I’ve been testing Athletica for a couple of weeks and my main area of confusion is that the plan doesn’t seem to update in any meaningful way after harder sessions (“above compliance”). I would expect the system to reduce the load of my next training day(s) after a harder-than-planned workout. Did I miss something in the settings?
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Dear @Francois thank you for raising the question and welcome to the blog.
You’re not missing anything relevant, I think. It’s just that the logic behind the prescribed sessions does not react “instantly” to a spike in the load or to an “above compliance” session. Athletica has some guardrails to guide you and, apparently, if the following sessions were untouched, it means that you were still safely within those guardrails. The moment Athletica will detect some possible issues related to the load it will let you know, and you will be either prescribed a lower load in the following days (it also depends on the kind of activity, kind of session, etc), or you will be warned with a message or info point.
Athletica offers also the possibility to change the planned session with the “Workout Wizard”. We always say: “trust your feelings” when it comes to follow the prescriptions or the warnings.
You can find much more info on how sensitive Athletica is to changes in your training loads all over the forum. It’s always a great topic of conversation. By being curious, testing, and trying to see what Athletica does in response to our training is the best approach. You should find out that the “inertia” of the logic (so how fast/slow it can steer) has to do with your training program, the different sport modalities, and your training volume. For example, the higher your chronic training load (aka the load you can sustain at regime) will make the logic more stable and less sensitive to variations in the load. In other words, Athletica keeps the green light on because the data indicate that you can keep on going. Athletica is conservative by design: we’d rather fail in prescribing a smaller load than in prescribing a higher load. But, again, trust your feelings.
I hope this helps!
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