AT: Easy vs Moderate vs Hard vs ... [Pass / Success Survey Responses]

I’m on a trip and was getting bored so I put together a little visual of what I think the survey responses are. Hopefully the TrainerRoad team has a blog post coming with a more descriptive piece on these responses. As far as I know this is what I understand each response is. Thoughts?


I would use the descriptions Ivy uses in this post (the parts in parentheses). Also, I’m not understanding the use of an endurance ride for your “Very Hard” example.

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I was going for a more visual representation of the levels with the survey and how well you stay on target with the interval. I get what you’re saying tho

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Can people try the following and report what PL behavior they get?

Do a workout that should result in a PL increase, but skip the post-workout survey. And see if the workout and your career page show PL increases (assuming you successfully completed the workout).

I did a workout tonight that gave me PL increases for both Sweet Spot and Tempo without the use of the post-ride survey. I’m experiencing an issue at the moment where my post-ride survey only gets sync’d if I quit the TR app and the relaunch it. Which is the only way I came across this PL behavior.

What I’d really like to see is if for people who would have rated a workout as Very Hard or All Out if they get PL increases if they don’t rate the workout. Or if TR AT is somehow independent of the survey response determining whether or not to increase PL from workouts.

As a reminder, you have 7 days from completing a workout to be able to complete the survey. So once you see if TR AT is giving you PL increases without filling in the survey, feel free to fill it out.

I have been struggling to understand how to rate my workouts in the survey but this really helps. Would be greater if there was a ? Button or ‘score explanation’ on the survey that you could click to get a pop up with these explanations.

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YES!! I’m pushing for there to be more of these in-app help features so that athletes wont have to hunt down these explanations on their own. Thanks for the feedback, this helps!

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Adding my latest version of my refined list:

Created based upon Ivy’s post above. I tried to make a very simple, bullet point style list that is easy to read and consider right upon completion of the workout. If 3 of the bullet points fit your feelings, that is likely the appropriate survey response.

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This list is really useful.

Worth noting that a lot of the prescribed workouts are supposed to be hard, depending on where you are in the plan - otherwise what would be the point! So there’s no shame in saying a workout was hard.

I usually do LV plans (topped up with TrainNow/outside rides) and that pretty much means that all 3 prescribed TR workouts are hard and AT seems to expect that (it doesn’t try and back off the progressions or anything). Looking at MV/HV plans, some of the workouts are going to be Achievable (you can’t do 7 progressive workouts per week :wink: ) and it seems logical that if you’re rating the easier ones Hard that it might try and back you off still.

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Picking up from this, I want to point out something I find as a bit funny and even odd with the ratings. For the “1 - Easy” rating, Ivy said the following:

  • For context, this should feel like a little bit more than a recovery ride

If the “1 - Easy” is “more than a recovery ride”, what do we rate an actual Recovery ride? :stuck_out_tongue:

  • Kinda joking, but kinda serious. If we don’t have a rating that is really equivalent to “Recovery”, it seems like the scale is a bit shifted (something I have argued for much of this discussion). Maybe Recovery rides are such a small aspect of the TR philosophy, that it is fine to lump them in with the rest of the “Easy” survey responses?

Either way, it seems a little off to me to have the wording supplied that implies a true Recovery is lower than the lowest rating we are offered. Any thoughts from the team on my silly diversion, @IvyAudrain?

For reference, here is what Nate gave us in the introduction 6 months ago:

After your workout, what we need is a 1 through 5… “How hard… or how did this effort feel?”. And this is, umm… it’s very simple. Think of it as RPE [Rate of Perceived Exertion], and this isn’t relative to that effort. This is just how hard did it feel.

An Aerobic ride is usually pretty Easy (1) or Moderate (2).
And a VO2 Max ride is usually Hard (3), Very Hard (4) or All Out (5).

There is more to it than this that is great to listen (and I’m out of time for writing the content right now). It gives context as to what TR is expecting to learn from the surveys, and a bit on how they act upon the results.


Quick note: I moved about 20 comments (right below this post) into this thread from the AT intro thread, because they were directly related to Surveys and Responses. It gets a bit messy to read, but that’s the best I can do for merging comments at this time.

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Sorry for not searching the answer myself - was there conclusion if you should rate the workout in terms how you have felt or how it felt in relation to ayour assumptions how the workout will be? (For example if I thought that workout would be hard but it felt easier, even if my real RPE was moderate)? As far as I remember there was a discussion how you should rate the workouts.

From my limited time with the AT beta i think the response form is one thing that needs and overhaul asap. Thinking it should be like: How did this training feel:

1: A lot easier then expected
2: Easier then expected
3: As expcted
4: Harder then expected
5: Too hard

For me, basically every endurance ride shorter then 1,5/2 hours feels easy. But i don’t think that’s the correct response. Most of the VO2 workouts are hard ,but when you select hard, it seems the system thinks it was too hard.

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Ok, so as expected is the correct answer. It is another layer of confusion then :slight_smile:

I think the conclusion was to not take expectations into account, but I may have missed some discussion: AT: Easy vs Moderate vs Hard vs ... [Pass / Success Survey Responses] - #60

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I don’t have time to search right now, but I need to head of misconception that is showing here.

It is NOT about expectations in any way. It is purely about how it FELT.

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Its buried in the other thread, but they specifically chose NOT to include expectations. Can’t remember if they gave a reason, but they think the “Feeling” aspect is correct for their needs.

No, it’s not. He is mistaken.

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Much appreciated for getting the link.

It’s important people read it and kill the “expectation” aspect, because it is incorrect.

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@jarsson, @PhydomiR

As @mcneese.chad wrote: rate the workout on how it felt. NOT on how it felt in relation to your expectation. Like others on this thread, I find Chad’s table and Ivy’s notes really useful.

The issue with expectations is this: I do a stretch VO2max workout. If I am sensible, I expect it to be “All Out”. Suppose that on this day, I manage to complete the workout [perhaps after 200g caffeine, 200g/h of sugar,…]. But I am all out. I get the survey your propose, and complete it as you propose: “As expected”. What is AT to make of this? It has no information about how you actually felt about your workout – whether it was easy for you [so AT should raise your rate of progression] or whether you were actually on your limit [and so a pause in the rate of progression is in order].

On the same day, Chad does the same workout. For him it is a stretch too. But he’s done it before and thinks it is much easier than it looks. And anyway, he’s good at VO2max efforts. So he expects to be able to complete it, though it will be hard. He completes, though he is surprised that it is very hard, gets the survey and rates the workout “Harder than expected”. What’s AT to do now? The sensible thing – from AT’s point of view – is to give Chad a smaller increment in progression than me.

The difference in our ratings is due to the difference in our expectations rather than the difference in our performance. Chad does the workout more easily than me “Very hard” rather than “All out”, but because of his expectations is forced to rate it harder than I do. The problem is that rating against expectations makes the answer to the survey reflect two variables – our expectations and our RPE – rather than one.

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The survey isn’t really asking the right question IMO since most of us would mark a VO2max workout as “Hard” or “Very Hard” but according to TR the response should be along the lines of:

Easy - yep, could do that in my sleep.
Moderate did OK but wasn’t pushed.
Hard struggled a bit
Very Hard should never have started it.

So if you want (positive) adaptations then the only responses are “Easy” or “Moderate”, everything else will lead to things being scaled back.