Occasionally I do a climbing or attacking workout then immediately follow with a endurance/recovery ride. With the rollout of AT, I notice my Endurance Level takes a hit when I complete the 2nd workout. I assume it’s because I’m carrying an elevated heart rate from the 1st workout into the 2nd.
Ego hit aside, the downside is that when I’m planning an endurance ride, AT/TrainNow will propose an endurance workout that’s likely easier than it needs to be.
should I not be using this structure for workouts?
should I accept the PL hit but then look for Stretch or Breakthrough workouts to compensate for decrease in suggested workout?
Is the TR team thinking that this is an issue that needs be solved with more programming?
I would just pick the harder workout if that’s what you want, and then say it was easy, to help AT adapt to your levels.
When I first started AT, it was constantly recommending workouts that were far too easy. I just picked a few stretch workouts in a row and answered “easy” and it figured out my levels pretty quickly.
Chad’s right- AT is not currently using your Heart rate data to make adaptations. It’s hard to say exactly what’s happening here, but as a general principle Adaptive Training won’t get confused or “broken” by you adding additional workouts. Even if they’re well below your current level, completing them won’t pull your Endurance level down in response. So if you see a specific example of this happening, shoot an email over to support@trainerroad.com and they’ll take a closer look at whatever it is that’s going on!
cool down at 50% or less isn’t really what I’m looking for. Plus it can also make comparing the same workout over time difficult as the cooldown gets included in the overall workout metrics thus diluting averages.
You don’t have to leave the cool down at 40-50%. Switch into resistance mode or hammer the + % button in ERG. This way you also avoid the pointless warmup at the start of the 2nd workout and get more quality work done.
Yes, your stats for the workout might look less impressive on Strava. Of course this won’t impact the appearance of any PRs in the PDC, and doesn’t mean it wasn’t a hard session. A lot of last year’s VO2 max sessions ended with rubbish looking power, because the work part is only like 20 something minutes of a 2 hour workout.