This week I returned to Trainerroad after a year’s absence to try out the fancy new adaptive training.
Did a ramp test last week on zwift so skipped it and rode sweetspot outdoors for an hour and trainerroad went ahead and adjusted my workouts accordingly. For the record the app has me marked as progression level 7.8 for sweetspot.
First workout then was laughably Truchas +3 (8.3) which I marked as very hard. I managed it but god damn that is an insane recommendation for your first workout of the first week of base training! I had to drop the intensity down to 95% but I made it through.
After marking it as very hard I’d have thought the coming sweetspot workouts would be tailored to suit but instead the difficulty has actually went up! I don’t even know what to say about the same workout being chosen twice in a row other than this is pretty frickin lame.
The app has looked at all my past rides but even if it hadn’t (which it has) it shouldn’t be prescribing me duplicate workouts and zero sweetspot progression.
I forget, can adaptations be set to automatically occur? I review all my adaptation suggestions before accepting them so I’d recommend doing that. You never have to go harder if you don’t really want to if you have the ability to review prior to accepting
The other thing is that by doing a 7.8 workout outside of the plan, you set that as your baseline. Adaptive training is going to put you in a positive trajectory based on your most recent completed level. So, in essence, you manipulated the system and made the recommendations harder. I did this at the start of my CX training, on purpose, because my anaerobic level was 1.0 prior to the plan. I wasn’t changing my FTP or anything, so I independently did a 4.0 level workout to get the level to where the workouts recommended would be above 4 and progress me in a way that I thought 1.0 would be too slow.
I dont mean to sound rude but its crazy to me that people complain about a feature but start with I didn’t do the ramp test that it recommended.
If you dont do the ramp test that it recommends, it has no idea what the FTP you have is correct or not. I believe that progression numbers are tight closely to the FTP.
I think it looked back at your past workout and noticed that you are performing way better than the average for that FTP, hence you are high on the progression. If you are around sweet spot 9ish, you are likely ready for a ramp test and increase on FTP.
I’m new to AT, but I would’ve classified that workout as “all out” rather than “very hard”. Then you would’ve got the option to select “Intensity” and I presume that would lead to adaptations down.
The outdoor ride at SS for an hour. Was it a TR outdoor WO, and if so, which one?
I’m pretty sure TR has made up for the the lack of detailed outdoor WO analysis by giving a pass too easily.
I associated an outdoor WO to one of my regular loops and this was the result.
Idk how or why but using my Zwift FTP was a recipe for disaster when I started TR. In my experience, the Zwift ramp test over-estimated my FTP by almost 20 watts compared to the TR ramp test. It is possible you’re also experiencing this, so might be worth doing the TR test or manually reducing FTP to what seems reasonable from the intensity standpoint based on your experience so far.
