Understand your point now. From my point-of-view, the primary benefit of Workout Levels is to support taking off-the-shelf plans and adapting the workouts to an individual (training zone by training zone). And for anyone that hasn’t learned to adapt workouts, I think that is a big benefit. Seriously I flamed out on TR Build plans because for awhile I tried doing them as-is, until I heard Coach Chad say on the podcast the plans were meant to be adapted. I’m still a huge fan of defining fitness with power curves, power-to-HR, max efforts, repeatable efforts, and time-in-zone. I just can’t bring myself to say sweet spot 4.4 (or whatever), do the same workout week after week, watch my HR drop over a couple of weeks, and not believe my fitness is increasing… in other words it is possible to progress fitness without progressing workout difficulty.
Under the hoods, this is already the case. With many workouts you do get credit for several different progression levels. I did Deseret yesterday, and got credit for Threshold, Sweet Spot and Tempo.
I don’t think it makes sense, though to advertise the other progression levels as typically only one will determine how hard the workout is. For example, Deseret is a Threshold 7.1 workout, and it raised my Tempo PL from 2.6 to 2.8 (+0.2). Would it make sense to advertise it as a Tempo PL 2.8 workout? I don’t think so, because that’d suggest it’s a really easy workout whereas it is intermediate-to-hard.
Independently of whether you repeat workouts, you don’t need to, the library is big enough (or you can ride outdoors if weather and time allow), you mention something important that deserves emphasis: there are very subtle indicators of fitness gains, which are extremely hard to quantify in some general fashion.
For me two additional indicators are my recovery heart rate during rest intervals (the heart rate I reach after 1:30–3:00 minutes or rest after an interval) and how quickly I attain it. I wonder whether there is a good way for training software to make the athlete aware of this.
To me, what is missing is some description / conception of what the PL levels mean outside of having to look at TR workouts. That is, if I tell you that my VO2 max PL is 5, without looking in the TR workout catalog, what would that mean to you? Is this good? It’s higher than a VO2 max PL of 4, but if I primarily do group rides / gran fondos / sportive, do I care if my VO2 max PL is a 5 instead of a 4?
This is even “more” needed for Threshold / Sweet Spot PLs. That is, for both of these zones, there is probably a minimum level you should be able to do assuming your “FTP” is correctly set. I would put $$$$ on it when TR set workout levels, they had some assumption in mind.
To my mind, without some translation of PL to a concept / description that is independent of TR workouts, the only value of PL is to make it easier to order TR workouts and allow people / AT to select harder / easier workouts.
I think you are mixing two separate things here: the first is how PLs are currently used, and that is as a tool to help you select workouts suitable for your fitness level. Nothing more. However, what you are alluding to is a better role to quantitatively judge your fitness. The numerical values of Progression Levels are themselves arbitrary, but still useful.
In my mind, you implicitly set your goals by picking a TR plan. For example, your implied goals with the Crit Plan are different from the goals you have with the Gran Fondo Plan or the Climbing Road Race plan. I think here TR should tell you what you are optimizing for or focussing on, and then help you track your progress. At present PLs only help you to track your progress within a block, because the levels will be reset after each FTP test that is the first thing you do when you start a block. Whether you can use PLs to track long-term progress, I don’t know if that’s the right way to do it. The only reliable, but very limited metric is your FTP. And it is easily misunderstood. I can remember several posts of members who start threads like “FTP stagnant, what to do?”, and if you read further in several cases the athlete is initially overweight and while they haven’t gained in terms of FTP, they have lost significant weight over the course and thus, ended up with a significantly higher specific FTP (W/kg). Have they gotten fitter? Oh yeah.
In my mind, TR should, when you pick a plan, single out a few key metrics they think are relevant and important. They should allow you to compare yourself with past training plans (e. g. how much did I gain at the same point in time in the previous season, e. g. in the second week of SSB2?).
That’s interesting. I think I’ve had that happen once or twice where there has been a secondary progression listed, but it’s not something that happens regularly. Maybe only certain workouts are setup that way right now?
I’ve had a couple of adaptations where a secondary level has been updated. I suspect that it happens with workouts near the edges of each zone rather than those squarely in the middle. Maybe the cutoffs for adaptations are too narrow so when you are in those wide power zones below threshold the system doesn’t see anything beyond the zone you are in.
Probably, and perhaps it depends on your relative PL levels. For example, I don’t think I do a lot of workouts doing tempo, so my tempo PL bar is very short. Same for anaerobic, for most of the year, I don’t think I am doing a lot of workouts that specifically target this energy region.