Forcing a harder week

Is there any way to force a harder week in TR? Like many of you, I’m returning home after the holidays. While on vacation I didn’t have access to my trainer and ran instead of biked. TR has me doing a recovery week next week, but that seems unnecessary. Is there a way to automatically force next week to be an “on” week? If there’s no automatic way to do it, should I instead try to just manually select activities next week that would correspond to a normal week for me?

you can swap entire weeks at once on the calender.

2nd option would be to restart the plan with the upcoming week (depends on how far in the future you plan).

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I’d just do harder TrainNow workouts, ‘Attacking’ or ‘Climbing’ and let the plan adapt, let AI doing the thinking, rather than you overthinking.

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I have the same problem coming up. A week off of vacation… and the plan gives me a recovery week when I get home that had a >50% reduction in training volume from the prior weeks (had increased volume from plan default)…

I just replaced rides with alternates when possible, then added my own in. I have specific rides I like to do when coming back from a week or two off anyways.

Do consider that by doing this you will have more weeks in a row without a recovery week, meaning you will be starting with a bit more fatigue than the plan is expecting. And that with even a week off, you will have lost a bit of fitness so may be more fatigued from these rides than you were before you left.

How do you swap weeks? Is that in the app or on the website? Not sure I see that option.

Don’t know about the cycling part but traveling with two kids I always feel like I need a vacation to recover from my “vacation.” :upside_down_face:

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I’d just mimic the week I missed. Three/four workouts dragged over in calendar.

I don’t know if you backdate the training plan for “travel” but I’d look at that option, too.

Yup I added travel when I made the plan, but TR decided to do a rest week after anyways.

yeah trainerroad does not adjust at all to travel or sickness. it just removes the workouts on those days but thats about it.

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Ease into your training. You will never regret being gentle to your body. Can’t say the same for doing too much too soon

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Browser/calendar on the far right of each week you see your totals and below the totals it says „quick action“ you can choose there between „delete, move and copy week“

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Funny enough, this was all moot as I came back from the holidays sick, so I’m going to take a recovery week anyway!

Unless Trainerroad knew?

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There isn’t a good way to “force” a harder week, unfortunately, but you could use TrainNow to pick up a few tougher workouts to spice up your week a bit if you’d like.

The issue with that approach is that you’re probably not getting a full rest week in an eight-week period then. As you mentioned, you did some running which is often much more stressful than cycling, and many athletes come back from their “vacations” surprisingly fatigued which is why we don’t assume that time off is purely recovery.

If you do decide to modify your rest week, make sure to modify the following week to be a bit lighter as well. Pushing through eight weeks of training without true recovery isn’t going to get you anywhere, but having a little more time to adapt often will.

There’s a whole other side of this though which I completely understand. For me, it’s often those times away from training (vacation, holidays, even illness) when I miss being active the most. I feel further away from it than on a typical rest week, and mentally I want it more.

The truth is that not all of us are here to remain 100% strict with a training schedule and use training for reasons other than simply increasing our speed when out riding, so I understand why sometimes it’s necessary to make changes to your plan.

I’d say, do whatever you feel you need to, but pay extra attention to how you feel physically and mentally to ensure that you’re backing off and recovering when you need to. Stress hormone comes in the form of physical and mental stress, so just remember that it’s all going in the same bucket! :bucket:

Is there any way for adaptive training to do a better job of planning around vacations? For example: currently, my off day is on Friday. If I add Time Off in TR for Saturday/Sunday, TR doesn’t do anything to adapt my plan for the week in preparation. ie: it might give me the option of finishing the week with a hard workout on Friday.

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