We’ll be producing more educational content and sharing data over the next few weeks, as I noted in my post above, that will hopefully give you the context and additional info you need to have confidence in the plans. 
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Thanks @Jonathan! I appreciate your transparency and willingness to engage with the community while these changes are implemented. It’s always reassuring to see that you’re out here reviewing our thoughts and feedback. I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s podcast, and will be keeping my eyes peeled for the relevant upcoming content. 
You know—maybe if you guys didn’t make the platform so effective to begin with, then it’d be easier to convince us all to make the switch to the new plans! 
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Thanks Jonathan.
I know I have said lots of critical things in this thread about the new rollout but I want to let everyone at TR including @IvyAudrain @Nate_Pearson even non TR employee @mcneese.chad that I do appreciate everything you guys do. Not all roads are fresh smooth asphalt.
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Thanks for putting this together. Not for the first time, TR have stepped up their communication after the event. I think this aspect needs much better planning. You guys know what this forum is like, save yourselves some work and have the FAQ ready in advance next time! 
(its not hard to guess what people will ask)
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Take this as an FYI for the future: as someone in the AT beta, my custom workouts are being progression level rated, and they do contribute to my progression levels. Note: I’m doing these workouts on my trainer
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As a general side and as TR pushes the concepts of “consistency” and “compliance” harder it would be nice to understand why these are going to help me be a better cyclist?
What in all the analysis has shown that these concepts/metrics are what count?
I’ll be honest, my goals are to get faster with an improved ftp and higher endurance, because that’s what makes the difference in my cycling.
Compliance is not my end goal.
A somewhat flippant example, I could go to a 45 min gym spinning class 3 times a week and be compliant, but I know that wouldn’t let me hit my goals.
Also some failure is not bad. You learn a lot from it.
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I think my main frustration with this change is that TR have have left the user with no choice but to accept the new plan, which feels under hand.
If there had been some warning of these changes people would have had opportunity to make notes of old plans.
Am I willing to adopt a totally new training plan: absolutely yes. However I would like some input as to when that happens and certainly not mid-season!
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Thanks @liamodea
I agree. Also there are other circumstances
- short A races. 10mTT is less that 20 mins for a top TTer. they don’t need to be 8 weeks apart. Likewise for a 25miler 40k, being a short race)
- Season circumstances, when races are scheduled by organisers.
I can see how it makes sense when planning an ironman season, or a long gravel race or multi-day events.
I can see sense in planning a season with A races spread out, but often two big races will come at the end of the year (Tour, Vuelta, Olympics 
)
I would expect that Scheduling and designing a progressive, structured, (with periods), season training plan, is about desiging for the various types of event and their needs. forcing A races 8 weeks aprt seems an arbritrary restriction.
It makes me wonder if the 8 weeks in Plan Builder is about having a specific type of plan, that leads to it, rather than a necessary gap between such races. @Jonathan is this the underlying reason for this?
(PS Part of my problem is the diffculty in being able to understand how changing what I consider to be A races to B races,to accomodate the Plan Builder, actually affects the Plan Builders proposed structure and programme.)
(PPS I really wish I had this in a separate thread)
Thanks @Jonathan Appreciated. I only found your long, detailed and realy informative post accidentally, having arrived lower down this forum. It is really helpful.
It does a great job of explaining things, the progressions, the logic and approach, of both workouts and the new plans. I must admit, in its absence, I had spent quite some time analysing workouts progressions and old plans vs new plans to try and deduce what what going on in order to gain an understanding and confidence in the new plans. (I even have my own spreadsheet of workouts and levels to see where I was). Your piece makes sense and is really helpful. Thanks.
Using TR for me is about a combination of TR’s experience and plans with my own self-awareness and understanding of where I am. I don’t need an external coach. This has worked for me. I want to be confident it will continue to work for me.
I suspect a lot of the concerns (and noise) in this discussion is around people trying to get their heads around the new model, given their trust in, and experience of, in the existing, previous, Training Plans & workouts.
Thanks
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@Jonathan A product suggestion: following your advice to search for workouts with a progression of around 0.5 in existing plans, I am looking for a VO2max duration 1:15-1;30, above 6.8, but lower than 7.5. (higher than Dade+1, lower than Kaiser+2).
However that leads to seemingly hundreds I am not interested in around 6-6.8. They seem to take ages to appear. and I have ro scroll down to get them to list on my PC…
A great improvement would be to be able to search for workouts in a range, eg 6.8 to 7.3. Rather than ticking 6 or 7.
