I want to start by saying my intention is not, “let’s pile on TrainerRoad” but I think it would be fun to speculate about why TrainerRoad had to build Masters plans. It seems to mean that Adaptive Training wouldn’t change your plan to the correct “dose” of hard work outs and the spacing between them. And the “red light” addition seems to mean that Adaptive Training wouldn’t tell you not to work out when you should take a break. My guess is that Adaptive Training was not set loose on the data set so that it could figure out ideal training for people. It was given parameters which looked a lot like the training programs that existed before Adaptive Training and was asked to make small adjustments within that framework. I’ve held the opinion for years now that based on what coaches, athletes, and studies were telling us that in the long run, for people to maintain consistency and longevity, everyone (not just Masters) do best with 2 or maybe 3 “hard” workouts a week and those need to be spaced out by 48 or 72 hours. Thus you see some people doing two hard workouts in a day so that they can get more hard workouts in a week while still having the time to recover. The things that take the longest to recover are neuromuscular and endocrine systems. Those don’t necessarily make you feel horrible when you are stressing them until weeks and weeks go by and then you crash.
Perhaps these Masters plans are the start of giving Adaptive Training the proper “rules” by which it makes plans and adjusts workouts. But it will have to figure out a way to incorporate ALL stressful workouts. A resistance work out for maximum strength, power, or hypertrophy is very stressful for the endocrine and neuromuscular system. How those combine with endurance work is hard to tease out. And then the good luck with multiport where you have to account for several different sports and resistance exercise.
I think you’re right about how the current adaptive training system works, but I thought that was kinda obvious. My impression is that adaptive training still follows a pretty set curriculum (e.g. it’s specified that a given phase will have say 1 VO2 workout, 1 threshold and 1 SS workout per week), and the adaptations are just varying how hard each of those is. I don’t know that they have the data to alter the order/length of phases or radically change your season goals if you’re going too hard, though of course if you start failing workouts at the level they’re set they’ll get easier.
I think that the masters plans are more about the current zeitgeist of training rather than the limits of Ai. They are just feeding the Ai a different recipe.