AT downgrade question

Hi all, new forum user here. I came back to TR recently after a long gap training by myself and some time with a coach. I did use TR a lot abut 3 years ago, but the AT aspect wasn’t there then.

Past few months I’ve been doing a decent amount of sweet spot work, up to 2 x 30 mins in a session. I’m an average rider, nearly 50, 75-80KG depending on how many pies I’ve eaten, FTP when on form around 280W. It’s currently about 260 as I haven’t been pushing too hard over the winter but been taking it a bit easier. I built a plan using plan builder recently and it did seem to take all that pre-signup work into account when I synced all my data into TR (most of the workouts in the next few weeks are in the 4.5 - 5.5 range).

I tried to set my plan start date so that it took into account a couple of months worth of training I’ve done, and aligned with a recovery week that I was taking last week, so this week was week 1 of a build phase. I chose the Low Volume plan due to time commitments and will add more endurance type riding at the weekends when I can. I did a VO2 max workout this morning (BlueBell), and completed all the intervals to a decent quality. It was probably about right, in that it was fairly hard, I might have been able to do a little bit more. I selected ‘Hard’ when asked for how it felt, and when I next opened the app it had created a bunch of adaptations massively downgrading all the next few weeks’ workouts down to about 1.5 to 2.5.

I did reject all the adaptations, but was curious as to why it felt I had to reign things in so dramatically - I am just at a point now where I want to push a bit more after lots of sweet spot base work over the past couple of months.

Was it a mistake to say that VO2 intervals were Hard? I was just being honest. Maybe my definition of hard is not what TR expects? My lungs aren’t great, I do struggle a bit with VO2 work some time but I thought today’s workout went pretty well.

Any insight appreciated!

Cheers

Maybe see this thread…

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That was a useful thread, thanks. Sounds like other people are having similar issues.

I went back and changed RPE to Moderate, and the proposed adaptations are still going from Sweet Spot 4.9 to Sweet Spot 1.1 in one instance. Doesn’t seem right to me.

I wonder if it’s because having just started a plan, the only progression levels that are not at default of 1.0 are VO2 Max and Endurance (I started with a recovery week of endurance rides last week, and did a Vo2 Max this morning). Maybe it thinks that’s my actual progression levels?

I was in a similar situation to you when I started my current TR TP in mid December (been self training or using a coach for about 3 years but had also used TR pre AT about 4 years ago).

Although you have synced all of your past data, it’s my understanding that TR doesn’t take that data into account for your PL (although I do believe if you go through the rides and start associating TR workouts to each ride it would). After listening to the podcast and reading around on the forum I decided that the best way forward was to answer the ride surveys honestly and accept the suggested adaptations (regardless if I felt that it might make the next workout unproductive/too easy). It took a couple of weeks but by doing this after the initial regular adaptations, the system settled down and my training plan really started taking off.

It was a completely foreign way of doing things for me but after deciding to trust in AT and accepting it’s suggested adaptations, it just started working.

Just my 2c after 2 months back on TR… hope it helps

If you hover with the mouse over the PL bars, the pop-up will give you the reason of the last change. Maybe that can help?

Yes, all the ones I haven’t yet worked against say ‘starting progression level’. Perhaps after a workout all your existing progression levels are supplied as parameters to the AT process, not just the ones targeted in that workout. That would explain it.

Anyway, you can just manually pick a harder workout and as soon as you complete that workout, the PLs will be updated to that level.

You will have to do a sweet spot workout to get an accurate progression level for sweet spot. The fact that you did a VO2max workout doesn’t impact sweet spot. Rating a workout as hard or moderate will normally not affect your progression level either. It might affect the ramp rate of your upcoming workouts, but your PL will be adjusted to the PL of the completed workout.

Yep all makes sense. It looks like somehow it inferred I was between the 4-5 mark for most of the PLs when I first built the plan, but has then reverted to the untested 1 levels. I’ll just ignore the suggested level 1.1 workouts and do something that looks roughly achievable based on my experience as each PL comes up in a workout, and let AT take over once there’s some proper numbers in each PL.

Thanks for all the input.

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That is what I would do as well.

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