Adaptive Training - Unuseable

Background:
I had enough time so I was following the Full Distance Tri Base / Build / Specialty plans.
I had just finished base when the ‘new’ training plans where changed out.
I was 1 week into build (which I had made a few changes due to the new plans) when I was added to the AT beta.

So I was following my plan expecting AT changes, but none happened, it was only then I found out that AT wont work with training plans, I thought it was a bit crap, but thought if this is the way the product is going I need to use PB.

First attempt:
I deleted my plan
Added a plan builder plan, when it was added it made AT adaptions.
Since the PB plan had thrown my current progression, I swapped some workouts out.
This apparently breaks the PB plan (I found out accidentally)
So I deleted it, then, manually deleted all the ‘left-over workouts’

Second attempt:
I tried to build a PB plan, backdated to when i started base.
I got a ‘something went wrong’ error splash page.

At this point I decided that essentially AT wont work for me.
I added back the build plan. The next day i thought I shouldn’t give up so easily, ill have another go at making it work.

Third attempt:
I completely deleted everything from my calendar between now and my goal event, including all my manually inputted runs and additional non-plan rides
Built a PB plan, back dated.
This time it worked and it added it to my calendar.
I was careful not to change anything etc and the plan ‘looked’ about right.
No adaptions came up, so again it looks like its broken.
Maybe it was because I deleted some runs / swims form the plan, who knows.

So I deleted it all again, and just went back to where I started, with the Build plan.

I have contacted TR support twice, and, both times I felt like I got a shoulder shrug, like, we know its buggy as crap but, it is what it is, or they only answered half my question with a copy-paste standard answer.

So I am in the position of not being able to use AT because:
AT wont work with the core plans - this has to be a massive bug, its essentially 50% of the product.
Plan builder breaks seemingly at the drop of a hat when you touch anything.
Sometimes when you build a PB plan you don’t get adaptions anyway.

So the question is, how do I actually make AT work for me, and my goals.

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This isn’t meant to be personal criticism but it’s a beta product and should be treated as such. I’m very grateful to all the AT beta testers for teasing out these types of issues but if the integrity of a training plan is absolutely crucial then don’t use a beta product. So in your position, I would not use AT and go back to your traditional plans until AT is in a format to work for you.

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Yeah, you signed up for AT in order to tease out the bugs and edge use cases. So it is known that it’s buggy as it still hasn’t been officially released. I said this in another thread but 90% of the AT complaints seem to boil down to not knowing that its a beta and not VIP early access and the other 10% are ‘why aren’t I in yet’. Any bugs or issues you encounter with AT should be directed to support so they can log and track them. I imagine they are also keeping track of any confusions (like having to use PB and not just dropping in plans) so that they can adjust their education material to make a smoother public release.

But I agree with @BaronGreenback, if AT is giving you this much grief and you don’t want to use a buggy, pre-release product then just go back to what you were doing.

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I know its beta, and fully aware what that entails however:

Plan builder is not in beta, and much of the issues I am having stem from its failings.

The fixed training plans, as I said are 50% of the product, but yet they released an update that only works in an extremely specific way, with 50% of the remaining product.

I reported the issues to support, and they essentially didn’t want to know, so they, in my mind don’t want to fix the issues I have raised, how is that helping the product improve if I get shrugged off?

I am one of the later additions, my issues must have come up before, but obviously hasn’t been addressed.

The point of being added to the beta test group is so I can use / test the product, the point of that is, the AT product is so problematic I cannot use it, I was asking how can I get around this, how do I make it work.

The tone of that reply is ‘you’re too dumb to understand what beta testing is’ and ‘talk to support’ which isn’t the actual premise of the positive point I was raising, in being ‘how can I make this product with bugs actually work for me?’

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AT is straight up going to change your progression, so be prepared for that.

I would say your best bet is to do PB and then use the Alternates feature for your workouts to set them at the level you think you’re at for your current progression. To do this, tap on the workout and scroll down to the bottom. There are filters for difficulty class and time. Use these to find an alternate for the workout to target the workout level you want.

This will not break them from PB (according to posts in the big AT thread) and will result in adapting future workouts. So in short, get your plan set, then each day for the first week or so, use the alternates feature to get your starting progression lined up where you want it, and then let AT do its thing after that.

If you’re looking to keep the progression very strict to what you want, I would definitely say that AT is not for you because it will be changing workouts constantly. The same workout 2 weeks from now could potentially change after every single workout you do, so the stepped progression week to week will change all the time. If that’s not something you want, and you want to control each workout yourself, AT simply is not something you’ll want, like or enjoy because you have to surrender control to it for it to work properly.

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I guess at this point once your point/issue has been submitted, support will share it as a defect with the team, see if its a known issue, and then whether its being worked on or not and whether it has to be prioritized.
Is it maybe because it’s a tri plan? I don’t know… i’m not in AT yet and I don’t know it that well…but that would be my first assumption.
I wouldn’t jump to the conclusion of it being “unuseable”, for sure, it isn’t working in your case scenario and i won’t discount that, but it is also working in other use cases :man_shrugging:t5:

I am happy to surrender control to AT.

The reason I had to change workouts was PB put me back to base, I didnt really want to do this, and then when I finally managed to get PB to make a plan with me currently in build, AT wouldn’t recognise it.

So its not that I want control, I was trying to find some sort of workaround with the problems I found, with the bugs in plan builder and AT, but everything I tried failed.

