I think it or something similar may have been mentioned before, but I would like to be able to add a ‘minimum focus’ constraint when defining availability. E.g. I could then limit weekends (or whatever days) to endurance workouts and ‘force’ XFAI to give intensity during the week on shorter rides. Currently I seem to mostly get intensity on long weekend rides, which has some effects which don’t really work for me…
Aside from making weekends very tough as they are both long and high intensity (and back to back), the XFAI ‘long and intense’ approach seems to impact focus and interval targets, which can be seen in the Autogen workouts. I guess because the weekend intensity ride is also long with a lot of moderate ‘low XSS’ which by nature increases focus duration, I find the Autogen intervals are much more intense than my actual focus e.g. today my training advice interval targets were 380w (probably what most would call ‘vo2’ for lack of a better term), but doing intervals at that intensity, plus a fair amount of moderate low XSS would lengthen overall ride focus… Autogen solution is to prescribe intervals at much higher intensity (in my case repeats of 470w for 2min plus 10min endurance top of z2) which is really tough, definitely anaerobic for each intensity interval, and also long for an anaerobic interval even if theoretically my signature suggests I should be able to do it. To me that really changes the nature of the workout from high aerobic and doesn’t seem right (aside from the fact I failed each one miserably, then lost motivation and cut the workout short!)
Of course open to other solutions e.g. adding some configurability of Autogen to
constrain the focus of the interval rather than the whole workout… or
to add more frequent shorter intervals when they are anaerobic… I possibly could have finished it if they were 1min plus 5min endurance… or 30 sec plus 2.5min endurance… that could be a preference or arguably should be the default for very short focus duration intervals
Am aware I can manually pin endurance workouts but it’s a lot of manual work to add progression to those each week… would be far better if automated
Have you tried adjusting the Program Difficulty slider? If it’s set to the right, you will see more intensity on longer rides. XFAI needs to find places for enough intensity for you to reach your target and have enough recovery. Note that if you slide it back to the left, it can impact your ability to reach the target.
We have some work to do still on Autogen. It attempts to create a workout that meets the low, high and peak XSS targets. Focus duration and Specificity aren’t part of the generation process. It just tries to balance the duration of the workout with the difficulty while meeting the low, high and peak XSS goals.
It does this in a general way. Sometimes, it can generate workouts that are pretty tough and require more motivation and concentration that many are used to. In some ways though, if your target is going to put you into fitness territory you’ve never been, you may need to find a way to get through these in order to reach your target. I know… easier said… but I’ve learned to do harder workouts with practice so there is something to be said about that and I’m reaching new highs. That being said, we are looking to improve some situations where the workouts generated could be better aligned with the difficulty that the user should be able to handle … without impacting their ability to reach their target by requiring too much training time. If we make workouts easier, they get longer in duration and you end up not having enough availability to reach your targets. Signficant balancing act to bring all this together.
Pinning is the solution for now since creating more options to instruct the FAI engine just makes it more complicated for us to implement and support and for users to manage too. It’s already pretty high on the configurability side so creating more simplications is likely more palatable than making things even more complicated. Try the Difficulty setting…
In terms of autogen, we had started on a more comprehensive autogen front end but that’s been put aside until we finish the bulk of what’s needed to bring FAI out of beta. We have Race AI coming and really, really need to update the EBC apps too. There are other pretty high prioirity improvements we need to make as well other updates that are just needed even if they don’t add any new features.
