The endurance workouts in my plan are generally in the .68-.75 IF range which is pushing me into Z3/tempo. Early on in the Beta, I tried adjusting the Training Approach by zone, lowering the endurance zone from ‘balanced’ to ‘moderate’ or ‘conservative’ but the changes did not seem to make a meaningful difference. This morning, I tried adjusting again and they definitely make noticeable differences (at one end of the scale at least) but they need further refining, in my opinion.
Now, what I am seeing is:
- Conservate assigns me only workouts in the 1-2 PL range; this is too low (more like recovery than endurance).
- Moderate assigns a combination of recovery (too low) and upper Z3 (tempo/too high). Nothing in the middle.
- Anything between Balanced - Aggressive assigns the same workouts (all high IF workouts that put me into tempo). Consequently, my recovery week even has me doing tempo every day.
My request - Have the training approach assign all endurance workouts in a defined IF range (e.g., conservative = 0.50-0.60, moderate = 0.60-0.65, balanced = 0.66-0.70, etc.). Those probably aren’t the right ranges but you get the point. Or at least cap the IF at a given level (so, maybe ‘moderate’ has a combo of recovery and higher but nothing above 0.66 IF).
Screenshots…
Conservative:
Moderate (notice recovery week has me in tempo 4 of 5 workouts):
Balanced (per Garmin HR based stats, every single day is intensity due to endurance days being tempo):
Aggressive (exactly same as Bal; didn’t check Demanding but assume the same) :
