@pbase, I’m curious what part of the survey response you were answering honestly. I say which part because I see the survey responses as having 2 parts. The first part is a vague and subjective description of perceived “challenge”, “effort” and “focus.” This asks the athlete’s perception of vague words describing their perception of performance. It is perception built upon perception.
The second part of the survey response description is more objective: how much, if any, additional work could you have done? To me this is the key. The survey responses should be entirely built upon this premise: How much capacity for additional work? The additional work descriptions could be fleshed out a little more, and the subjective “focus”, “challenge” and “effort” stuff done away with.
Finally, the “All Out” description should include a specific reference to using bail-outs as @mcneese.chad’s chart does. Without a specific reference to using bailouts, there is no meaningful distinction between Very Hard and All Out.
Ok, mini-rant almost over. But I do feel pretty strongly that the post workout surveys need to be well understood. It is one of the major keys to whether TR works for someone or not. “Don’t overthink it” doesn’t cut it.
A link to the survey response descriptions should be out-front with every survey. And the descriptions should be improved so they are more objective in describing additional work capacity only. They should omit overtly subjective language. That’s how we can hopefully avoid controversy over honesty … and honesty about what? focus? challenge? effort? The keys to the kingdom shouldn’t be so gauzy.
I totally agree that the descriptions and the way the information is provided to the user needs a rethink. We see posts like this constantly, and this is such a small sample of the user base that the lack of understanding of the levels must be far more common”out there”.
As for me, I always used Chad’s chart and only focused on the second part you mentioned. It’s just that with a lot of experience using the definitions, I just think they’re not very accurate for me. For example, I feel like I can almost always do one more interval. It might hurt like hell, but it can be done. I’ve raised this before and the response is always “just be honest and the AI will figure it out”. It didn’t for me.
That sounds tough! You definitely have more motivation than most. I really appreciate your dedication to get your training in however possible.
Something that might be worth trying is switching your plan over to a Masters version. We developed these with athletes like you in mind who work long shifts and tend to have inconsistent recovery. The idea here is to reduce the amount of intensity in the plan without necessarily changing the volume.
It’s important to only take on the amount of training stress that your body can absorb considering all of the external factors such as nutrition, recovery, etc. More isn’t always better! It’s about balancing things for each individual.
The link below has a section at the bottom that shows “How to Change Your Current Plan to a Masters Plan” if you’re interested in trying one out.
Thank you. Like I said, I just started with TR and at the same time structured training 3 months ago, I’m really new to this and that is why I was heavily reliant on what the program is giving me. I’ve always thought that the “all out” option means I gave everything I had and not able to continue after, but I’m wrong. Very hard for me means I was still able to finish the workout despite “backpedalling” so for me my answers were honest. I reached out to get some answers and no way that it was based on ego. I coudn’t care less of what FTP is, I just started learning this too. I am now more aware of how to approach the surveys and alternative workouts moving forward.
even so, if you didn’t complete the work, you didn’t complete the work. so giving the “credit” as complete imo is incorrect.
side thought: would be nice to see AT to learn from user surveys and tailor adaptations based on the users scale.
Like say: If the workout expected a Very hard, and you said HARD but paused the workout several times it would start to know that your personal RPE measurements are a little skewed.
When we finally get the updated WLV2, I believe that the “full credit” PL issue will likely go away. Until then, their solution appears to be accepting that PL and having AT dump the pending workouts down in that related zone. Means we get to do “Achievable” workouts in many cases as we theoretically climb back up to that higher PL, or we do workouts under that PL long enough that the decay steps in. Either way, AT is driving the bus and setting pending workouts on that new info as well as subsequent survey responses on those next workouts.
That is what TR claims is happening and why they stress the “rate it how it feels” side vs the more wordy charts I have done. This clearly doesn’t seem to work in all cases for whatever reason, but that is what I have seen mentioned more than once (that AT and the Survey Response system “learns” as you continue to use it).
Again, they say these items are apparently “seen” by AT and factored into the soup, we just don’t know exactly how.
Yea the idea came from this ai oveni saw. You can ask it to make a rare steak. Then tell it that it wasn’t cooked enough. So it learns your version of rare is actually more cooked than usual
I have a feeling that the majority of people may not have read the detailed information carefully. So, having a scale that’s more self-explanatory may help. This is easy to say and maybe not always easy to do. Nevertheless, I am fairly sure that my suggestion for a too hard option is not a terrible one. That seems self-explanatory enough.
