Hi all, wondering if you can offer me some suggestions.
At the end of my last training block, SSB HV 1, I had to miss a couple of final workouts due to going away for a short trip (that bled into my recovery week). I was feeling fit and motivated at the time and decided to knock out a final monster workout the day before heading off. I successfully completed Wright Peak with a combo of caffeine, a crap-tonne of carbs, and a fair bit of grit. It was an all-out effort that I felt was only possible as a one-off.
Successfully completing this workout boosted my sweet spot level to 10.0 after weeks of training between 3-5. After ramp testing upon my return and seeing a decent FTP increase, my level was set at 8, meaning I was faced with 5 weeks of sweet spot workouts between level 8-10 (Wright Peak and similar every other day, also meaty sustained workouts like Pioneer+1).
After the festive period inconsistencies and a bout of crappy Jan mental health, I’ve been struggling with training. I do not feel like my FTP has seen any meaningful drop since my mid Dec test, but I often can’t complete the workouts now. I feel that if my level was still at 5, progressing through to 7 by the end of base, I’d be managing just fine. Pumping out 4.5wpkg for 30 mins at a time, 3-4 times a week, is currently well beyond me.
Do I:
Lower my FTP?
Manually select workouts at manageable levels?
Intentionally fail a bunch of workouts to make AT recalculate?
TLDR: I accidentally red-lined my workout levels with a one-off near-max effort, and now I can’t successfully execute my training plan. I can’t seem to manually adjust the levels, so how do I get back on track?
There are two distinct issues raised in your post - the progression level in sweet spot (caused by a one-off), and your FTP level. Let’s tackle the second first: I presume your progression level for threshold workouts did not get affected by “the bump”. If so, are the workouts in that progression still ok? If so, this confirms your FTP is ok. If not, then indeed your FTP is probably set too high. Drop it manually, test, ramp or 20mins, whatever floats your boat.
Then, and only then, should you look at the progression level for sweet spot. I suggest you either try your best at the workouts proposed in the calendar, if you struggle or fail then you struggle or fail, if you need to lower the effort then be it, and be honest in your post-workout evaluations. It takes a few struggles and even less fails for AT to lower the bar. In the meantime you will have trained anyway.
That percent in the bottom left corner doesn’t have to stay at 100%, if it feels to hard set it lower, if you still can’t complete fail the workout. Let adaptive training adapt and both of those are feedback into AT
The solution is simple, just start picking alternates closer to the level you think you’re at, eventually the progression level will decay to where you’re at. Don’t try to bash your way through hard stuff. Heck I’m at 9.5 at the end of week 3 of ssb2 and im going to scale back a bit next week just so I’m not always going harder and harder
i did something similar with a custom workout, it skewed the progression levels and therefore AT bumped things up quite dramatically.
I deleted the completed workout from calendar and AT then re-did its thing and came back into line with more realistic workouts.