From the Introducing Adaptive Training forum thread that announced AT:
So yeah, while some will take offense at the term, AT is a ‘hack’ to work around:
- Ramp Testing as a single metric to base training on, if FTP estimate is too high/low
- Above threshold work that must be individualized and treated independent of FTP (Coggan iLevels from 6 years ago)
- Further customize workouts in terms of time-in-zone and number of intervals, based on the athlete’s fitness and ability to recover
That doesn’t make AT bad. And to be clear - you don’t need AT or ML to do the items above. What AT promises is to make it as easy as following a plan in exchange for a subscription fee. That is exactly what some people want, they have no real interest in self-coaching or hiring a coach.
But that doesn’t make AT better than other options. I get better results following a different approach to base, and TR doesn’t offer that approach, so why would I use TR base plans? AT isn’t going to give me another approach, it uses the TR approach and adapts workouts based on my fitness/feedback.
SUF did add support for Android, I’d say that was their first priority. I’ve no plans to use SYSTM, will be interesting to see what happens over the next year.