As a long-time user (4 years) this is great because honestly the old plans were stale and not very inspiring as of late. My general observation after reading thru most of the comments is this - changing your mindset is often hard and a huge leap of faith but a leap well worth taking. Thank you @Jonathan, @Nate_Pearson and the rest of the trainerRoad crew (I did this purposely for @mcneese.chad 
) for changing your mindset in how you approach and craft plans.
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sarcasm warning I’m insulted! TrainNow is recommending super low level stuff for me right now. I’m getting the best power numbers I’ve ever seen in the last couple weeks of training. Boooooooooooooo!!!
switching to serious voice
Actually I’m wondering if it is recommending workouts with easier difficulty ratings right now because I did a tough attacking workout this morning. So if I tell the app I want to train again today, it’s going to recommend something much easier that won’t burn me out, right?
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@Jonathan maybe I’m reading it wrong… but think I have the same question. I accidentally deleted my Plan I created with PB. So just tossed in Sustained Power Build for the next 8 weeks. Will AT apply here, or only if I did a full PB creation?
AT needs Plan Builder at the present time. Manually added plans are not functional with AT right now.
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I would like to keep doing the TR Training Plans that I’ve been doing for the last 6 years. I benefit being able to compare my performance and progression from year to year. With the completely revised Plans, it seems I will not be able to do that except by building my own plans manually populating my calendar with the workouts from the “legacy” plans. Some use FTP results to measure their progression, but I use my performance on some key workouts, e.g. Mary Austin, to assess myself. Is there a way to access the “legacy” plans.
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I’ve just updated my plan and i now have up to 4 work outs per day!! I’m guessing this is because I had moved some of the days around but am now wondering the best way to get back to something sensible. Do I have to delete and plan and start again, backdating the start date of the plan? I’m hoping there’s an easier fix!
Yeah, unfortunately, if you shuffle workouts around on the calendar, that “breaks them out” of the Plan Builder association. As such, it may be necessary to delete your current PB and the remaining workouts that got broken.
Maybe before trying that, you can possibly identify the stragglers, and just delete them manually. Depends a bit on how many times and workouts you moved, as to what might be easier.
Outside of that, emailing support@trainerroad.com for their review might be the best first step, to see if they have anything better to suggest.
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Thanks for your help… Unfortunately I’ve had to delete and start again… hopefully the upgrades will be worth it though! 
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@jjmc , the revised plans appear to progress each energy system by 0.5 +/- 0.1 each week. For example, Sustained Power Build Threshold workouts on Thursdays are 4.0, 4.4, 4.8 whereas the Saturday VO2Max is 4.8, 5.4, 6.0 and the Sunday Sweet Spot is 3.0, 3.6, 4.1.
As I understand how TR implemented AI/ML (and I’m not in the beta) your subjective feedback at the end of a workout will combine with how well you achieved it to accelerate or slow down the default progression. So, if you nail a 3.0 Sweet Spot workout and mark it as easy your next one will almost certainly be more than 0.5 +/- 0.1 higher. Whereas if you fail a workout and tell the system it was too difficult then your progress will (may) backtrack. If you complete a workout but really struggled (and tell the system) then you should still progress but more slowly (maybe 0.2 or 0.3).
@Jonathan, @IvyAudrain, please correct me where I’m wrong but at it’s most basic operation (and I recognize it is way more complicated) this is how I believe AT to work in general. Thanks!
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I’m not in AT either, so it is up to me to adapt the plans. But I have no insight on how hard the workout should be.
That’s a pretty solid summary, especially for a non-AT user, well done! 
For sure not a new problem. What is new is that for the old plans I had experience with plus lots of time spent on the podcasts to guide me in adapting them.
There is info to help us adapt before full access to AT, we just don’t have access to it yet.
When possible and filled out, reading the specific info about the workout is valuable. It often gives some context to the workout ahead and what it might feel like if your progression lines up with the effort.
I have not dug into the hundreds of new workouts to know if they all got the basic info like the old ones. But hopefully they will get that if they don’t already have it.
- Note, I am not talking about workout instructions that show during the workout, but the ones on the workout description page, and visible when you launch a workout in the app.
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Yeah. I just applied the updated plan this afternoon after the workout was complete. So what I’m seeing now should be factoring in this mornings workout.
Well, if it makes you feel any better I’ve been handpicking all my workouts for years. 
Great breakdown!
This is only partially correct. In some cases an energy system will trend at a higher or lower rate, depending on the goal of the plan in relation to that energy system.
Once AT gets factored in, it gets further individualized.
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The progression rates of the plans are based off of data at scale and our individual insights from analyzing the data and having experience with this system. A progression rate of .3-.7 week over week for a given energy system is achievable and productive, but in some cases higher or lower rates are justified, depending on the goals of that plan as they relate to a specific energy system.
Yes, AT will further individualize this among other things, but the progressions seen in the updated plans aren’t generic – they are data-backed as being what leads to consistent improvement and sustainable gains.
This is why we rebuilt these plans!
Figuring out ramp rate is tough, which is why we have developed our ML and AT systems to help solve this in a data-driven way. Give the ramp rates of the new plans a shot but make sure you either take a ramp test first or just jump in within a .3-.7 range of recent workouts you’ve done.
We’re making great progress on AT development and yes, it does handle this automatically. But for now, having Workout Levels and following the approach I outlined above will make the adjustment and testing process much easier.
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I’ve been a lurker on the TR forum for about six months now, and finally came across the post that prompted me to join the discussion… so exciting! 
First off, major kudos to the TR team for having developed (and continuing to develop) an awesome training platform. It’s exciting to see TR leverage ML/AI to further improve the training outcomes of its users. Overall, I’m very optimistic about TR’s growth as a platform, and I’m constantly impressed by the amount of support that the TR team offers to its community! Keep it up, TR!
A prelude to my upcoming question:
- I understand that AT will combine workout completion/compliance with user prompts/feedback at the end of each session (e.g., did that workout feel manageable or were you suffering?) to dynamically adjust one’s training plan. This will ensure that a user is in the optimal place to achieve greater physiological adaptations without overtraining.
- I also agree with the thought that it is not always better to train harder—sometimes, less is more!
However, I think there is some concern among a specific group of users with regards to the updated training plans. In particular, I’m thinking of users who meet the following criteria:
- They aren’t currently using AT, and instead are using ‘static’ training plans
- They have been at/near 100% compliance with their previous (“more difficult”) TR training plans
- They have been seeing positive gains using the old plans and see no reason to “fix things if they aren’t broken”
@Jonathan For users who fall into that group, how would you convince us that switching to the newly-updated plans will yield equal (or greater) training benefits than the plans they’ve replaced?
You mentioned in earlier replies that you’re “confident we’ll have better performance with these new plans” and that “you bet 100% the new plans will get us even further than before.” I’m curious if there’s any data you could share with us (without raising intellectual property concerns, of course! ) on the performance gains that users have made on the updated plans when compared to a control group of users on the old plans? I think that this kind of analysis could go very far in boosting confidence for those users expressing hesitation about the updated plans.
Thanks!
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Count me as one of those users. This is the first year in the past 5 that I’ve completed General Build MV week 1-3 workouts and am now going into week 5 and am really bummed that those workouts are no longer available. I tend to schedule workouts on a weekly basis based on the plan as I need to remain flexible within each week. Please bring back the option to at least use the legacy plans for a little while longer.
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