The existing Adaptive Training threads cover a very wide range of topics. I thought it might be helpful to have a thread dedicated to understanding why certain adaptations are being proposed. I can’t be the only one surprised by what AT is suggesting and am very interested in learning what AI has to teach me.
My Threshold progression level is 4.5. My plan has been slowly increasing the levels of my Threshold workouts, over the past two weeks I have successfully completed one Threshold workout at 4.0 and then two at 4.5. This morning I failed a 5.0 Threshold workout. I expected AT to suggest dialing back over the next couple weeks - which it did. The surprise was it knocked the upcoming Threshold workouts to 2.3-2.6. I would have thought it would fall back to “last known success” rather than so aggressively cutting back. Thoughts?
Original:
Adapted:
1 Like
My guess would be that AT may think that failing a 5 workout might meant that the 4 level stuff might have been pushing you too far (did you rate them as very hard?) and by scaling back you can do some achievable stuff without cooking you too much. Just a guess, but personally I’m trying not to overthink suggested adaptations
Interesting. Makes sense. Thanks!
I’m wondering how to think about the difficulty rating question that follows workouts. Ignoring endurance/recovery workouts and ignoring workouts which are failed or include some form of material failure to hold target power (I assume these are automatically “all out”), all other workouts are “very hard” for me. I don’t ever finish a VO2 max, threshold or sweet spot workout and feel it was two notches from all out. Any thoughts?
For me, “all out” means I barely completed the workout, and there is no way I would have completed it if the intervals were any longer. “Any longer” being 15 seconds or more.
Do all your workouts feel this hard? What PL level workouts are you doing? If every workout is truly “all out”, your FTP is probably set wrong and you are probably on the road to burn-out / flame-out.
I’d say half my workouts are all our per your definition and the rest are “very hard”. I don’t know what a “hard” workout is…maybe you’re right about the FTP. My PLs are 6.3, 5.5 and 6.0 for SS, threshold and VO2max, respectively.
