It’s been a while since I’ve been on a TR plan, but I’m on masters plan for general fitness. Just finished the base phase last week and my build phase is scheduled to start tomorrow and TR is kicking me off with Kaiser -1, a 6.8 rated VO2 workout? Is this typical, or a bug with my plan?
I would say it’s personal, not typical. I.e. it’s seeing something in your training history that makes it think you can handle that workout. I would trust it and give it a go. I’ve seen similarly big leaps when training a zone that I haven’t touched for a long time and so where my Workout Level is down at 1 or close to it, and they’ve worked out OK. Especially VO2 - I’ve always been pretty good at those workouts relative to other zones, in the past I’ve had to manually pick a Breakthrough or Not Recommended workout to jump quickly up to something challenging, recently TR is much better at making that jump for me.
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What your history like? TR AI now progresses you forward to the ability you’ve shown recently, rather than having you waste time on workouts that are way too easy for you. If you’ve shown recently a good performance in that zone, its not a bug.
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Until this past month I haven’t used TR in over a year. I also didn’t ride as much as normal this past summer for it to think I’ve got great high end fitness. And there’s no VO2 in the base phase, that’s what’s confusing me. I’ll give it a shot and see what happens lol, it just seems odd
This was not typical until near the end of last year. They made some changes under the hood . There are other posts relating to this change. I believe they want to make the hard workouts harder. Depending on how you rate the workout the plan might change your easy workout coming up.
Yep, it seems like everyone is on the right track here.
We don’t simply base your workouts on your Athlete Levels anymore. It’s much more complex than that.
@jaylikesbikes, give Kaiser -1 a shot and let me know how it goes.
A level 1.0 VO2 workout would likely be far too easy for you, and we’re much better and getting close to the ideal workout for your current fitness right from the gun now.
Don’t be afraid of higher Workout Levels! If, for any reason, you feel that the workout we prescribed was way too hard after giving it a go, let us know. That’s something we’d like to hear about.
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Its looks at all activities now not just TR. Giving it a shot I think is the right track, good luck 
I know this is a hot take for some, but progression levels with vo2 workouts are silly. All someone needs to do a good vo2 workout is a) figure out a range of maximum power from 3-4-5min, b) do repeats of 3-4-5min in such a manner to get 15-25min of interval time and try to hit the number you have from your power curve, but chances are you won’t be able to hit that every time (I know I don’t) c) take as much rest as you need between intervals, it could be anywhere from 1-3times interval duration. That’s it!
I think this approach is better than TR’s because a) you’re not bound to whatever percentage of ftp they indicate, I know people who can hit 120% for a long time, whereas I struggle doing 110-115% for too long. Now, I don’t have TR so I don’t know where the workout you reference fits in with all of this, my advice if you aren’t doing the following would be turn off erg mode and just go as hard as you can on each. the goal with vo2 stuff isn’t to hit a power but to hit a physiological state
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Hotter take, progression levels wouldn’t be needed at all if their plans followed simple logical progression. SS at 2x20, 3x15, 3x18, 3x20……Threshold at 3x8, 3x10, 3x12, 3x15……
I am a recent resubscriber, and it is good so far. But it really could be less complicated by more than half. But novelty sells I guess.
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completely agree, I’ve been working on a “workout recipe” thingy to help highlight to people how few workouts people actually need. and you hardly need progression levels for these things. I think the overcomplication is, to some degree, a feature, because overcomplicating creates dependence on a platform. But I think a lot of people who claim they need an app to plan out training are just lead to believe the process is more complicated than it really is
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If you don’t over complicate training you can’t make people dependent on your product.
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Yeah, but people have shown over and over that they don’t want to go full manual with training starting with the fact that they don’t like to test their FTP. Second, they don’t seem to be able to monitor training load and rest when needed - remember all the people burning out? Thus TR has designed all sorts of guard rails in their system because many seem to want or need them.
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And I have to admit, I like variety. Riding the bike and especially trainer day after day can get pretty repetitive, I’m happy to do different types of workouts and it helps keep my motivation up. Even though I know that physiologically I can get the stimulus required from very few different types of workouts, the brain needs a little more.
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I think this is exactly why Athlete/Workout Levels are useful.
That is one possible goal commonly associated with one type of VO2 Max workout. Not all workouts in the VO2 Max training zone are designed to improve stroke volume. I wish we could change the name of that training zone! 
Similarly, Threshold is a training zone, but not every single workout in that training zone is to simply sit at your FTP for 40 minutes.
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Just finished it. It was definitely challenging but I completed it. I guess the lesson here is to just trust the process lol
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Training is allowed to be fun. Complexity, for me, adds fun. So, I don’t like it just because it’s more complex, rather because that’s what I need to remain interested.