Rating Workout Difficulty using AT System

As I was listening to the AT podcast, I was really struck by the idea of structuring training based on workout difficulty. AT will provide your progressions when it rolls out, but in the meantime, I was thinking of playing around with my plans/workouts to balance pushing my fitness without overly building fatigue (just starting a modified SPB now).

Couple thoughts/questions that I thought of, curious what others think of the concept:

  1. How are the current plans constructed in terms of the workout breakdown between achievable/progression/breakthrough (apologies if I’m using the wrong terms)? Tuesdays definitely seem like a progression workout, others might vary based off plan/stage.

  2. How many workouts per week do you want to push above your current level? Thinking that you’d want at least one workout above current levels to be goal specific- i.e. a hard threshold workout for sustained power, VO2 max for short power/crit, etc.

  3. The above point probably ties into whether you’re using polarized/pyramidal/threshold distribution- i.e. polarized you’d want to push above current fitness 2-3x per week since the rest are easy, whereas pyramidal/threshold may only be 1x progression workout since the other workouts add more fatigue (even if they are achievable)

  4. How often would you want to try a “breakthrough” type workout? Thinking this would be maybe more like a race day or event, even a self-created challenge. This might also depend on the demand- disaster would take a much greater toll than a one hour VO2 max or TT for example.

Maybe (ok not maybe, definitely) I’m way over-analyzing, but at minimum, I want to use the WO notes to record whether a workout felt achievable/progression/breakthrough after. Even without ML, it seems like there’s some use of this classification to balance fitness and fatigue and figure out your progressions.