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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This was my thinking aswell. But the more I think about it, the more I wonder if that’s such a bad thing. We all want to get better of course, but is it really that bad to do 4.0 threshold workouts for a whole block, not going up. Same goes for sweetspot workouts. You’re still improving and doing work.
Only for VO2 work I would really like to see those numbers go up. Because it’s the difference between 1min, 1,5m, 2mins at vo2 etc.
I’ve marked plenty of workouts as Hard or Very Hard without having my PLs scale back. Sometimes that’s what AT is trying to prescribe for you, sometimes it isn’t. The lack of transparency into what it’s doing and why seems like the bigger issue for most folks. I’m in the minority it would seem of just putting blind faith in the thing and enjoying the journey to newer fitness heights.
I think people are just overthinking it (paging @mcneese.chad for that overthinking meme).
The question is simple: “How hard did this workout feel?” That’s it. Nothing about expectation at all. Just mark how hard it was.
Comparisons across zones isn’t part of this equation and from what I understand the ML is taking the targeted zone into account. So marking a recovery ride or Z2 ride between hard workouts as “Easy” is entirely expected (I believe Nate even mentioned this in the announcement podcast episode).
3 - Hard seems to be the intended outcome for the “target” workouts (some workouts may be deliberately set to Achievable etc depending on what plan you’re on/how many days per week), so that wouldn’t be expected to change the progressions - they’re not meant to be easy. I’ve certainly ranked things 4 - Very Hard and had PLs scaled back, but that was a Stretch workout back in my Build so wasn’t really a surprise.
Seems logical that if AT is prescribing a Stretch workout that it may be expecting you to go for a 4 though.
I know the AT “where should we discuss what” gets really messy. But since we already have a lengthy discussion with official TR support info in a separate thread, can we move all future discussion about surveys and their response over to that existing thread, please?