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Oh! That can also be changed. Plan Builder does sometimes create weird week stuff like that because of your A and B races and the time constraints it is presented with. I’ve always just accepted the quirks as they aren’t long enough to derail things imo.

Regardless, here are some screenshots that may help.


You should see a little tooltip like this on your calendar for that block. Click on that and the box below will pop up.


Click the thing there. It will give you a list of plan options to choose.

If it’s not giving you the option you’d like, then try doing Plan Builder by setting the start of your plan on the same day as your original plan start date (essentially back-dating it to the start of your base plan). This should give it the structure you were on as it will be using the full number of weeks available when you initially set it up. In the PB set-up you should be able to tweak the blocks around as well. I think there’s a page with small text that you can click to adjust each block individually. It’s been a bit since I’ve set up a PB plan, so I don’t recall exactly how granular you can get with changing those blocks, but there will be some options available to you.

The purpose of a beta is to find people for whom there are bugs/problems, fix them, then move on. If this isn’t you, then don’t sign up for beta. It remains in beta because it isn’t going to work for people yet. Beta isn’t early access to finished product. You are a test pilot finding what makes the plane crash.

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Well… I don’t have access to AT so I have to judge by the posts. But if the product is basically unusable, it is not really a beta, is it? It’s more of an alpha then.

Beta = it basically works and the core mechanisms and algorithms are ok. But we need to work on bug reports and polish.

Alpha = The basic mechanisms and algorithms still need major work.

To me, beta would be more like: it works most of the time, but sometimes a workout here or there is too hard / easy.

Or: progression feels good, but this particular week feels a bit off.

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It seems like the issue is that he got an unsatisfactory answer from support. They don’t seemed to have acknowledged the specific issues, nor offered solutions. But maybe they wrote up bug reports behind the scenes? We don’t know.

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Sorry you’re having issues, that’s super frustrating.

I’ve been using AT for a few weeks now, and have been really happy with using plan builder. Pre AT I thought plan builder was useless since it just gave me the canned plans in sequence that I could pick out myself. Now I am enjoying fine graining things a bit better with putting in travel dates, some races, etc.

I started it towards the end of build cycle and back dated it and it worked without issue. I’ve modified it and it worked out for me as well. This week I am stressing it by dropping half the recovery week since I had 4 days off last week and have a race next week I don’t want to do a ramp right before. I deleted my ramp and added one today. No adaptations happened, so I probably broke the predictions by the way I did it. However, I have updated progression levels and will just use alternates based on those, what I think I can do, and what is prescribed and believe it will take care of things down the road just fine. My FTP only increased 2%, so it shouldn’t have changed much anyways.

All that said, I don’t want nor need AT to take complete control over my training plan. I want it to keep things more appropriately scoped, but I am always gonna be involved in what I actually do versus exactly what it is telling me. AT isn’t anywhere close to ready for full autonomy, even without beta bugs, unless one is a novice to structured training.

The issue seems to be that AT only works with plan builder plans. However, if you manually alter the workouts in your plan, they become dissociated from the plan builder plan, and thus AT.

I’m guessing that will only be fixed once AT works for all TR workouts, even those without plans. When that happens, it will also work with the stock plans. It sounds a bit like plan builder puts the workouts into a different database, and AT only looks at that database.

(I don’t have AT, so maybe I’m completely wrong :slight_smile: )

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Based on my experience, I think this has to do with how far in advance AT looks to adapt workouts. From what I can tell, it only adapts workouts for the current block (using recovery weeks to identify their end), and when you’re in a recovery week, you will see no adaptations at all until your ramp test day or after you finish the ramp. So in your case, I’d expect to see adaptations for the next block on the day of your first workout back or after you finish that first workout.

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Plan Builder has long required back dating if you want that level of control.

No adaptations is a separate issue. Are you doing all cycling workouts on trainer using TR app? Or outside? And if outside which bike computer?

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Cool…will look out for that.

Confident it is self-correcting either way though, since the originally prescribed workouts look good to me and with a small change in FTP setting I have a good idea of how to adjust the workout level if needed. So after a week of rolling through the different zones I’m targeting in specialty, I expect it will be back on track if it isn’t already before that.

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A couple of things:

  • AT is never going to be able to work if you manually select a workout, as it doesn’t know why that specific workout was selected outside of some type of “plan”. Maybe you selected a set of easy workouts because you are building a recovery week. Without something to tell AT the purpose, it wouldn’t know how to modify the workout.
  • You can alter future workouts in a PB plan, and still have that future workout get adapted by AT, but you have to do it using the “Variants” functionality (only available if you are in the Beta).
  • Today, AT counts all TR workouts into your PLs.

Cheers,

I disagree with your statement it won’t work if you manually select a different workout.

As you point out, AT is always adapting progression levels based on what you actually accomplish. Using variants is a similar thing, but just makes selecting a workout more scoped to the intention. Either way it will still adapt your workouts if you go outside of scope and complete a workout. If you do it in a zone that is not being targeted, it might not be obvious, but it is being accounted for.

Certainly there may be limitations on how well this works in beta, but the fundamental aspect of updating progression levels means this has a pathway to do a lot in the future when going off script.

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AT won’t adapt future manually selected workouts. If you want to change a future workout and have it adapted, then you need to use variants.

Maybe I misunderstood your “never” comment. What you say is the case now (though should be implicitly correctable), but I’d be highly surprised and disappointed if it doesn’t happen in later versions of AT.