Given the way the current PL works I dont know if there is any real need for a partial. You can next time do an alternate and pick the PL you want. The actual number of PL doesnt really matter other then how AT will pick your workout. You still have the option to choose what to do.
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Did a ramp test, lost 2w, gained positive adaptations across the board 
I’ll take it! Good to not be completely reset.
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How is it possible to make positive adaptions in every zone but still do worse in the ramp test (assuming both attempts were 100% max effort)? Isn’t that indicative that something is not correct?
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Ramp uses your max 1 minute power. Looking at his levels, he is the weakest at anaerobic (0.1+ increase) and sprint (0.0 increase). That could explain why it did not increase.
I would say there is. Because what we get currently is what I had to do. I have to go into workout creator and create a custom workout of what I did, then get the workout level, then for my next workout on Sunday, I have to go into the workouts and manually select a workout based on the the level I’m at. It’s maybe 5-10 minutes or work, but the whole point of AT is that I don’t need to do that work. And since all of my levels are off, either 1s or 2s, for each type of workout, that is what I have to do. I know this is still beta, so I’m hoping they can fix this for the full release.
On a larger sense, I just feel like having the outcome be so strict of pass vs fail isn’t productive. You’re not going to have a clear pass or fail for every workout moving forward. Maybe you had to cut it short, or knock down the intensity. Is that truly a failed workout? Was my 50 minutes time in zone actually a fail? I don’t see it as a fail in any sense. It was a solid workout and definitely productive to me. But if AT only sees 2 options with no gray area, it’s classified as a fail and I don’t get any adaptions.
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The ramp test still includes ~10 minutes of threshold and VO2, both of which improved significantly. If the ramp test is so specifically geared towards “anaerobic” and “sprint” zones I would suggest it’s a very bad test, seems more likely to me that the adaptions are not reflecting what is happening.
A three point PL gain in endurance can’t be just from the 25 min ramp test. I’m guessing it’s updated from a backlog of rides I’d done outside, that hadn’t had progressions applied, as its been a fortnight since my last TR ride (Hail Mary). Or an issue like you suggest.
Old ramp tests prior to being accepted into AT have had PL’s calculated, I looked at those but none show a three point jump in endurance from a 25 min ramp test.
It must be nice to be an AI and not have to explain yourself. Just spit out a result and produce a “new baseline. Trust it. Bleep!” But nobody does, yet. It’s going to take TR a long time to wean us off the explanations everybody is asking for.
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I’m in 
I switched recently to pushing all my workouts to Garmin “outdoors” but I almost always actually do them indoors in Erg mode.
Are there any tips and tricks to help AT get it right?
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Absolutely agree. “You did most of the workout, suffered, and it’s going to impact your upcoming workouts, but you get no credit for that” isn’t exactly motivating or helpful in your training. I’d say even adapting downward would be better than no adaptations at all. At least then you could see the impact.
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All I am saying is here is the workaround. You yourself know what you did. TR still has a long way to go to get this all to work the way everyone wants. I don’t disagree that you likely did the majority of the workout but how do you quantify what PL to give. I suspect part of the issue is just there approach otherwise you would think outside rides of any type could be quantified into the PLs.
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Not specifically. It seems to be getting better though.
The last two workouts I did outside, Baird+1 and Schoen, both this week, were classified as successful as I would have expected them to be so hopefully it’s an issue thats being sorted.
My plan during this version of the AT beta has been SSBHV-Short Power Build-RollingRR Speciality and at the beginning of plan all the SS workouts seemed to be classified correctly. Moving to the shorter intervals after the base period seemed to cause the issues so whether this was related to the shorter, sometimes more complicated interval structure being more difficult to classify, or changes to classification behind the scenes I don’t know.
With the classification though, if the workout wasn’t seen as successful but I hit the expected targets and felt it was successful it’s easy enough to pick a next workout thats appropriate for progression.
One thing I’ve found works better for me in that scenario is to only change a workout prior to doing it rather than a week beforehand. Adaptions can happen regularly and can impact more than one progression level and there’s often more than one workout of any given progression level that can impact future planning. If you change anything too early it’ll move the workout outside the plan and won’t be adapted even if other successful workouts would have had an impact on it.
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This is where the workout levels get funky. If your FTP increases, you’d expect a decrease in your levels because the power targets for the levels you recently did would be bumped up. A Level 7.0 Threshold workout at 250 FTP would be harder than a Level 7 workout at 225 FTP in the case of pure kJs (this is a reductive example to illustrate the point). So it drops the levels slightly to make up for this difference. By contrast, if your FTP were to go down, you’d expect the levels to remain the same or go up slightly based on recent performance because it would keep the difficulty in the same ballpark as the workouts prior to the test. There’s a weird inversion going on because of how they’ve set it up.
All of this, of course, also is done in consideration of numerous other factors that we don’t know about and have not been shared with us. The context of the plan, where the rider is in relation to their goals and a bunch of other ML classifications proprietary to TR are all being considered.
In the end, if there is a small increase or decrease in FTP, I do not think there will be an A + B = C answer that is universal for everyone. Some may see level increases, some may see no change and others may see decreases. And it will all be relative to the individual because that’s the point of AT.
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I am not in the beta so it isn’t really clear to me what the levels mean. Are they the time you can sustain in zone, the power level per zone or some combination of all of it?
I assume they are generated using the summation of training data available. But if your training data indicates you have made significant improvements in pretty much all zones but you are not making any improvements in an actual test then that means the numbers are not very useful (to me at least).
Of course, it could be something else. I am not in the beta so don’t know how it works. Or it could be a bad day on the test.
