Workout levels clicked when I understood why they are called Progression Levels and not Performance Levels: their purpose is to help AT and the athlete select suitable workouts. Unstructured outdoor rides are typically more varied, so apart from endurance rides they tend to tax a whole lot of power zones. So the PL in a given zone will be lower than a workout that specifically addresses one power zone.
I expect workout levels v2 to be most useful for outdoor workouts.
To gauge the impact of unstructured rides, group rides and the like, TR should measure fatigue instead. But that feature is on the horizon, too.
I can understand why people are worried about the PLs and outdoor workouts, but im surprised they are a deal breaker. I’m mixing up my outdoor and indoor stuff a lot more at the moment as have been lucky enough to get a bit of advice from a top level coach. This has meant doing VO2 max outside and adding in some very long rides. Most of my social rides have the climbing at Threshold over and over and over so I pretty much always replace the weekend threshold workout with a social ride. So my PLs have somewhat stalled and Adaptive training is offering me alternatives all the time to lower the PL of my upcoming workouts. My endurance PL has never been over 1 and I have a 24 hr in a few weeks so I’m sure hoping it’s better than that!
So I dont accept the adaptions and, if I was feeling fresh, I’d just pick a harder one from the alternatives. I wasnt sure how that would affect the PLs until the other evening when my other half wanted to try the kickr+TR so I stuck him on one of my workouts with breakthrough selected - some kind of ridiculous threshold workout with sprints in, for fun. It would have killed me. He completed it easily and my PLs jumped right up until I had deleted the ride and skipped the questionaire.
I know these are workarounds, but ultimately, for me at least TR still has
a load of workouts to select from
structured plans that adapt to injury, sickness and work
And if you do hire a coach and then decide to do what quite a lot of posters in this thread seem to want to do of ignoring their prescribed training and doing taxing, unscheduled, unstructured rides, then don’t be surprised when the coach isn’t best pleased with you!
I’ve been training for about 8 years, some of them coached. It’s not that hard to be self-coached.
I do mostly Zwift group rides for endurance. And 2 to 3 more intense workouts a week, depending on the phase. I’m now progressing time in zone on tempo/SST.
I’d think people are less likely to skip prescribed workouts when they hire a coach who cost far more than TR and a coach will give an athlete grief for not adhering to a plan whereas TR won’t be texting you asking why you’re not adhering to the plan
+1. And some of the crazy stuff they decide to do (e.g. had one athlete go rogue and run a 5k time trial 2 days before the state meet to “practice pace”) or how easy they are influenced by an online influencer is mind blowing
The best part is you only find out about it after the fact….wondering why they are flat in the workout: “Oh I didn’t race well on Saturday so I went out and did hill repeats and ran a half marathon on Sunday” (both of those examples really happened).
For an example of a training platform that does analyze your outdoor rides and use “AI” (that’s a misused term, including by TR) To adapt your training plan based on your rides: JOIN.
It does interpret your outside rides and is quite flexible in how it does so. Instead of giving very strict and complex workouts, it prescribes a ride like 2 hours at X% with 5 intervals of Y% and Z duration. It will export a workout file and sync to TP or whatever. But here’s the beautiful thing: you don’t need it. Just remember the overall goal. Go on your ride. Make it 1.5 to 3 hours, do the intervals at any time in the workout, not some strict specific time shown in the workout file. JOIN’s algorithm will figure it out and give you a compliance score that is similar to how a human would rate compliance; did you more or less achieve the goals, while ignoring the second by second power target error. With TR, even if I follow the workout power targets, if I so much as stop at a stop light it’s considered non-compliance and might hurt my PLs and possibly giving me easier future workouts.
Now there’s major differences in approach that JOIN has vs TR, but it also adapts your workouts automatically based on what you did vs the plan.
That’s just one example. There’s also atletica.ai that uses “AI” to adapt your training, even for triathletes. I haven’t checked them out in detail. But there will be more and more companies coming out with “AI” training platforms that can deal with not following the exact second by second workout as well as group rides, races, etc.
Hold on one second. That wasn’t my argument at all. Stop pretending that TR workouts are the only training that are valid. Races are valid training and TR is a product marketed towards racers.
Picture this very common scenario. You have your main goal event that’s at the end of the summer. You follow a TR plan starting in winter. Come spring you continue to follow the plan but start introducing once per week races. Come summer you’re doing twice per week races. Those races make up a significant portion of your training time and load.
How does AT, which relies on PL to know your fitness, manage your plan properly? PL can’t analyze your current fitness accurately because it misses everything that happens in those races. AT presumably still sees the TSS/CTL and makes basic adjustments accordingly, but it doesn’t know if that extra load was VO2Max (crit race), threshold (road race), or sprints (track racing). So how is it going to optimize your training now? Not very specifically to your exact training, that’s for sure.
Where does TR say you can’t race while using their plans? How can AT automatically adjust my training according to those races without me trying to hack together something that isn’t built into the platform? Sure you can out those events on your calendar, but all AT knows is a duration and IF that you estimate; TSS. That says nothing about what power zone distribution during that time was. Track cycling will have completely different effects on your body than an equivalent TSS of a road race.
You just described races and group rides, apart from the unscheduled part. So don’t race, don’t do fondos or group rides or ride for fun? I think you just eliminated 95% of the customer base.
