In fact, that’s what i’m planning to do; seems like AT at this point does not support outside rides too well. So i’ll do LV on TR and outside rides on ‘rest’ days; i suppose the plan would adapt better this way.
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If you’ve a Garmin head unit then AT does work but don’t expect adaptations after every workout. I’ve not seen the downward adaptations that others have, no idea why, I either get no adaptations or something slightly harder - usually around +1.0 above what I’ve been doing.
I do LV plans mostly because of my age (62) and I need some recovery time and, as you and @HLaB say, it lets you do “freeform” rides at the weekend. You can still associate such rides with workouts so AT has something to work with.
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Slightly off topic but I have noted comments about marking rides as ‘easy’. A ride I complete successfully gets marked as ‘moderate’. I do get adaptions from that.
Don’t think any of the tougher rides could be said to be easy IMHO. Doable yes.
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A workout gets an easy from me when I feel like I could do that workout again, right away. So that basically only 1/1,5h endurance rides.
You also shouldn’t expect adaptations after every ride. The plans have progression build in so they get harder no matter what. Upping the difficulty early on in a plan could get back to bite you near the end.
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I think people expect too much. AT is right now is like +1 or -1. It’s not gonna make big jumps to cover a gap. At least not as quickly as you want. It’s also limited to going up no higher than the highest workout you’ve completed recently, for probably good reason. You should expect that AT will help you pick a workout, but it won’t replace you making your own decisions, particularly when you feel there is a wide gap to fill. It’s very simple to use the Alternates to find a stretch workout and then complete that and let that be your new baseline.
I’ve had really good results using AT, I’ve been on it since May - hit a load of all time power PRs on both days of my A event last weekend.
Generally speaking the adaptations I have been offered have been spot on and it’s helped me be really consistent, which is where I think the gains have come from.
There have been a couple of times when the PL of a planned workout looks low compared to what I know I can achieve - and that’s generally been when I have been hitting those zones a lot outside which isn’t accounted for (not very well - you can manually associate a TR ride with any outdoor ride and get the PL credit, but I don’t usually bother unless I have been very structured with my outdoor ride). So in that case I just used Alternates to sub in a workout with a higher PL, then once I hit that workout it updates the relevant PLs and the following plan workouts get updated to match.
AT can only “see” what you do either directly in TR or that is associated with a TR workout, so if you do a load of e.g., Sweetspot rides outside of that, then it’s not going to be able to take account of it yet (I understand it’s in their development plan).
The main issues I have had have been Plan Builder related rather than AT specifically. It really needs an option to “force” it to treat a week as a recovery week (I had one case with a week off where I did some nice easy rides, and came back straight into another recovery week…).
I’m taking a few weeks off being on a plan, but I’m going to start again from 1st Nov only a plan which will probably take me all the way through to the end of next September.
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Update here:
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I’m using Plan Builder for a February event and AT is working nicely. I’m also adding in racing and strength training so I think erring on the side of easy and slowing building up is the safer approach. Which is what AT is doing for me.
Question though: I’ve had some workouts that were too easy and I’ve bumped up the intensity to where I feel it should be. When I complete the survey, should I base my response on how the original workout felt, or on my modifications? Like if I feel what should be a hard workout feels moderate and I bump it up to the point where it’s hard, should I then answer hard? Or moderate?
The questions that haunt me during long boring intervals, lol!
Respond how you felt for what you actually did.
The better way to do this is instead of bumping up the intensity is to use the alternates function to find a harder workout, and do the harder workout. This also removes your quandary, as you are rating the actual workout “as is”.
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Im also in doubt, but i have to say, its my 2nd week.
My sweet spot pl is 5.5. Why Do i have a sweet spot workout with 4.1 tomorrow?
I had to change nearly every workout this week to have the feeling " i did something productive"
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The way the plans are designed now Sundays will always be easier sweet spot workouts below one’s progression level. The plans are no longer stacking back to back tough sweet spot workouts on the weekend like in the old version of sweet spot base
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Thanks for your answer!
I hope so. Maybe the Rating with words (moderate, Hard,…) is not optimal or its a language Problem or very subjective. It feel Like all the workouts are to easy and i dont have the knowledge to tweak the Plan to an optimum.
Greets from Austria!
For comparison, I found the Plan Builder set up to be wholly intuitive.
Erm, my weekend sessions are the hardest. So not the same for all of us 
New to TR (3mo) and am really not satisfied w AT. Build phase is so easy I’ve lost fitness. I keep rating workouts as easy but they’re not getting harder. FTP tests come up and start me w ridiculously low FTP, so that I need to suffer thru 35’ to get a score that’s probably a bit low since that’s a long test. Doing rides outside don’t seem to count towards TR fitness, so they’re just making my training sessions easier, I think.
How do I adjust the training to increase difficulty in a rational way?
Are the original plans a better option?
I know lots of folks really like TR and improve, so thanks for any advice!
Chad is right, support is a good place to start, curious if they’ll advise your FTP is set too low based upon when your last Ramp Test was, or if AI FTP Detection isnt effectively considering all your ride data? They’ll check it out.
Unstructured outside rides contribute to your Progression Levels, but not to your potential adaptations. This is the current highest priority for our developers (Levels V2).
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why not just manually increase your FTP by a margin you think is accurate and then do a ramp test - see what it does? Or just manually increase your FTP and ignore the ramp and do some workouts to see how it feels - AT will likely kick in more effectively, and worst case you can get an AI FTP estimate 14 days later…
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If you’re going for ~35mins on the ramp test, your FTP should have gone up ~50% from the original estimate, wait a day or two until you feel fresh-ish and try again. That should give you a bit better estimate I would think. But also, do what Ivy says and contact support, they’ll have the best info and are super responsive and helpful.
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Thanks for tips, everyone.
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