What impact does increasing intensity have on endurance workouts?

I’ve got ‘Recess’ (endurance, 1.0) scheduled for tomorrow, after a ramp test with a small improvement today. However, I’m feeling really good, and consider that doing a much harder endurance ride tomorrow won’t put me in a hole.

So, my question is about what happens if I increase the intensity (rather than choosing a harder workout via ‘alternates’) of the workout, but keeping it within the ‘endurance’ zone. For example, if I increase the intensity from 50% to about 70% (a la ‘Muir’ for example), will AT recognise that the workout was significantly harder and adjust levels accordingly?

I’m assuming for the moment that I’ll mark each workout as ‘easy’.

if you want AT to recognise the effort you’re better off searching for a stretch alternate to replace Recess.

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No, not at this time but that is the hope/future of AT. Use Alternates and AT will adjust future workouts and progression levels.

There is no complex thinking behind AT. It is essentially a predictor-corrector approach that uses feedback from workout performance and survey input to make adjustments to a over-arching pre-built plan.

That said, implicitly everything goes into AT. There is a schedule with a goal to progress an athlete up at a certain rate in desired power zones the athlete self-selects. When results don’t match predictions, it corrects up or down. Things won’t match predictions if you do a much higher PL than your current rating or you rate a workout harder than predicted. If you are over cooking things, this will show up when you start to fail workouts. The system won’t be able to predict this to happen, but once results deviate from updated predictions, it will adjust down.

To mitigate things oscillating out of control, there are smoothing controls, at least in survey feedback or failing a workout. In other words, I haven’t observed drastic changes based on survey or failed workouts. If you complete a much higher rated PL workout than your current status, it seems to adjust to that immediately. But if this was an outlier, things will trend back down within a few workouts if you answer honestly on the surveys.