That’s fantastic (except the accident with your van). And very similar to my experience as well this time last year in that I had a massive crash and burn coming out of SSB II into build that had me spiraling for a few months shell shocked I couldn’t do the workouts on target.
Although I’ve been super aggressive at times with alternates - going stretches where I was changing things daily. I’ve yet to complete a block where I don’t have a decent amount of deviation at some point. I’m at all time high power targets after a long time plateau pre-AT, and my MMP for the first quarter of the year is way up. I’ve been on AT since last spring, midway through the beta roll-out release period.
I think the take away from our shared experience is that there is good evidence the system is very robust to keep us from getting in our own way - whether trying to experiment or just leaving it as is. And the threshold detection feature is going to zero that in even better I think. Along with rating unstructured rides we do in groups/races, etc.
Power targets apparently don’t force some people into the true VO2max zone and hence its easy (relatively anyway . ) Kolie Moore does an interesting podcast on the subject.
absolutely - hitting a certain % of FTP is not how vo2 work should be assigned or measured. Unfortunately every second of every TR workout is fixed to a % of FTP…
Neither, but you did the correct thing with the workout imo. Up the intensity and mark it easy (as in mark it as if you had done the unadjusted session, until AT gives credit for increasing the intensity)
VO2 and Sprint work is the only time I suggest this though.
Threshold and below work doesnt have to be hard / really hard.
I don’t use AT as I don’t have a TR plan, but there still seems to be plenty of holes in the current implementation of AT. My only thought in relation to your idea of past work impacting future AT iterations, is that AT probably isnt going to look too far backwards in time when making adaptions, so unless you over perform every session I doubt this would be much of a issue for long IF they develop AT to handle these over-performed sessions? FTP AI…who knows
I know what you are saying but you are kind of missing the wood for the trees.
The important word in that first sentence is every and the important word in the second is introductory. Yes, VO2max workouts should be hard, that’s the point of them but you need some intro to them so you know what to expect and how to approach them. See my earlier post about doing them outdoors - I’d use the first interval to hone in on what was a valid effort for the remaining intervals - hard enough to get the adaptations but “easy” enough that I could do all ten or twelve intervals.
In the podcast that introduced AT, Nate mentioned super-passes where the system would recognise what the OP has done. In a subsequent podcast he sort of backtracked on that and said it either wasn’t ready or not implemented, can’t remember which. I’ve not heard anything since then on that particular aspect of AT so it’s probably still not part of the functionality.
As for the OP’s question: I would have done the workout as prescribed (despite any flaws it may or may not have), marked it as “Easy” and let AT do its thing. Within a couple of weeks the system will have lifted the level for them.
This is where we disagree…they upped both sets and still complete the session. Very little would have been achieved leaving the session as it was and there would have been very little training benefit. At least they now know roughly what to sub in for the next session instead of waiting weeks for AT to catch up with their abiltity. As said above the problem is using a fixed precentage of FTP which is a really bad approach to VO2max work.
Agreed - a few short reps of not really hitting anything close to vo2 is just a waste of time. Tiring for very little, if any, benefit. OK, so you may learn, but do that by cranking it up and learning that you need to go harder.
I think both approaches (leave it, up it) is fine with the caveat you shouldn’t 100% trust yourself and you shouldn’t 100% trust AT.
Work with the system to find the right balance. Don’t be afraid to suggest the system is wrong. Don’t be afraid to admit it’s right. Over time things work out very well.
Any one workout isn’t gonna make a difference. It’s what you do over the course of weeks that do.
Because tomorrow i have a VO2 workout scheduled. Yesterday i did a ramp test and the result was (as always) lower than i expected. So i looked at the workout for tomorrow and looking at the numbers, i should be able to “easily” hit those. It’s VO2, so the idea should be as much power as you can produce, for every repetition of every interval.
I think there are 3 options:
keep intensity as it is, stay on power target, which then ends up “too low”, the VO2 workout being too easy, not getting the desired training effect. Mark the work out as easy
keep intensity as it is, exceed the power targets, get the correct training effect. But, then do you mark the workout as easy or hard?
increase insensity, get the correct training effect. then still, do you mark it as easy or hard?
In the end though, IME it was lay less important to mark things as too easy when they are vs too hard when the are. The later puts the break on progressions which is important to catch to avoid persistent over-reach. So probably just over thinking this all around.
My last TR workout is from a long time ago, 14th of April 2021, so dont know if AI FTP prediction will work.
I did do an indoor 30/15s workout 2 weeks ago and going off that…tomorrow should be too easy as its prescribed.
Ah well. i’ll figure it out before tomorrow
If you think AT is wrong, then go for what you think is right. Don’t over think surveys. Listen to your body if the progressions speed up and you need to back down by not completing a workout and taking a down grade in progression.
In the case of the person who asked though, it won’t help just because they don’t have a lot of training data.
For folks that do have training data, AT is generally very good about coupling the intensity level with progression level. It isn’t as good when guessing PL across different power zones, so if swapping to one you haven’t been doing a lot in, there definitely is a settling period.
. ) Kolie Moore does an interesting podcast on the subject.