Ah yes I was a bit concerned with short intervals due to the Garmin/Erg delay.
I’m just finishing Olympic Build HV. My first session is 3h15 endurance…I suspect I’d ‘fail’ outside due to the traffic and terrain of suburban London so I will probably do it indoors.
Thanks for the tip on accepting adaptations.
Just wondering, is this the correct place to put feedback and observations or is there any dedicated channel for that?
This is as good a place as any. But if you’ve run into something “weird” or that didn’t quite work they way you expected, I would also email TR support - email is support@trainerroad.com - directly
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As far as I can see they are fairly arbitrary (in terms of the value) and are more designed to give you a more rounded view of your ability in each area rather than ftp. So being 4.3 in tempo is not necessarily the same thing as being 4.3 in vo2 max but sets a level where a slightly higher workout level e.g. 4.6 would mean that if you successfully completed it, you increase your levels and can push on to something harder. Theoretically your next ftp test should show an improvement (and your levels go down) and if not, you just keep pushing the levels until you find your limit.
My assumption is that the levels system is also designed to iron out the flaws with all types of ftp testing. The ramp test (or whatever you choose) is a benchmark but levels take into account that not everyone is in the middle of the bell curve.
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I keep reading stuff like this and scratching my head a bit. With respect to your example the difference is a banana (90kJ or roughly 90 calories). Some of the examples from TR podcast sound like working out in the gym. In the gym I keep the number of sets and reps the same, and over 6 months have seen large increases in the weight lifted.
My own experience with self-coaching and adapting my training has been increasing time-in-zone for tempo and sweet spot and threshold during periods where my FTP increases. It is also happening now with a coach. The endurance rides are constant, but if I had endless time then those would be getting longer even while FTP is rising.
Where it gets interesting is above threshold, and this is where in my opinion it is decoupled from 1-min ramp power (max aerobic power) or FTP.
Now when you put all of that into the context of a progressive plan, where a 3-4 week loading block is focused on primary and secondary progression goals, then things look a little different. And if I’m working for 3 weeks to increase anaerobic capacity, then MAP or FTP is the wrong measurement and I’m struggling to make sense of how FTP impacting progression levels makes sense. However its hard to see classic anaerobic capacity work in the TR plans, as they seem more focused on repeatability / power. And in general I feel the plans assume higher capacity and then work on repeatability/power, unless you look at Traditional Base or Full Distance Triathlon plans.
FWIW, just a few random thoughts.
As others have explained @chris1234, the workout levels are a means to compare difficulty within that zone. So a level 7 threshold workout is more challenging than a level 3 threshold workout. This could be because the %FTP of each interval is greater or because the interval length is greater. Or it could be both. This allows AT to progress your threshold irrespective of the other zones so that the workouts for each zone are tailored to your abilities in that zone.
For example, I’ve always struggled with VO2 workouts, but Sweet Spot has been easier for me to do, even at long intervals. With the stock plans, the Sweet Spot work would sometimes be too easy and the VO2 would be too hard. With AT, this changes because it will adapt the stock plan to serve me lower level VO2 workouts and higher level Sweet Spot workouts to meet my abilities where they are.
The element that gets confusing is that a level 4 VO2 does not directly correlate in hurt or difficulty to a level 4 Sweet Spot. It can only be compared to other VO2 workouts. Then when you bring FTP into the mix, the waters get a little muddier as well because all the workouts in the catalogue are based on % of FTP.
This next bit will be going to go deep, so I apologize for length. But hopefully it will help to explain this further. I’ve broken it up with some h-tags for easier parsing.
Example Of Workout Levels Compared to FTP
Mount Field Example
Let’s use a simple workout to illustrate the level for a single zone, Mount Field. This workout is a level 2.7 Sweet Spot workout. Each interval is 12 minutes long at 85% of FTP and there are three of them total in the workout. Below are some sample FTPs and what that would equate to for the interval periods.
- FTP: 250; Interval: 212 for 12 mins
- FTP: 225: Interval: 191 for 12 mins
- FTP: 200: Interval: 170 for 12 mins
So as you can see, the raw watts required will change at each FTP, but the percent of FTP remains the same. This means that the difficulty for the respective FTP is the same as the others, assuming the FTP is correctly set. When you add levels into the mix, however, it is possible the person with a 225 FTP overperforms on Sweet Spot and needs a workout like Tray Mountain.
Tray Mountain Example
Tray Mountain is a level 6.9 Sweet Spot workout with three 20-minute intervals at 90% FTP. For a person at 225 FTP, this means holding 202 watts and extending the time of each interval by an additional 8 minutes compared to Mount Field. Below are the interval periods for Tray Mountain using the above FTPs as an example.
- FTP: 250; Interval: 225 for 20 minutes
- FTP: 225; Interval: 202 for 20 minutes
- FTP: 200; Interval: 180 for 20 minutes
Now let’s say that the 225 FTP tests and sees an increase to 250. If they maintained that same workout level of Sweet Spot, they would have to complete those intervals at 225 watts rather than 202. That’s a considerable difference in power and exactly why the levels decrease with a gain in FTP. I believe the inverse would likely be true when there is a decrease in FTP, meaning the levels may increase to maintain similar power targets and interval length to the workouts prior to the decrease. Ultimately the goal here is to smooth your progression over time.
Hopefully that helps to illustrate the system. It can be confusing to use manually without some guidance, and once more data points get added into the mix, it makes sense why machine learning would be an ideal way to address the challenge of prescribing the correct workouts to everyone.
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I think your story breaks down because of the focus on absolute power. The sweet spot progression thread is a good read.
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