I am curious about the polarity ratio, its in the 90s for most my forecast but I have it set to default 80:20 so should that be what it moves toward (I’ve got 3.5% periodization so imagine that will impact too)
Interesting to hear. I noticed I get a lot of 3 and a bit stars and higher recommended for high intensity days despite only having ~1.8 training status. For user selection I wouldn’t be too sure what to choose. What I have observed is that often but not always it suggests a 30 minute 4 star workout for what XFAI is saying would be a longer session (so less low intensity) so could improvements in estimated training time also help?
Havent explored more deeply though as it’s been a non-issue since I haven’t done the recommendations choosing to ride outdoors or zwift race instead.
I have been through that article and I have experimented with a few different fitness signatures (assuming higher HIE and lower TP and vice versa). When endurance intervals feel right, the high intensity are undoable and vice versa. And then I get a breakthrough and all becomes hard again! I am recovering from a shoulder operation but it was 5 months ago that I am doing 6+ hours a week of riding for the past 3-4 months. I am only holding back in sprinting, affecting the kick you get at the first 10-15 seconds.
I will write to the support. Compared past plans I followed and other platforms, xert’s workouts are definitely much harder. Maybe it’s my age, my capacity for recovery or maybe I have grew to a very “lazy” rider from all those zwift flat races where I am riding tempo and give it all once in the last 2-4 minutes.
XFAI should account for this already and will get better with the next update. The factors at the moment that govern how much intensity get prescribed are:
You current low, high and peak training and recovery loads.
Your Recovery Demands setting
Your Polarization Level setting.
Your training load increases you need to do the maintain progressive overload towards your goal.
These 4 combine to tell XFAI how much XSS you should do:
1 and 2 determine your red/yellow/blue status before and after the training
3 determines how many days of yellow that will follow
4 determines how much of low, high and peak xss you need to keep pace with increases you need to reach your goal/event
XFAI looks as each of these day to day throughout the plan and makes them fit during the Adapt or Forecast AI process. It’s optimizing and making the puzzle fit.
So if you can’t complete a workout, it’s likely due to 2 or 3. You either need more recovery (so you’ll get less low, high and peak xss prescribed) or polarization level is too much and getting a 80:20 dose of high/peak might be more than you can handle.
The next version should account for workout duration better and avoid large high/peak XSS days, even if they meet all the above criteria.
In the planner tab, I a see a suggested workout (mostly low intensity) every day, and/or a rest day. There’s a couple of symbols underneath …. no clock icon underneath any of the days though.
So I’m being daft - I know I must be.
I’ve gone back in to the forecast AI thing to see if I can specify availability in there but it just asks me for hours, polar or not, watts increase, focus and end date (seems I need 12.5hrs a week to improve 20 min capability by 3 watts. Gonna be a tough 9-10 week block this one !!
When you first forecast a plan (without Availability configured), Forecast AI considers the max hours/week you set along with your recent history (what you typically ride by day of the week).
Once the plan is forecast you can refine your schedule by day. For example, set Mondays as Unavailable and Saturdays as your longest day of the week. Then recast the plan with your newly defined constraints.
Ta. I took a screenshot at the time but forgot to attach.
Was the same on my phone browser too. Anyway, your screenshot/info clearly shows three buttons vs my two, so must be something to do with that. I’ll figure it out - as long as I can do the days off thing is all that matters.
Learned something the other day I thought I’d share…
My Saturday HIT workout from last week was repaired afterwards with FitFileTools to remove a power spike that resulted in the workout being automatically flagged.
Without the flag PP would have jumped to 2200.
Importing the fixed file back into Xert worked fine but left me with a clear circle and no way to compare Forecasted versus Completed.
I filed a support request mentioning the issue and it turns out a recent update to XO handles merging of activities with the scheduled forecast.
So, I deleted the entry and upon reimport I have the results I wanted indicating the mostly High strain load I missed by skipping some HI intervals.
Same here.
I am not super bummed if I can’t make it through them all at 100% when I’m trying 100%.
I also don’t do well with VO2max intervals unless they stick close to yellow for most of the interval.
Consider adding some notes you can refer to in the future when the same workout comes up again. Or use the experience to steer you towards another selection next time.
For example, these were the top four workouts for me today.
This was my first HIT following a rest day in a couple weeks. That may have been a factor but I could have done another set (getting harder but doable). That would have put me closer to the Target XSS ratio. You can tell when that’s going to happen by the color (!) of the Suitability circle.
Instead of –
In this scenario (none of the top four were green) I could have used Autogen to match the target but I hadn’t ridden My Way or the Highway before and wanted to try it.
The XSS ratio shortfall caused the red dot to appear on Adapt Forecast.
What you do (or don’t do) today affects the forecast plan, potentially weeks from now.
When this occurs you have the option to let it ride (view your current and following week to decide) or run Adapt Forecast and watch what changes on your Forecast Chart before committing. Example –
You’ll notice as you run the routine it first checks the next 7 days (green highlight appears) then scans forward to your Target Date and rebalances your plan to remove magentas (broken constraints).
I needed a pause on the remaining intervals. Burn zone got to be too much after 90 secs.
You get old and VO2max declines no matter what. In my case neuropathy is a factor.
I threw in a couple 1-minute efforts at similar watts in Slope mode before cooldown as I expected to come up short on High strain. Got close enough.
Lots of low-intensity endurance just under LTP to build back up my low training load & threshold power. Looks like XFAI has me doing just 1 or 2 high-intensity sessions each week, which makes sense given my program is using 80:20 polarization.
So far I feel that I’m on my way to achieving my Target 10 min Power Goal by early July:
Hey Scott, I went for +10 watts on my 8 minute power.
Xert pretty much said you’ll be lucky in that amount of time but gave me something.
I’ll be upping the hours a fair amount from what I’m used to but we’ll see how it goes.
I have pink bars in my forecast chart, what does that mean? Yours are all blue and so are the ones on in the documentation example.
My modest Jan 3 to March 31 Goal was a 10 pt increase in GC Specialist power.
I reached 20+ pts higher four weeks prior to Target Date so I leveled off TL then scaled back from the 13.5 max hours I had originally configured and took some time off (age-related issues).
The tallest entries are outdoor rides including yesterday’s 70 miler LIT endurance.
In my case neuropathy is a factor.
's! 
