I had trouble with my Wahoo outside workouts (pauses kicking them into “Struggle”, but it seemed to work overall), and others reported proper function recently (after seeing known bugs prior to that point). I am about 90% sure the Wahoo / TR outside workouts are functioning on the same level as Garmin.
AT and Plan Builder will continue to work together in the future, but you can expect them to constantly improve as well.
For the first issue you posed, we’d love to allow plan comparison in the future.
For the second issue, I think it comes down to picking less of your races as A Races. In a season of racing, you should pick one or two events to serve as your true peak within that series, then let the rest be B Races.
That said, your current approach is also a possible option, but I think you’d be best with pruning back the A Races into B Races.
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Does tr factor in work done under fatigue? As in one major limit of tss is it doesn’t care if you did (just an example with arbitrary numbers) 4 intervals at 80% of your ftp followed by one at 130% vs a workout with the same workout and same rest but the reverse order. The second version you’re doing more work under fatigue so it should both feel harder and have a greater impact on your fitness, tss numbers for both are the same, but does tr rank them differently?
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Hi Jonathon,
I think I’m seeing quite a significant drop in difficulty updating the Olympic Build HV plan, and most of my next week’s workouts don’t have any Variants.
I’ve sketched up a manual version of the AT scoreboard to illustrate 
| Recent Highest | Next workout | |
|---|---|---|
| Endurance | 7 | 4.8 |
| Sweet Spot | 7.8 | 5.5 |
| Tempo | ||
| Threshold | ||
| Vo2 | 5.3 | 3.9 |
Also appreciating that the difficulty score isn’t the only important factor, For example my last endurance ride was a 7 and 2h45, my next is a 4.8 and 3h, so perhaps still a progression.
So my first question, is there any harm in accepting the easier workouts? (I can just follow the new plan)
If yes and there is sense in making the workouts harder manually, how can I do this and keep the workout “in Plan” if there are no variants? E.g. Solferino, Broken Hand, Saddle Mountain, etc.
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What about the 11.1 on Boarstone +1:
Partly because of the Spinal Tap references (love 'em), I’m still unclear if levels max out at 10 and Jonathan was having a little fun by saying “Some of the most challenging workouts can even exceed a Level 10!”
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Seems like they were trying to aim for 10 being max but not everything fit perfectly
I bet you $20 there really is no hard cap at 10. Think about it. It’s always possible to make a harder workout by increasing intensity, duration or number of intervals. There’s no upper limit.
That said, clearly at some point you are exceeding what a bigger and bigger portion of the population can achieve, either due to genetic limits or training quantity. So they have to define 10 somehow that most people can get to a reasonable number (maybe 8?). But they also should let the really strong people not be limited by that mostly artificial choice of the definition of 10.
And the definition of 10 is different for every energy system, as has been said in this thread.
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I can’t speak to that specifically, other than stating I saw others point out some questionable workouts that seemed similar, but had different ratings. That was a bug that Jonathan passed along, so this could be too.
Thank you for the response, much appreciated. Also, a huge “thank you!” to you & the entire TR team for constantly improving & levelling up your product to help us get faster. I’m really looking forward to working with AT when it’s released & but til then, I’ll be using a combo of the new training plans, TrainNow & knowledge of how I respond to different efforts to get ready for Shenandoah Mtn 100 in September.
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hmm, I still see it on the known bugs list as not affecting progression levels, and on TrainNow, it’s back to off the couch workout proposals for me. (anything I’ve done on TR recently has been outside on Wahoo)
But if it’s at least interpreting the outdoor pass/fail better, that is encouraging.
I had been doing everything I could to keep outside stuff within a TR workout framework post-AT announcement even when I wanted something a bit harder / different than the plan but have been less rigorous about it recently as it’s just adding needless complexity / rigidity for those of us with no AT access - just keeping a couple per week totally in the TR framework.
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I’ll put on my math major hat and yes you can cap it at 10, as workouts get harder and harder they asymptotically approach 10 but never reach it.
And of course TR can go the other route, and lump “level breakers” into an 11 and give a playful nod to the Spinal Tap meme 
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There is no cap, but as I stated above, Custom Workout Levels are not calculated in the same way as those in the TR Library and as such, should not be relied upon.
I know they mathematically could, but that would be terrible user experience. People expect a 1-10 scale of difficulty to result in linear increase of difficulty. Nobody expects or wants log type scaling
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I know that there’s no way to make everyone happy and AT solves for a lot of my complaint- but I really don’t like the new iterations of the training plans. To me, they make the workouts too easy without actually addressing the core of TR’s criticisms (e.g. too much total intensity).
What would be much more effective using the new rating system would be to scale the difficulty of the workouts for the target discipline. For example, have one progression or stretch workout per week (maybe either Tues or Sat) that targets the energy system of the plan (e.g. threshold for SPB, VO2/repeatability for crit specialty, etc.) and the others be achievable. For example, as a triathlete, it helps to touch up the VO2 system every week, but you don’t need to be doing load of intervals- so your key workout is some type of threshold repeats during build and tempo/SS during specialty (and those might progress from 6-8 for example), while VO2s would be shorter/easier 3-4 just to touch up the system. This is actually how I’ve structured my own training using the concept of the rating system since the concept was introduced with AT.
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Thank you! Let the search for level busters begin!
tell that to the sound meter app on my mobile (sound pressure level in dB) :metal and the Richter scale, to name a few 
No, I have said to myself that I will not try to do this, but knowing myself this will be my A event this year 
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Having finished SSSBHV, ShortPBHV and now on XCO Specialty I have the same concerns. I’ve never been fitter and approaching race season. With the now lower level workouts I’d suggest (doing this myself) the following.
For z2 just extend the duration or work closer to 75% FTP (increase workout intensity) if the new workouts are too easy.
For VO2 after finishing the intervals and you feel it wasn’t enough, either increase intensity (after first interval) or switch to resistance mode, extend workout and add an extra interval.
I don’t think it’s workable to have a hard cap at ‘10’ for the ‘hardest’ workout, so this makes sense. Look at what happened in Gymnastics judging or rock climbing route difficulty when they set 10 as the hardest/best that will ever happen.
My bet is that that 10 corresponds to approximately the hardest workout that TR will recommend/assign as part of a plan - ie the hardest workout that will typically be encountered using the software as intended.
It is trivial to make super hard and unrealistic workouts - these are only limited by the max time and max %FTP limits that TR has in their workout creator, but this is totally uninteresting from a training perspective. My guess is that the workout level assignment will also likely only work well on workouts that fit certain guidelines (aka workouts that are actually assigned) - hence things like disaster either won’t be classified or the classification won’t be that meaningful.
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I’ve only a few weeks of speciality left, so haven’t adjusted this plan. The next plan I deleted and re-built. From a weak VO2 Max perspective, it looks a lot more doable. Tied to the ramp test though, which underdoes my FTP for threshold/ sweet spot - so feels like a bit of a double whammy, but interested to give it a go (assuming I’m not in adaptive training by then anyway).
10 has been set as a “You can raise your FTP if you can do a 10” or “It’s time to work on something else in the case of a level 10 SS/tempo/endurance workout”.
So you could of course have a workout that is higher than 10, but you don’t really need to do those.
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