If you don’t use PLs or you cope some other way, that’s cool
Not sure why you claim it only matters if you are using erg mode. I never use erg mode on sweet spot and higher, only endurance workouts and perhaps longer recovery intervals. Differences of 1–2 %, especially around threshold and higher matter, and I can hit power targets reliably (usually +/- 1–2 W on anything longer than 45 seconds or so, it gets tricker on shorter intervals as you usually get deviations from power targets simply due to accelerating and decelerating the flywheel).
A 0.5 difference in PL is definitely something I feel, and adjusting them increases my chances to complete workouts successfully. I also find PLs useful if you change “workout style”, e. g. when I wish to replace a steady endurance workout with 15-minute intervals with one that has many small variations. Could I do it without PLs? Sure. I just find it easier.
Look up VC Adventures. He’s a funny dude who does LONG rides with Jeremiah Bishop and makes hour + long videos. Personally I’ve got about an hour limit for indoors anyway.
If you do a lot of outside rides and they are improving your fitness won’t AT adapt as presumably you will be rating TR workouts. when you do them, as easier than the algorithm thinks they should be and AT will therefore adapt future workouts as appropriate. Of course the opposite could hold true if your outside rides are fatiguing you unduly and are not properly recovering from them.
Now that RLGL is in Early Access, I’m really hopeful we might actually see unstructured rides affect training levels soon!
I still hold the opinion that AT is incomplete without that feature [unstructured rides affecting training levels].
TR is an amazing product, best automated training tool I’ve ever used … but even the TR hosts are always encouraging end-users to follow a low volume training plan to leave space for other stresses. I don’t know about you all, but I cycle for fun. It’s not all about training for me. I liked the low volume plan since it left room for the odd ride that I did just for fun. Be it a weekend epic, or spunky lunch ride … I really do feel that if AT cannot adjust my levels after an unscheduled unstructured ride, then it’s incomplete.
RLGL goes a long way to rectifying this, since it will actually adapt your plan after an unscheduled activity. It’s really exciting to see it in early access!
Tbh for me I feel that RLGL is actually more relevant than levels from outside rides.
I seriously doubt my outside rides offer much improvement at any specific zone, but they definitely add stress into my legs. While I’m sure they improve my fitness it’s not done in any structured format.
Like you I think outside is fun and a LV plan should fit around the fun part, not the other way around. I’m not a pro, I ride to pretend I’m fast and to forget office life.
No, but I regularly want to do a 45 or 90 minute version of my scheduled 60 minute workout, and using alternates with the PLs is really useful. I never do workouts at 4am… But I regularly want to change my workout durations for various reasons.
I also agree that workout levels are helpful as guidelines. Does a 1-2% difference in power target matter? At near-threshold, of course! These tiny changes are supposed to continually challenge you as you get stronger. Do you want a 4% increase? Madness!
WL can be gamed but if your goal is to get the best training you can, and you use workout levels as a tool to help with that, it’s still useful. it’s great to be aware of its limitations, but that doesn’t mean it’s useless.
If WLv2 can take unstructured rides into account, categorize and rate them, this suggests that your structured rides could also be calculated to a number based on your performance (particularly useful if you changed workout % during the workout in ERG, or if you worked out in regular trainer mode or outdoors) rather than giving you the result pass/fail.
I think that’s exactly the point of WLv2. The ‘unstructured’ work you do necessarily has an impact on PLs. In fact, you might be doing work that actually is stuctured, but it doesn’t meet the format of a TR workout. By being able to take say, hill reps on a hill I like to do, or mostly endurance ride where I might to 4 or 5 hard V02 max efforts, I couldn’t quantify those rides and see where they might be good alternates.
Further, with a combination of RLGL and WLv2, I think you get to the point where you don’t need TSS/CTL at all. TR can measure progress with AIFTP and PLs, lay out a plan, and avoid overtraining with RLGL.
Any update on this?. I’m now mostly doing outside rides and my PLs are being reduced due to the lack of “productive” workouts. Today l did over 3 hours of fartlek-tempo (a favourite of Kolie Moore) with a IF=0.76…l like TR and appreciate very much the efforts to improve it (RLGL has been a great addition!) but l think that acknowledging non TR workouts is a need at least for me in order for PLs to be used realistically when choosing a TR workout.
I’m a long time Xert user. IMHO, it does the best job of any app there modeling the physiology I hear all the big brains talking about. It gives you clear guidance (if you want it) on the specific training you should be doing to perform for a specific type of race/effort, while also measuring your overall load. It also already gives you a measure of the difficulty of every ride you do, relative to other rides, and quantifies the relative intensity. ‘Unstructured’ with Xert is a meaningless distinction.
