I did Sale yesterday - which is Threshold 6.1 - completed it, but found it harder that usual, so marked it accordingly as ‘Very Hard’. On returning to my Career summary page I noticed all my progressions levels are displaying either ‘secondary level decrease’ OR ‘Secondary level increase’ - this includes the Threshold system which also shows as a ‘Secondary level increase’, however I’d have expected that to at the very least display as ‘Primary Level Increase’. I was at level 6.0 before the workout so Sale was only a small bump in difficulty.
I’m wondering if there is a bug as this doesn’t seem like correct / expected behaviour, so wondering if anyone else has experienced the same? I’d add, this hasn’t happened before, at least not that I’ve noticed.
For context, I’m on a custom plan which having finished the base phase have upped the volume from low to medium last week using the edit plan feature. I also had odd behaviour when I did this as when changing the plan, if I choose to switch the days around vs following the default days, it then seemed to skew some of the sessions - for instance, it would duplicate a threshold workout on back to back days. If I changed the volume but kept the workouts days as per the default, this didn’t happen and there was then (correctly) and endurance day followed by a threshold day. I’m wondering if this was the catalyst for the issues I’m now seeing in the progressions levels.
Might be one I need to raise with support, but thought I’d ask here first as the chat is offline currently. Hope this is OK @IvyAudrain - noticed a few posts of this nature have been locked, that’s all.
One thing to note that progression levels atrophy on their own. I believe it’s typically 2 weeks and they will drop, which also includes the 14th day so if you miss a week in a specific zone, and you move your workout for that zone to the 15th day, you’ll see a progression level decrease because you haven’t worked that zone in that timeframe. It may even be based on time of day, so if you do your workout on day 14 later than you did 14 days ago, the decrease may show up before you get to your workout. This also typically happens when you move from phase to phase and the workout types change and oddly the main culprit might actually be a recovery week since it forces you to skip a week of all intensity zones. Moving workouts around manually will likely cause some issues with plan builder and AT, at least for that week. I believe there are posts around this, but I’m not sure which the best are to link.
My interpretation is that the progression levels attempt to tell you the most recent reason for your current progression level. So if you see a change due to inactivity, then it will call out whether the prior progression level was due to a primary change or a secondary change. For example, if you did a Threshold workout of 4.0 three weeks ago and it set your primary progression (threshold) to 4.0 and your secondary progression (sweetspot) to 3.0 because that workout had a secondary progression for sweetspot. Then if you don’t do any workouts that have a sweetspot (primary or secondary) progression in that 3 weeks, the tool tip will say your sweetspot progression was 3.0 based on a secondary progresssion, but now it’s a 2.1 because that was 3 weeks ago and it’s has atrophied.
Also, if you haven’t done a threshold workout in 3 weeks, then it would probably say “primary progression decrease.”