I’m on a high volume IM 70.3 plan and it has been going well, saw a 7 ftp increase in 3 months (which is rare for me nowadays), but then TR gave me a really easy final build month before the specialty phase began yesterday. I was surprised that basically nothing during last month seemed difficult with occasional “hard” workouts, but I could do all of these workouts with a +3% bias and definitely finish. And then when the month ended it wanted to drop my ftp down by 2 points, which I rejected because the upcoming workouts also don’t seem too difficult.
When I looked at the calendar, there were only 2 workouts I did not do due to a 3 day vacation, other than that I did everything the system gave me and chose either easy or moderate for 95% of them. So is this by design? Is TR trying to not overload me further when my race is 1.5 months away and simply wants me to maintain this form until the race?
Rather than the ftp decrease, the overall low difficulty of the build month seemed weird. I wasn’t ill, I did not rate any workout “very hard”, so I was surprised that the system basically gave me a free month. I think at some point this build month was completely different, with much more demanding workouts, but then for some reason I received a down adaptation which changed the entire schedule.
I’ve never used TR triathlon plans, so can’t really speak to any details there. I don’t know if the “easy” build on the bike was being balanced by run / swim workouts?
The best feedback I can give you is to listen to your body…if the workouts don’t seem challenging enough, try a couple of Alternate workouts that may require a bit more effort.
I’d probably also reach out to TR support with your specific concerns re: any down adaptations. It is pretty hard for us to speculate without seeing the details of your calendar, but Support can really dive into the details
We’d second @Power13’s recommendation to use Workout Alternates if some of your sessions feel a bit too easy. You can look for “Stretch” workouts (or even “Breakthrough” workouts if things feel really easy), and, upon completing those sessions, your PLs will update and you will start to be served more difficult workouts based on those updated PLs.
You may have to use Workout Alternates once or twice to find the right difficulty level you’re looking for – but once you find what feels appropriately challenging, you shouldn’t have to use Workout Alternates anymore and AT will take over for you moving forward.
There no easy month in 70.3 HV, so maybe that’s a poor choice of words but it would be useful to see that?
I’m not sure why you add 3% to every workout for a month, but more isn’t always better - so it could be you were overloading yourself and not recovering well?
Other than those questions I think we kind of accept that progression isn’t linear but yeah it’s disappointing to put in a high compliance block and “get nothing” from it…but I’d check for indicators of progress - heart rate at race pace for example.
As a triathlete there are at least two other factors - run and swim. I can imagine that if you’re recovering from a heavy run load that it’s hard to gain from bike too at the same time.