The alternates functionality will help you choose a workout of a similar type with the duration you want. But if you do decide to do something else entirely, it will still impact your progression levels, so I don’t think either option will “break” adaptive training. It’s just that alternates makes it easier to stick to your plan’s goal for that day.
As far as I know it doesn’t really matter. Especially if you keep the same workout type. Switch between types might cause AT to change planned workouts in the future (but that’s basically the point of AT).
Curious about this but didn’t want to start a new thread.
I’m wanting to try adaptive training for the first time (been on TR for 7+ years) and I am messing around with plan builder. It is starting me out, on a masters plan, doing sweet spot and threshold. I would like to start out with maybe Tempo and sweet spot but not sure how the adaptive part will handle this. I can’t change workout “type” with the alternates option, so looks like the only way to do this is to just stick in the desired workout in place.
How does the adaptive part react to this once I do said different workout type? And as mentioned in this thread, do I need to delete/leave in the old scheduled workout for the “adaptiveness”?
FWIW I’d only be doing this on the 2 “hard intensity” workouts each week basically doing a progression of my choosing.
To be honest, this would just about nuke the benefit of using AT in the first place. If you have a plan for hard workouts, AT’s use on setting the rest of the Endurance level workouts is debatable. It does work on progression of those workouts, but more than a few people see issues with they way AT does it.
Until you aim to actually follow a TR plan at least most of the time, using AT seems unnecessary per your description.
I’ve been using AT since it was released and i do manual tweaks from time to time, but I largely stick with the plan. I think that essence has to be there for AT to have a proper foundation if it’s expected to work as intended.