Two weeks ago, my VO2 max workout was Bird -1 (Level 4.7). I scraped through, reducing the intensity on one interval, and rated it Very Hard.
Last week, my VO2 max workout was Gendarme +2 (Level 4.6). I was on the fence between hard and very hard, but I felt good later in the day and went with Hard.
This week, I was prescribed Bird (Level 5.4). I thought this was insane. I did the workout as prescribed mainly to prove to the system that it was being overly optimistic. But, to my surprise, the workout felt…good? I had to concentrate, and I would only have been able to do one more set, but this was really a well-tuned challenge for me.
I wish more people would take this attitude rather than questioning what the AI is doing, it gives you the right workout every time, if everyone followed it like this they would improve quickly
Curious what others think about this. Not saying you are right or wrong, but I would have rated this All Out, as that is my understanding of the rating system at this time. Then in the follow-up survey I would indicate intensity was too high (I forget the exact verbiage used).
I believe the AI is looking at the work done and your rating for the work done, rather than prescribed. Hence it would be best to rate the work done and not the work prescribed. @eddie is that a reasonable interpretation?
Example: I had a mechanical and trainer was playing up so I rated at the work done (I think was moderate) rather than prescribed which would have been the suggested hard. I noticed that my future workouts only changed if I rated it hard, which tells me it was based on the work I did. The subsequent workouts were all fine and in line with AI suggestion.
To me this should be a “Maximum Effort”. Noting that OP described it as scraping through, this fits well with how TR describes a maximum effort rating.
This ride was extremely difficult. It pushed you well beyond your abilities and took a massive amount of energy and focus to complete. You’ll feel like you barely made it to the end of this ride, and that you had to pull out every mental trick in the book to finish. If you had to pause during a workout to catch your breath or adjust the power demand down, the workout was likely a max effort.
It’s an interesting question. I don’t typically think I am the sort of person capable of going “all out.” I reduced the intensity of interval 14 out of 15 to 95%, which was just enough of a [probably mental] reprieve to allow me to bump it back to 100% for the last one and finish feeling like I could have managed a couple more. To me, that’s Very Hard.
Had I left it at 100% for that 14th interval, I am confident I would have muddled through, possibly with erg death spiral and some puking. And that would have been “all out.”
I believe it should have been all out, or max effort (forget the exact wording) because they turned down the intensity. Once you take any kind of bail out it’s all out.
Your scheduled workout is 2 × 20 at 100% of FTP. Let’s also say there’s a 3 minute interval at 100% to finish off the warmup.
Between the warmup and the first interval you decide that instead of doing them at 100% you want to take a couple of percent off, just based on the feel of the 3 minute effort.
You finish the workout at 98%. RPE for the first interval is 7/10. 8/10 for the second one. Exactly where they should be, right?
How are we rating the workout for RPE?
For me - that’s not a maximum effort or all out. That’s either hard or very hard.
To be honest now you’re making me question the way I’ve been doing it. I’ve had a couple workouts in the last few months where I would barely get through the first few intervals and I was worried I wouldn’t be able to finish so I would turn an interval down a couple percent and maybe if I felt better I would slowly increase it back to 100%. I rated these as Max Effort because I took the bail outs and I thought I heard Jon say that’s what you’re supposed to do, but the work I actually did was Very Hard.
My view has been to try to keep the ratings simple. Say how the workout felt. Try to be consistent [and honest] with yourself. Don’t overthink it. And all those guidelines you and others have created exist because it turns out that it’s very tricky for your user group to keep things simple.
I will say, though, that having the predictor tell me how I’m expected to feel does get in my head sometimes.
I have had this same experience as well. I am doing MUCH better on my threshold workouts especially and no longer dread them. It took about 6 weeks for things to settle in a bit and for me to actually realize the workouts were in fact the right workouts for me at that specific time.
Yeah. I don’t think you’re alone in that self rating is not the easiest. I have found using metrics like HR really help guide me on my rating. Also… I also had my first workout of the block where I had to decrease the power to finish (lots of work to do in the muscle endurance area ) and I rated it very hard. Totally agree … according to definition on the website I probably should have marked it max-effort, but it doesn’t feel like max-effort because I still had gas in the tank. Just not enough to do it RX. Either way, I got the struggle survey. Filled it out and all my workouts / ai-predictor was adjusted accordingly.
Long story short, probably matters less than we think. The important part was that we’re all working the right zone
Since most all TR workouts are done on Zwift, do you still get the “Struggle Survey”?
I’ll add that this year I found TR AI has surprised me with prescribing workouts that are just about spot on. That was not the case a few years ago, so well done TrainerRoad.
) and I rated it very hard. Totally agree … according to definition on the