personalized feedback in terms of freshness through the use of this slider.  The slider ranges from -60 and +60, but is set to a value of 0 by default, where is should generally be left most of the time. We’ll provide examples of if/when you may need to adjust it below. Technical note: the value represents how much your form is adjusted overall, allocated in the ratio of your current individual system’s Training Loads.  For example, if you set Freshness Feedback to 10, your Form is increased by 10 overall and will thus introduce more freshness (all colors move right on the spectrum) and the Difficulty Scores used by XATA in identifying workouts is increased by 10.  Similarly, if Freshness Feedback is -10, your Form is decreased by 10 overall and indicate to the system that you are less fresh than before.  Difficulty Score used by XATA will decrease by 10.

Increasing this value will increasingly turn red days to yellow, yellow to blue, blue to green etc.  This means that whereas before XATA may recommend you take a rest day or do a Recovery Ride, and Endurance ride may be prescribed.  Increasing Freshness Feedback will inform Xert that you are able to handle more overall training both in volume and difficulty.  Increasing the value allows you to track higher Improvement Rates by reducing recovery time. Conversely, shifting the slider to the left indicates that you may need more recovery, and an endurance ride (or recovery) day may be recommended instead of higher intensity workouts.

 

IMPORTANT

Setting this too high and maintaining it too high for an extended period of time could potentially lead to issues with overtraining.  You should only increase this value temporarily (no more than a few days) and also having an idea about the impact it may have on you and the time you need to recover.

Examples of when you could safely increase this value include:

  1. Your Training Load as determined by Xert is too low because not all your training data has been accounted for.
  2. You’re an accomplished cyclist with years of training and can handle greater volume/intensity even at lower Training Loads.
  3. You’re looking to perform a week or two of training overload at a higher improvement rate in preparation for important event.

Examples when you should decrease this value:

  1. If you feel that the system is too aggressive in recommending high intensity workouts.  You need a bit more recovery time.
  2. You’ve been doing other types of exercise that may impact your ability to train, for example, weight training.
  3. You’re recovering from an injury.
  4. You’re recovering from sickness.