Hey, all. Feel free to merge this into a different thread, but I was wondering if it was possible to find out how long you had before a progression level “decayed” due to lack of any workouts in a given timeperiod. For example, could I find out how long until my, say, Sweet Spot tier decays?
As an aside, let’s say that my Threshold level is at 2.0, and I do Garrowby -1, which shows a 1.0 level effort at Threshold. Is that enough to prevent decay? Does that slow the level of decay (i.e. it will only decay by, say 0.3 instead of 0.5)? Or is the answer “it’s complicated and it depends”.
There’s a lot functionality to PLs that I don’t fully understand, and I don’t know if this stuff is documented anywhere. Feel free to link me to the docs if they exist, and I’ll mark this thread as “answered”!
i dont think the rate of decay is changed, if you’re not doing the same or higher PL, it’ll decay to you next highest recently accomplished workout within the timeframe they establish (a couple of weeks or something like that, I forget now that I don’t use TR anymore)
AFAIK, they don’t publish the precise rates of decline they apply. But from some of the flags I’ve seen when reviewing my PL table, around 2 weeks is a safe bet broadly speaking.
Also not an answer, but here is an article that is related:
If you don’t complete Productive workouts in a given zone for two weeks, your PLs will begin to decrease. This is so that once you do a workout in that zone again, you won’t be served a workout that’s too difficult for your current fitness.
Thanks for the information, thanks makes (some) sense…
Is there a place where I can see the latest ‘productive’ workouts, or do i have to check each one by one on the calendar ? Is there a feature that tells/warns you if a certain zone is ‘expiring’, iow, about to expire and you should do a productive workout in that zone to maintain fitness? does that even make sense or not something to worry about?
That chart will tell you when the most recent Productive workout was for when your PLs increase, but it doesn’t say which specific workout was your last Productive workout when they go down – just that too much time has passed since hitting that zone. As you mentioned above, you can reference your Calendar to see what particular workout it was as the chart will tell you the date the decrease occurred.
The most important bit of info here is the PL number itself – that way, you’ll be guided into the right workout for your current fitness if you want to get back into training a zone that’s decreased.
There isn’t any warning that the zones will decrease. It’s not realistic to try to maintain all of your zones at near-peak fitness year-round, so some zones will likely be higher than others depending on the time of the year and what your training focus is.
In Base, for example, your Tempo and Sweet Spot zones would likely be higher than Threshold, VO2, or Anaerobic. As you move from Base into Build and then Specialty, if you’re preparing for high-intensity efforts, you’ll spend less time on Tempo and Sweet Spot and more on those higher zones. As a result, your Tempo and Sweet Spot PLs would likely go down, but your Threshold/VO2/Anaerobic PLs (whichever of those might be your target for improvement) would go up.
Hope that explanation helps clear things up – feel free to let me know if you have any additional questions!
I understand some decay making sense, but I’ve always thought that the fact that there’s no real floor (you decay back to 1.0) to be pretty ridiculous.
It’s fresh on my mind because I just started a build block this week and the “VO2 Max” workout it served me was an absolute joke. For context, I haven’t done a VO2 Max workout since March, so my PL had fully decayed. The first workout offered to me was Mound. Is that workout actually productive for anyone? I would be shocked if it was.
I don’t follow the suggested workouts blindly so I picked Pisgah as something that would not be difficult but remind me what it’s like to work above threshold. I’m not willing to do this experiment, but how long would it have taken to naturally progress from Mound to Pisgah by just completing the suggested workouts, even if I was rating them “Easy” every time? The whole build block?
In a similar vein, I don’t have any Sweet Spot scheduled for the next 8 weeks and my PL for that will decay quite a bit. Possible adaptations notwithstanding, the last Threshold workout in my build is Mount Goode +2 which has a secondary PL for Sweet Spot of 4.4. But surely if someone can do 3x18 at 97-99% of FTP they can also do 3x20 at 88-94% of FTP, which is Eclipse, a Sweet Spot PL 7.0.
I’ve never understood this and it really seems to fly in the face of the “Right Workout Every Time” motto that TR has.
Yeah, from what I remember, Coach Chad said that it takes roughly half as long for an energy level to decay as it did to build it. So Anaerobic would be “Quickly Come, Quickly Go” whereas Endurance would drop incrementally …
… however, no one at TR is going to code that, since they a) have no idea how long you’ve really been working on a given energy level, b) every body is different, and c) many / most users will have a good idea of where they’re comfortable at, when a given level is at 1.0.
When I come back from the season and transition back to indoor training, I know that I can do Petit +1 right off the bat, and Bays not too long afterwards, and have a good idea how where to start on my other zones.
Still, it stinks that we recognize that a 1.0 PL doesn’t mean that we can only handle a 1.0 workout, but that the software isn’t mature enough to realize that. Maybe Workout Levels 2.0?
I guess my real issue, is that I don’t understand why PL 1.0 exists. Maybe this is a minority view, but if every workout with PL < 3.0 disappeared it would either be a general improvement or there would be almost no noticeable change. (There are a few exceptions I can think of recovery “workouts” and oddballs that don’t quite fit a single zone.)
I rolled back my calendar to the first time I did a plan, back in the Pre-AT days, and Sweet-Spot Base started with what are now classified as PL 4.0 SS and Threshold workouts. That seems about right. Tray Mountain -2 is a reasonable start of a SS progression.
Having anyone start at PL 1.0 seems counterproductive.
