Just here to +1 this idea and agree it would be awesome to get a bit more guidance on what’s happening with the suggestions. Even the red light / yellow light feature could be vastly more useful if it explained why. Something like “we gave you a red day because you did a 250 tss day, which is higher than your rolling average tss of whatever”. Same with the adaptations. It could say something like “since you said yesterday’s Sweet spot was extremely difficult, we are going to back down the intensity until you’re better recovered and adapted”.
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I think a key part of the “why” is the perceived difficulty rating in post workout survey. I always overthink the surveys and it doesn’t help that Zwift asks for rating on 10 point scale which TR coverts to 5 point scale. I wonder if showing the expected difficulty (assuming this is something AI model is estimating) would help get better survey results. If TR is trying to give me a “hard” workout, then I would like to give feedback of the form “for a hard workout” I perceived it was “too hard”, “just right”, or “not hard enough”. But the blind number rating throws me off. Did I just do a 7 difficulty and rate it an 8 or was it an 8 difficulty workout and I rated it 7?
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I really hope the system isn’t this sensitive. If it is, then ugh garbage out
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Both are roughly the same TiZ but how they get there is a bit different. This can help with the perceived effort.
My speculation based off what i’ve heard from multiple TR podcasts, the TR model tries it’s best to not overload and burn you out (red light green light). So, at times, it may try to slow your progression down so you can continue to hit workouts in the future. Time and time again, people try to do too much too quickly and, therefore, slowing the ramp rate down allows them to do MORE over the long run by sacrificing the short run.
You can’t “cram” fitness in endurance sports. The mindset has to shift into, “what program will set me up to do the most work over an entire year”
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100% agree with the general sentiment (people need to think in terms of years, not months), but there are multiple moving parts and goals that are sometimes at odds with each other. If the only goal is the build fitness year after year, you would approach that very differently vs. wanting to build long term fitness while also trying to optimize near term race results. While those 2 objectives complement each other in a lot of ways, you can’t truly optimize both objectives at the same time. And you can “cram” for some types of fitness to an extent, particularly the more anaerobic stuff. That type of work isn’t doing much to build the long-term aerobic engine, but can be key to results for an specific event. But yeah, people wanting a plan to get fast in a few months or a single season better have really good parents or already have the aerobic engine built through another endurance sport.
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I get what you’re saying, but I also have not had any yellow or red light days in the past few weeks, which just adds to my confusion, and, hence, why I feel the why for adaptations would be helpful to know.
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Consider this another +1 for this suggestion. When I get them, I also would like to know why adaptations are what they are.
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Personally, I wouldn’t sweat a WL change unless it’s at least a 0.6 change. The WL assignments frankly aren’t that precise. Some of TR’s workouts have been adjusted in their rating a fair amount over time as users found issues with them.
Also, it’s not the end of the world to do slightly easier training here and there.
I also wouldn’t get worked up about multiple changes to the plan as long as none of them are drastic (see above criteria). Who cares if it made a 0.2 WL change? Accept it or don’t, it’s not going to matter much.
I agree it can be confusing if you try to understand the why. But apply some basic logic on the practical effect most of these changes have and you’ll see it’s splitting hairs.
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