Hello there, I have switched to athletica from Train As one this week- and have some questions for more experienced users:
Low/mid volume- I find low volume not giving me gym days when I want them (even with beta function scheduling on). But mid volume, despite being limited to 7h/week, hours skyrocket with 11h of running on first week of training!
Witch practice do you find more useful/aligned with periodization- Adding gym sessions on low volume or removing a tone of planned activities from mid volume training plan?
2.How does more races influence training plan creation? In Train As One, having 10k race after a marathon would give me a little different marathon plan, does it matter in athletica, or I can just have one race and add another when needed?
(beta) I have set my schedule as on screenshot attached, but my plan looks like on second screenshot every week - Have I made some kind of mistake with configuration? On mid-volume plan gym sessions are in place- but other activities trying to have me dead of fatigue before easter
Feedback for creators, what I have noticed is lacking when compared to Train As One:
-Easy configuration of schedule for every day of the week (max minutes, min minutes, lack of speed sessions (extremely useful to block hard intervals etc day after hard gym training
-Month view where you can tick a day and set special training rules- If you want to have free day you tick it, and it generates plan with day-off- so you don’t have to delete any activities on the go, plan is generated to take that into account.
But still, athletica seems lvl higher than TAO- better charts, better training sessions and periodization shown to user are gamechangers!
Hello, I’ll just tackle #1. Welcome to Athletica!
You have several options here. One is to change the number of hours in the mid volume or low volume plan to reflect your time constraints. Go to Settings/ Training/ and change your hours.
For my athletes, I generally assign their strength workout on the same day as intervals so the hard days are hard. It seems you’re a runner so I would mostly do the intervals first, then strength training. You could always do the strength training early in the morning then intervals in the afternoon but I’d rather have you switch them.
You can also extend your aerobic endurance runs if you have the time and energy. For example, doing a moderate run on Saturday AND Sunday gives you some really good training stimulus without the stress of a really long run on one day.
I have changed hours, and outcome is:
-on mid volume- I get errors that I should go to lower volume due to lack of hours avaiable
On low volume- I get errors that my fitness is to high for this - and I should go for mid volume
Kinda disorientating, but could you tell me, based on your experience with athletica.ai, does it break a training plan if after recovery phase I would switch to other volume plan? Or it will keep periodization in place?
It should keep pretty close in place. I had the same issue - on low volume it yelled that my bike / swim fitness was too high, consider mid-volume, and on mid-volume it yelled that my run fitness wasn’t high enough, try low-volume. FYI you can turn the warnings off, but I like them (along with the overtraining alerts) for balance and awareness, and as a metric of where I am, so just ignore them unless meaningful.
As a result though, I went back and forth between low and mid volume plans quite a few times, and then rebuilt the plans another few times trying to get the beta time constraints working. The good news: it tracked my fitness throughout, kept similar intensities and durations for individual workouts, and also kept periodization for the most part since I didn’t delete any races from the settings. It might switch a week two build for a week 1, but the impact was minor and the tapers stayed at the same place.
If I noticed a long run or ride was shortened after the new plan started, e.g. in the immediate week thatI’d been planning on, I sometimes just decided to go longer. The plan would then recognize that and level up the next week appropriately.
Low volume plan doesn’t give you strength work, because we are prioritizing endurance work. We could argue back and worth about the importance of strength work, but at the end of the day, you must make a personal decision where you want to spend you time in. If anyone is on low volume plan and wants those in, consider generating mid volume plan, save those strength sessions into your library, generate low volume plan again, and insert those strength training sessions into your weeks.
I don’t know if you brought your historical data and you’ve had some higher weeks previously, that could possibly impact the volume of hours. If not, it could be a bug. Also check your advanced settings. How many hours did you give as guardrails? (maybe add a screenshot here)
I think you forgot to attach screenshots… We definitely don’t want to bin you. Sometimes when giving too many constraints, the output is not optimal. Please share the screenshots and I can advise.
When it comes to advice about “your fitness is too high or too low”… The system is likely still trying to get to know you, and you are kind of in between low and mid volume plans. Here, my advice is to consider, do you have a little more time in your week to train, and do you feel like you could handle a little more training, even if it is low intensity ? If answer is yes! Adding a little bit volume, can nudge you to the mid volume bin, and those warnings will disappear.
Hope this helps you get started. Also, remember the importance of doing the test week…
FYI you can turn the warnings off, but I like them (along with the overtraining alerts) for balance and awareness, and as a metric of where I am, so just ignore them unless meaningful.
We definitely don’t want to bin you. Sometimes when giving too many constraints, the output is not optimal. Please share the screenshots and I can advise.