Your can throw them in your TR calendar and AT will see the TSS, but AFAIK it won’t see what kind if training it is. That’s why WLV2 is so important
I used JOIN for a while and went back to TR. it was nice to have JOIN score your effort vs the prescribe workout, and it was neat seeing the next few days change based on what I did. But in the end, I didn’t feel like it was doing anything magic in the background. And I really like the TR calendar, the workout player, the podcast and the forum. And ATFtp works well for me. And the Ml adaptations do as well as long as I don’t completely go off plan. When I do, I just make adjustments on my own—if I do a spontaneous hard ride outside with friends on Friday, I just swap out an easy endurance ride for my Saturday threshold workout. In the end, I’m riding for fun and to get faster. I know that following structure helps and TR does that for me. And is flexible enough if you know how to use it. When RLGL and WL2 come out (maybe 2024 ), I’ll be excited.
Also I think Nate and the TR team are doing a ton of work to make sure the model works and has a high correlation to successful changes and adaptations. My sense is that JOIN uses a much simpler model. It got them usable product faster, but sometimes the changes were strange. So for better or worse, TR is doing a ton of testing to prove the model, which is why Nate keeps thinking it’s close but then it gets pushed out.
I agree TR had the best overall product. And if you know how to adapt your training yourself, then the AT/PL limitations are mostly moot.
But that’s my point. AT is supposed to help avoid needing to know how to self-adapt your training. I would say the percentage of TR users that can self-coach well is fairly low. And even if someone can adjust the plan on the fly, they might not want to have to go searching for the right workout. That’s part of the TR value proposition.
The scenario is valid, but you are focussing on the wrong future feature of TR. PLs are not meant for that, the traffic light feature is.
Progression levels help you choose a workout of the right difficulty. If you manage to do something equivalent to a harder workout for a given power zone in a race, PL v2 should make the next workouts harder — not what you want in this situation.
The traffic light feature is in charge of adapting your intensity and volume to take races and unstructured rides into account.
That’s your vision of AT, but I don’t know whether it is TR’s or how others want it to work. Do you want AT to be a coach you blindly trust or a coach who helps you make better decisions? I’d prefer the latter. I am not sure whether TR has decided where it wants to be on that sliding scale. This is as much a UI/UX problem as it is a machine learning problem.
That’s why the traffic light feature (= fatigue management) will IMHO be a more important feature than WL/PL v2.
Nope. That’s not the way the TR plans work - the plan/weekly structure is defined up-front, with only the intensity of future workouts being modified based on past achievements; the structure of the week won’t be changed.
You appear to be clearly stating here that JOIN better meets your requirements than TR does. Perfect - we’re not dealing with religion here, just choosing products that do a job for us. Does this mean you now use JOIN instead of TR? If not, why not, if it works for you? Isn’t that the answer for you, for now?
I periodically “mock” TR on here for the non-delivery of WLV2, but haven’t been surprised by the difficulties faced, as I see it as a somewhat flawed approach. My opinion, and I welcome being proved wrong, perhaps!
Despite me not using the TR plans much anymore (a/the key feature!), I’m very happy using the product as it is, and recognise that it’s made great strides since I began using it 6 years ago. I look around at other products and for me personally, this is still the one that suits me best. If it wasn’t I’d simply take my custom elsewhere - no big deal.
I’ve not signed up to a marriage or joined a cult, I’m just using a product that ticks some boxes, and I’m not going to get too worked up if it doesn’t happen to operate the way I believe it should do. I do provide feedback to the folks making the product so they’ve an idea of what I’d like to see in order to retain my custom, and I believe they’re well aware of some current shortcomings, but I’m not going to burn a ton of time and emotional energy complaining that the product doesn’t work for me…
Of course do races, fondos and group rides. Just don’t expect them to be much, if any, use in predicting your ability to complete structured workouts. Which is what the PLs are for - their purpose is to help identify the right TR workout for you in any given power zone.
Doesn’t TR market their AT as “the right workout, every time”? Seems like that is indeed their vision of it, then.
I am agnostic on PL’s, overall….i don’t really rely on them or use them in anyway. For me, it is just gamification. That is fine as it can be very motivating for people.
But 2+ years into it, it is an extremely flawed system as it misses a crucial and critical part of everyone’s training - outdoor rides.
Wow! That’s some take! If that’s what you took from my post, either you dramatically misunderstood what I was saying, or I did a terrible job of making a point.
I agree, and so does TR. Thats why plan builder works around scheduled races.
[quote=“huges84, post:406, topic:80597, full:true”]
How does AT, which relies on PL to know your fitness, manage your plan properly?[/quote]
TR sees all your riding and adjusts your FTP. It uses a combination of FTP and completed workouts to set your PL levels, and adjusts those each time you finish a workout.
Of course, you have some responsibility here, too. Consistently reporting how workouts feel and struggle reports is important, as is using your own good judgement. The program offers recommended alternates, and through this forum, podcasts, and online docs, you are encouraged to use good judgement about when you need to change training volume, take time off, or adjust goals.
I think the problem is you are making some incorrect assumptions. Fact of the matter is that no program has omniscience. Even when WLV2 is fully functional, TR won’t know when you had a fight with your spouse, when you had a crappy day at work, or when you had 18 beers the night before and slept poorly for 2 hours. There will always be an undefined variable in the equation.
But workouts provide regular samples of your fitness, and that data can be used to deign an adaptive training plan and set workout levels. Having an extra race, group ride, or other effort unaccounted for doesn’t invalidate the data collected in workouts, or the constantly updated ftp that does use that data.
Consider - if you weigh yourself once a week, you don’t get the same data that you’d get if you weighed yourself once a day, but over the course of time, you’d still have an accurate picture of your fluctuations in weight within a pound or two. You’ll get more detailed data from daily weigh ins, but in the end, you’ll still weigh X pounds.
), I’ll be excited.