There is a lot to like about the TR calendar, RLGL and the elegance of AIFTP, but zero measurement of outdoor work or tracking of overall fitness, something like CTL, are big gaps. I came back on a subscription to see recent progress, but I’ll probably quit again at the end of the month.
Since this thread has percolated back to the top, I’ll relay something that came up in my plan for next week, and how it relates to the usefulness ( or lack thereof) for PL’s once you really start getting unstructured rides in….
Saturday, I did the BMTR Flat 100 B ride on Zwift….i then added on about another hour or so to get to 5:24 of ride time, 317 TSS with a NP of 196 and an IF of .77. Overall, pretty easy high Z2 / low tempo ride for me.
This week for my Endurance ride on Wednesday, I have Heseman, which is a 2 hour, 106 TSS and .73 IF ride. Based on my PL’s, it is listed as a “Stretch” ride……c’mon. That will be a very easy endurance ride for me and damn near a recovery day (slight exaggeration, but only slight).
I think it’s been discussed a lot on here that endurance PLs aren’t that relavant if you do long 4+ hour endurance rides outdoors. But my view is so what? When they do release it, your endurance PL will go up. Are you going to do 4 hour trainer rides or just keep doing long outdoor rides?
Bottom line, PL are very helpful for interval progression, not so much for endurance. it isn’t hard to figure out what endurance ride to do.
As I have said before in this this thread, I am agnostic on PL’s. But the example I gave helped illustrate the limitations of the concept. The same applies to any outdoor ride you do…see the examples I gave above re: my usual group rides during the season. A mix of VO2, SS and threshold the whole ride and none of that gets reflected on PL’s.
When the weather’s nice in the Northwest, I’d much rather be outside. I find I’m always in much better shape at the end of the outdoor season than the indoor season. I do one structured trainer workout in the summer and the rest outdoors. Rides are invariably hilly because of where I live, so it’s usually not zone 2. I will blast up some short hills at twice my ftp. If tired, roll down. I have an 11% climb back to my house. My attitude toward progression levels is “gee, that’s nice”.
Agree to a point, but endurance has a progression just like the other zones. You don’t just go out and ride at the top of z2 for 5,6,7+ hours without progressing to that point. From my perspective, the endurance zone and progression is a bit of an afterthought in the TR training system. I’m not saying they don’t have anything, but it seems underemphasized in TR’s “time crunched” core philosophy. Lots of emphasis on pushing up SS, Threshold, Vo2, but endurance just seems like filler for lower intensity days. For those of us with extra time to train and focused on longer events, there is value in ramping the duration and intensity of Z2. I’m not aware of any TR plans that prescribe this type of training or progression. Maybe TR doesn’t believe in the value of long/slow to that extent, but I suspect it’s back to the focus on time crunched training. So, we are left to manage endurance progression on our own and that is fine because it’s pretty simple. Nobody needs detailed instructions to ride Z2 and I’m personally not a fan of the endurance workouts that prescribe constant power adjustments (ie - I’d likely ignore the workout directions even if I had them). The only complicated part of it is balancing the Z2 stress against the stress from other zones and how much to prioritize Z2 progression vs. progression in the other zones.
I think I’m in a similar situation that @Power13 describes (actually did that same long Zwift ride on saturday). We are both training for Unbound where all-day endurance is critical and it’s just kind of silly looking at endurance (and even tempo) PL’s being so low compared to threshold/vo2 when those lower zones are my strength. I used to try to play the game of assigning a TR workout to my long endurance/tempo work to bump up the PL’s, but I don’t think it was doing anything to affect my plan when I did it (I still got short/easy Z2 workouts on my plan).
Sorry to respond to the last post, but progressing higher levels is pretty straightforward and doesn’t require detailed instruction or levels. Unpopular opinion I’m sure.
I remember hoping Workout Level 2 would be ready in time for the outdoors season… two years ago. So 2.5years counting, meanwhile workout levels are still completely useless for me with a majority of my rides not per plan in base season Doing about 5x3h endurance per week, endurance level is 3.6 My transition to structured build will be very bumpy
Well, a toast to hoping WL2 will be out this season
EDIT: At least with red light green light I now know when I am about to overdo things, so that’s a good step in the right direction. Not too sound too sullen, but I really hope one day TR might be able to give me “the right workout, every time”, accounting for outdoors rides and Zwift rides too That would be the dream!
So as not to become like this guy, I look at my ride, figure out the training zone that was most likely trained the most on that ride, then search for and associate the closest TR workout to it. This way my PLs aren’t terribly off and AT might pick decent workouts for me.
Doing about 5x3h endurance per week, endurance level is 3.6 
My transition to structured build will be very bumpy 
That would be the dream!