What is the best way to swap the workout recommendations between two days? Here’s the situation. Forecast AI wants me to do Pure Endurance 236 XSS on Saturday and Mixed Pursuiter 71 XSS on Sunday. Due to external factors, I want to do the Saturday (endurance) workout on Sunday and the lower XSS day on Saturday. How can I accomplish that?
I tried to do this last weekend and never could get the system to do what I wanted. Here’s what I tried:
I tried limiting my availability on Saturday to only two hours, thinking the system would see more time available on Sunday to do longer training. Instead, it simply tried cramming the same (large) amount of XSS into a shorter duration workout.
I tried adding a long endurance workout manually to Sunday thinking that the system would see all the XSS I was going to do on Sunday and reduce the required amount on Saturday. Instead, it then tried adding even more XSS on Saturday and wanted to mark Sunday as a rest day.
I ended up just filtering the workouts on Saturday and doing something that I knew would accomplish my real goals, despite Forecast AI telling me it was no optimal.
Think this has come up before and the answer was at this stage there isn’t a way. Hopefully in the future.
The consensus seemed to be that so long as you don’t have a super inflexible plan (i.e. you need to follow it close to 100% to reach your goal) then just do what you did here and shuffle them yourself. Consider hitting Adapt Forecast after, particularly if you do this a few times to make workouts fit into your life [full disclosure I don’t have a good idea on what the threshold should be for hitting Adapt but my feeling is one swap here or there especially on back to back days shouldn’t be a huge deal]
It’s not perfect as the plan accounts for rest and recovery, so you might be more fatigued than intended for a given target.
My idea for when drag-and-drop is added in the future would be to support two modes.
Mode 1 if a blank calendar and Mode 2 if FAI is in play.
Mode 1 would allow users to drag and drop workout/activity selections onto a blank calendar. This would be for those who aren’t using an FAI plan. Tap the icon, a search/selection form appears, drag and drop your selections onto the calendar.
Mode 2 mode would allow swapping days on an FAI plan which analyzes what you are swapping and determines whether Adapt Forecast is warranted. I.e. tap the icon to enable swap mode, identify which two days to swap, save change and Adapt Forecast runs if needed. Otherwise move on to next swap or stick to the plan for now.
I don’t think you want to support both modes at the same time as you shouldn’t drag-and-drop onto an FAI plan which is sure to fry it.
Icon button could switch based on mode (blank calendar vs FAI). Example :
With the upcoming release, you can just choose what you want to do on Saturday and/or Sunday and pin the workout to the forecast. Then run Adapt and it should then reschedule before/after as needed to accomodate. Currently, you can add a planned workout manually and then set availability to Unavailable to avoid getting a second workout on the given day. A few extra steps…
So long as you’re aware of what you’re doing, the Adapt process should be able to accommodate. If you start shifting things around too much and compromising the training you need to have to complete rest of the plan, you’ll eventually get to a point where you may not be able to reach your goal anymore.
I think pinning is a step in the right direction, however usefulness for some purposes depends on how it’s implemented e.g, I’ve asked previously about whether we can have back to back (Sat / Sun) follow a logic of high intensity (if required) first followed by low intensity (to be fresher for high intensity, as even long low intensity rides cause some fatigue, even if not making you yellow status).
I’m not sure pinning a high intensity workout for Saturday addresses this as 1) I may not need high intensity depending where I am in the plan and 2) I’d be more than happy for variety and progression of the high intensity session each Saturday, while pinning presumably gives literally the same workout each week?
The pin feature will allow you to choose what workout/activity to do for a given forecast and have it persist when you Adapt Forecast. Generally, it’ll be useful when you lay out your week, for example, and have the Adapt Forecast process re-optimize around your choices. In most cases, the workouts/activities you choose will (should?) be what’s recommended but they don’t have to be.
As example, you could decide you want to train on a rest day or do a low intensity in place of a high intensity. You can choose a ride/workout you want to do, pin it, and then run Adapt Forecast and it will juggle things around your choices.
I have been struggling with “re-organising” workouts. From what I can tell, you have rough XSS(LP,HIE,PP) targets for the week and XFAI decides how best to plan it. What I’m seeing is that the way it’s splitting the work is sub-optimal for me.
For example: a 3 hour interval-style session is planned, which I guess is suggested because I usually ride outdoors for 3 hours on that day. All of the HIE for that week is in the one ride. The problem is I don’t have a power meter yet on my bikes and am reliant on using the turbo. I won’t be doing a workout of that length on the turbo.
Ideally I’d like to split that HIE work across a few days. And there in lies the problem - it’s very difficult to do that. I’ve tried manually creating the workouts and XFAI kind of ignores it.
Any suggestions on how to get around this? Pinning is useful, but I want Xert to control the progressive overload for me - not for me to calculate what it should be this week and try to backport it.
One option could be to reduce polarisation eg to 50:50 and / or reduce periodisation (unsure about the latter - that may be over a longer time horizon than polarisation). I also wonder whether increasing recovery demands would lead to more frequent, smaller HIE doses than the ‘all in one go’ approach. I’ve not played a lot with these settings.
I do think the though, that this could lead to lower fitness as you create less high TL overall… guess it’s just a trade-off
I had a play with the settings. Reducing polarisation does help distrubute the load, but not predicatably. I was under the impression that Polarised training was related to total training volume, not how that volume is distributed per week (e.g. 30 HIE in 1 day vs 7 shouldn’t matter - you’re still training at the same intensities and avoiding threshold power efforts). I might have misunderstood though.
Maybe once pinning is here I can “fence-off” certain days for endurance and we’ll see how it tries to fit in the required HIE/PP efforts. My concern would still be that it tries to put 120 XSS into one day instead of split across two days (the total stress is the same, so recovery should be unaffected?) - in which case, it once again comes down to redistribution of load. Again - please correct me if I’m way off on the understanding.
I think mathematically the more you put load into one day, the quicker you recover… am not sure if that means it’s necessarily the best advice though… frequency of training is also important if you listen to most coaches…
