Sometime I have the need/want to add/plan manual workouts in between training plans. However I would really like it if those workouts could be included in the adaptive training and receive suggested adaptations.
As an example if I plan a Vo2 Max productive workout 2 weeks in the future and in the runup to that I increase my Vo2 Max level making the workout “achievable” instead of “productive”. In that case I would like to get the suggested adaptation to increase the level of my planned workout.
TR might well say, not unreasonably, that when AT adapts a workout it does so within the context of the plan in which it sits, and if there’s no plan, there’s no context. This points to AT doing more than just following a simple logic of “adjust workout difficulty to Productive”.
However… I’ve long thought that workouts placed on the Calendar could all have a property/attribute, “Adaptable”, specifying whether AT can adapt that workout or not. If that property was enabled for a given workout, then:
- for workouts in a plan, things would operate as currently, ie. with the plan context helping to determine how AT adapts that workout;
- for Workouts not in a plan, then some simple logic would be followed, such as to adapt the workout to be minimally Productive (ie. one having a WL just into the Productive range).
This might be a moderately useful feature IMO, helping to ensure that workouts manually added to a plan at some earlier date could, as the workout’s scheduled day approaches, be adjusted to a “default” difficulty that reduces your need to look for Alternates.
A downside is that stuff that’s simple to envisage and describe like this always become much more complicated to implement in production-ready software once you begin considering all the nuances and edge cases of how exactly it should function, requiring orders of magnitude(!) more time and resources to get them 100% ready. All this detracts from delivering other features that might have a higher priority…
1 Like