To play devil’s-advocate… whenever this goes live a whole lot of people are going to get thrown at the new functionality. Part of a beta test can be seeing how accessible and discoverable the new features are. Troubles the beta testers make can lead to workflow improvements for the ultimate release. If you need an FAQ just to get started, that might more effort than the average live-user is willing to apply and causing them to think AT is a flop or too hard to use.
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I don’t remember - but I’ve been in the AT beta since the beginning 
I hit the activate adaptive training but was not walked through the first bits!
From my view the issue at the start is I want AT to work and adapt what I do. But it wont work under certain scenarios. I am one that would adjust my workouts to a more appropriate level. If I look ahead a week my next threshold workout is 2 PL higher then my current level and higher then any threshold workout over the next 4 weeks. The issue for me is I would normally adjust my workouts for an upcoming week based on my schedule. If I mess around now AT may not work. So if I just sub to another workout my PL may adapt but I wont get adjustments to adjust future workouts until I do another workout in the program. If I wait until the day and pick an alternative workout then that should work. My issue I really prefer to know ahead of time. This really is a beta issue in my view.
I’m unsure how an FAQ will help with that. You want AT to intelligently ramp your workout progression, but you also want to micro-manage it weeks out? Maybe I don’t get it, but my take is the whole point here is to just let AT fiddle with your workout lineup so you don’t have to. Almost by definition it’s not worth looking at the schedule a few weeks out because who knows if you’ll get bumped up or down a PL by then.
I would suggest you just do what you’re gonna do (I’m assuming you’re in the AT beta, anyway). If TR staff see a bunch of people constantly overriding the AT workouts they might dig in to see if there is some general a weakness with how workouts are being assigned or forecast. This is the whole point of a beta. If not, well, it’s not a show-stopper for the rest of us so no reason to hold things up. There are plenty of features a lot of people are clamoring on (outdoor rides/workouts, polarized AT plan).
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It’s a beta issue, but it’s also a plan builder issue. And the problem is plan builder has been out for a while now and you still can’t drag a workout to a different day without breaking the connection to a plan builder plan. In my mind this is a basic feature that should work. When it doesn’t it causes a lot of confusion and not everyone will go to the forums to find answers.
I am not sure why this is not a high priority to fix. Seems like moving dragging workouts to different days is something most people are going to do when work/family/life changes your plans for the day and you need to adjust.
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An FAQ would explain what we can do, if anything to get around the limitations. Its a beta…it helps to know what works and doesnt work. Reading these threads to find out if someone has addressed it isnt very functional. An FAQ is just simple. It can still be in flux as it is a beta but it would stop users from doing things before they realize what they are doing isnt going to work. So my problem workout is one that I would like to adjust. It isnt one that I can do as currently scheduled. Can I have an extra day of rest before it? Can I sub it now or do I have to wait till that day? Is there a proper way to sub a workout. There is but not everyone starting the beta knows what they can and cannot do without reading a lot of material.
I get what your doing but I would prefer more proactivity by TR to help guide us.
Agreed. Being able to move the workout days to different days of the week in the plan Builder/ scheduling phase is a pretty key part. Hopefully it’s high priority.
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Actually, the whole point of the beta is for you to use AT how you want, find things that don’t work / don’t work the way you think it should, report that to TR, so TR can
Iterate / solve for situations it didn’t think through.
The point isn’t to test AT within a proscribed framework. This is what people who are joining the beta now don’t get:: AT needs to be stress tested - both scale and corner cases / scenarios that TR didn’t anticipate/ fully account for. This can lead to a less than optimal experience if you aren’t expecting a rough, unfinished product.
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I do disagree. Yes it needs to be tested but moving workouts as an example doesn’t test it as it is broken. I want to use it so it works. It’s the reason we should know what doesn’t work or what the work around is. If I use it and something doesn’t work that’s fine. It’s fine to find what’s broken but if it is already known repeating that failure for me is pointless
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The way most developers address this issue during pre-release testing is to publish a list of known limitations and bugs. It’s the opposite of a how-to guide: it doesn’t tell you how to use the app, it tells you how not to use it for now.
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It’s essential. The best training plan is the one you will follow, and having flexibility to get around minor injuries or illness, bad days and things life throws at you is absolutely necessary to maintain compliance. Just refer to the thousands of posts on Zwift forums decrying the lack of flexibility in their training plans for more arguments.
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Great point. Letting people engage with the product can flesh out where things might be less than intuitive. For example, I just got my AT invite, did my first workout, and completed my first post-ride workout.
The workout was marked as a “Stretch” workout, and credited me a +1.2 for Threshold. I marked it as “Hard” because it wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t brutal–just a good hard workout. Got an alert that AT was going to adapt my upcoming workouts. Figuring it was going to bump things up a bit, I clicked on Preview Adaptations only to find out that three Saturdays from now, the AI decided to reduce a Threshold 5.5 workout to a Threshold 4.6.
Is that a bug? Sure seems like it. Or is it the way things are supposed to work? All I can say is, the AI is a lot more gentle with me than I have been with myself.
(Update: I just went in and manually changed things back from Indianhouse -1 to Warlow +2 and immediately got a notification of pending adaptations. Clicked on that and now it wants to reduce the intensity of the next week from a 6.0 to a 4.5.
No, really, AT! I’ll be okay. Don’t worry about me!
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I’m hoping dragging a planned workout to a different day gets fixed too. I do this all the time for one reason or another.
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I am really curious as to what the AI is optimizing for. Is it completion rate, improvements in FTP, etc?
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Excellent question, actually. I hope it‘s FTP improvements, but I‘m very curious too. I‘d think this might be is propriatery info for TR as it goes to the core of training the algorithm, but who knows?
Interesting. I just emailed support yesterday about how to do this and I was told: “The best way to approach this scenario is to actively move the scheduled workout a day later. For instance, if you had a Pettit scheduled for Monday but you know you can only get to it on Tuesday, then moving it back a day in advance will make sure that the workout will be accounted for 100%” I wonder if that mean’s i’s fixed, or that I could have issues when I do that. I may need to be more specific on what “actively move” means. So much is in the details of how something is done…
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I would probably ignore any adaptation more than a couple of days out, as those workouts could be changed again depending upon how the workouts between now and then go. I honestly think AT plans should just use placeholder workouts (e.g., 1 hour VO2 max intervals), except for the immediately next 7 days which would show specific workouts. Any workout farther out than that, is completely speculative. If AT plans worked like this, then people wouldn’t get so hung up on adaptations, as fewer would be needed, and they would be more like to actually be the adaptations you would actually ride.
Also, this is more how coaches work: they set the goals - e.g., we are going to do a three week threshold block - ahead of time, but the specific workouts (e.g., 3x10 @ threshold) isn’t selected until you get closer to the actual workout.
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That still doesn’t sound like it’s fixed. What happens if you need to bring it forward? And more importantly the big fix is being able to change the scheduled days away from the TR Plan Builder standard days.
I’m not sweating it too much, but to have such an odd “adaptation” as my introduction to the new system did kind of make me chuckle. Maybe it’s detected an incipient Lyme’s disease infection that’ll start kicking my ass a month from now.