For the suggestions box…
PS I am not looking for people to suggest workouts. This is a product suggestion.
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Even without progression levels I’m loving the noodling around with this workout level data. I always thought VO2 Max was my weakness, but have been doing >6.5 workouts, and highlights how poor my threshold abilities are, 4ish and hence have built a block to work on that. Likin’ it lads!!
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As a cyclist my training is an important part of my life. I know the current plans and had an idea of what plans I would like to follow in the coming years.
Having them completely changed, with no previous warning and without access to the old ones does not feel right.
At least I would like to internalise what the changes are, compare the new plans with the old ones week by week and try to understand the changes and wheter they make sense to me or not.
I can only do this with the plans I have already followed because I have them in my history, but not with the ones I was planning to do in the future. Also, I would like to analyze the new differences between mid and high volume with respect to the old ones.
As much as I trust trainerroad I care and spend too much time cycling so as to follow the plans blindly. I did not follow the old plans to the t either.
If we could at least have a list of workouts per week per phase of the old training plans… I am so frustrated!
Precisely what I have been doing - loads of analysis of my older plans and the progression levels from my Calendar, together with trying to understand what the progressions and new plans entail, their mix of energy levels, how different each are to what I expect, and how I can add what I do outside (off plan) alongside them.
Reading this helped immensley, as well
But as you say, @ncarbayo we have trust and confidence in the existing plns, and we need (to be given) time to rebuild that confidence and trust.
Hard to question consistency as ever being a bad thing. The question on compliance is fair. For sure you can take compliance to the extreme and not get faster. The assumption on why increased compliance will work is fundamentally that those who want to get faster are driven to push themselves hard. So then the goal is to hit the right energy systems for the right amount of time without over reaching. And it is better to do a bit less than do a bit more.
I suspect a great deal of users are gaming the ramp test and getting results that are too high under their typical workout conditions. I also suspect that the plans had too high a ramp rate for people past the early stages of rapid growth. What happens in those scenarios is that people start burning out and failing workouts bad.
I am confident the ramp rates hit the mean better - it is probably too low for novices and too high for advanced cyclists, but not so far off for either.
I suspect though the plans start low in difficulty level because the data is telling the model to needs to start easier than previous plans after an FTP change. That makes a lot of sense, unless you are an athlete that is highly trained and has high progression levels at their current FTP. Here you run into high compliance, but low productivity unless either picking new workouts our inflating the FTP number to try and grow to it. Neither are super ideal and a bit of an experiment for that individual on how best to do it.
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What is the relationship between your new Workout Level metric and Normalized Power (NP), Intensity Factor (IF) and Training Stress Score (TSS). The NP formula also takes into account the variability in power output during a workout. And both IF and TSS formulas both include NP.
I have found that IF is already very good indicator of how deep I’m going to have to go on a workout. As Workout Level is based on a somewhat “mystical” ML algorithm, I am having some difficulty internalizing what it means to me.
I’d read the article, “Introducing Workout Levels”, but it did not give me a very good understanding of how WL relates to IF. Is the relative difficulty of workouts going to be any different looking at WL than looking at IF? I appreciate that TSS does not singularly rank how various workouts compare. However, IF has been a very good comparator for me.
Workout time is a big factor that goes with IF to dictate how hard a workout is.
.9 IF for 30 min vs 60 min vs 90 min are very different levels of difficulty.
Similarly interval vs rest time as well. Many ways to get to the same IF by hitting different energy systems.
So it is a multitude of parameters and if they are using a neural net, then there is no model form to coherently analyze how the parameters affect it without brute force generation of response surfaces. And even then, if the model is nonlinear with a lot of parameters, it is hard to get much from that.
Best is probably to use a sanity check against workouts you are familiar with and compare the workout level. Most of the time I nod in agreement, sometimes I scratch my head. And that does give pause on how much we should trust the model for a while. As pointed out many times, models built from data tells us all kinds of novel things and are incredible tools. They also tells us things that aren’t true sometimes, and it’s important to be mindful of that.
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IF and TSS are part of the same family of training metrics. Listen to the podcast where TR intro AT and all will become clear. One way to think about it is two intervals same TSS and IF, but in one workout you have a 10 min break between them and the other you have 30sec. The latter would have a higher level.
Short version of this thread:
I’m unhappy I’m not in the AT beta, which would change my training plan constantly, and I’m unhappy my training plan has been changed.
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