Roughly, yes. The idea is that a relatively untrained rider is going to have a very difficult time completing high-difficulty workouts. That doesn’t mean they can’t complete them, but the compliance at 100% difficulty is likely going to be much lower. Therefore, we’ve built in logic to recommend high intensity workouts that are roughly equivalent in diamond difficulty to your training load (e.g. # of stars).
Xert is hybrid because it doesnt use FTP based zones nor LT1/LT2 for determining your workout targets. Instead, Xert uses focus and strain. From the blog pasted below, “Xert is not entirely polarized since training variety is an important element to training success, but you will find many of the Endurance workouts and the rest intervals in workouts to be defined at or just below LTP.”
As mentioned by others, you can use the workout filter to find workouts that might have a higher difficulty score (and likely a higher XSS/hr) on days that you feel good, and then free-ride at/below LTP on days that you’re yellow and waiting for blue freshness to come back. Like @wescaine , I do many of my low intensity days around the 75-85% LTP range, or just free-ride in slope mode (or in Zwift) and aim to keep the intensity sufficiently low (often guided by DFAa1).
You can also pair intensity with your endurance training to give your training a bit of XSS/hr boost. You can do this by using intensity to draw down MPA and then holding your endurance targets. Doing so will boost the Low XSS/hr you receive. Look at some of the workouts with endurance-paced efforts under fatigue in the workout library (Firestarter, Bangarang, etc.).
Hope this helps!
Reference: (btw… am I becoming @ridgerider2 ? haha)