How many yellow days per week are acceptable?

Training
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I wanted to start by saying that I am really enjoying the Zwift integration, and it’s helping me stay consistent! A big thank you to the TR team and everyone behind the scenes at both TR and Zwift for making this possible!

I understand that if I get a yellow day on my calendar, it means that my stress is high and I would either need to do an endurance ride or a rest day. My training has been going consistent so far thanks to the RLGL feature and I am able to absorb the stress well and Adaptive Training (AT) adapts my workouts accordingly. The concern now is that I am now in General Base III, and starting to see a lot more yellow days on my calendar. I am respecting the yellow days by either doing an endurance ride or taking the day off. Right now, there are no disruptions to my workouts, but I am a lot of yellow days on my calendar.

So I began training for this season in December of 2024, and the plan builder suggested I do 3 workouts per week. I followed that and was typically seeing about one yellow day per week, with an occasional red day. I’ve only had 2 red days this season!

My training has been very consistent in December and January, and as I started feeling more confident and able to absorb the load, I decided to increase my workout duration to 1 hour and 15 minutes each, three times per week. Here’s what my week generally looked like. I am pretty flexible on the strength training sessions as I might do them either on a hard or easy day as they depending on how I feel.

  • M: 1h15min TR workout
  • T: 1h endurance
  • W: 1h15min TR workout + 10 min strength
  • Th: Rest day
  • F: 1h15min TR workout + 10 min strength
  • S: 1h30min ski
  • Sun: Rest

I’ve been absorbing this load quite well until last week when I noticed a lot more yellow days on my calendar. The snow here is unpredictable, and I’d like to go skiing if the nearby trail has been groomed. Last week, I had 4 yellow days. I did take one rest day on a yellow day, but the rest were either endurance rides or Nordic skiing.

I was still able to complete the 3 core workouts of the week as assigned by my plan, but I’m a bit concerned about the number of yellow days. Here’s a screenshot of my calendar from last week:

yellow days
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My questions are:

  • How many yellow days per week are acceptable?
  • If I do an endurance ride on a yellow day, what’s the ideal duration? Last Sunday, I had a yellow day and was recommended to do an endurance ride. I chose a 90-minute endurance ride through TrainNow, but I was given another yellow day the next day.
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When you use phrases like “I’ve been absorbing this load quite well until last week when I noticed a lot more yellow days on my calendar”… Yellow being on your calendar isn’t definitive as to whether you’re absorbing load or not. How do you actually feel? Are you being honest about how tired you feel each day? Are you completing sessions with something left in the tank?

Yellow is just an indicator. You could be running yourself down, you might not be adequately recovering. But if you feel fine, and you’re intentionally upping the load then I wouldn’t worry.

I tend to get one yellow day a week, after my long weekend rides. But i rarely do a workout in the week that would give a spike in load.

Be honest with how you are feeling. That’s better than a colour on a screen.

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I would also add that, since you’re in the middle of a TR training plan at the moment, you might be exceeding the amount of time that is set up in that plan, thus eliciting the high number of yellow days. You might want to review that to see if you need to increase your available training time. And, as was mentioned above, definitely be sure you are honest in your post-workout assessments, as that is a determining factor with TR understanding whether you can take on additional load, or not.

Based on the snippet of calendar you included in your post, I am seeing 3 hard days last week, and 2 already this week, with what looks like it will be another tomorrow. I think 3 hard days per week is more than what TR would recommend, which is likely leading to the increased number of yellow days.

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Does the LV plan still have 3 hard days? If so, I’m guessing that’s it. He’s on a plan giving him 3 hard rides by definition, and then adding more volume, so it’s giving him yellows.

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I’m not sure that I’m in any position to advise:

IMG_5201
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However I’d echo what’s been said above, red and yellow days give useful guidance and can give you cause to pause and think “just because I can… does that mean that I should?” and maybe even an internal reason to take a break with a mental “I’m doing this because I have reason to believe that it’s the better option” label rather than “I might be just being lazy”. However, on the podcast they are pretty clear that training on yellow days is not necessarily a bad thing, you just probably want to give it some thought and be honest with yourself, especially if you’re getting a lot of them. If you really feel fine and are just ramping up in a way that you’re confident is OK for you then just be sure to take rest weeks and pay attention to yourself with a low threshold for backing off, and you’ll probably be fine.

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Mine looks like somewhere between yours and @Grayham at the moment.

It seems to be a fairly basic calculation looking at the TSS and a couple of rolling TSS windows.
Likely comparing 1,3,7 day and 6 week. i wish their algorithm had more historical calculation in it. Perhaps it does. For example. I took almost the entire week off and did one race on the weekend and it relighted me for the next day.

It seems to be giving you these because your recent TSS through November-December is very low compared to Your summer. Mine looks worse because I had a major crash in November and averaged 100 weekly TSS for the last 6 weeks of the year.

I checked their ML algorithm vs my history. Back when I was riding as I wanted and averaging 700 TSS every week while riding every day, it almost never threw any cautions. It only through a caution on a ride i named “finally tired” . I also looked at huge volume sedona vacations with 3 hour MTB rides every day. It would get yellow in the end of the trip which was accurate, because we usually go hard with 15 hour MTB weeks out there.

I would say let it do its thing for now. It will catch up as your volume gets a higher 6 week history. If you feel great on a yellow day, do you thing. If you are getting a red, be very introspective.

Also, make sure your HR TSS isnt giving you too high of a tss

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In answer to the title… EIGHT!

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Glad to hear you’re enjoying the Zwift integration! :tada:

We don’t necessarily have a precise recommendation as to how many yellow days per week an athlete “should” have or are acceptable. A few yellow (or even red) days each week is typically quite normal and may even be expected, though – it’s common to see them pop up as you push your limits during training.

If you were getting yellow or red days every day, however, that would probably be cause for alarm!

From the screenshot you posted, though, I think it looks like you’re balancing everything very well. Your 3 core “hard” workouts seem to tend to fall on “normal” (non-yellow/red) days when you should be recovered and ready to go. :muscle:

Keeping your yellow days easier is also the right move and what we’d recommend, so keep it up!

For those Z2 rides on your yellow days, we’d generally recommend doing an “Achievable” session. Those would likely be about the same length as your other rides in your plan (which look to be about an hour in duration right now).

If you increase the duration of those rides, you may find that you get another yellow day on your TR Calendar (or even a red day if you’ve accumulated enough stress). That isn’t, however, a bad thing, especially if you’d like to increase your volume a little bit. Going from ~1hr rides to ~1.5hr rides is a pretty reasonable bump, so if you have a day off planned the following day, then getting a yellow/red day afterward in that case isn’t that big a deal as you’ll have a planned day to recover already waiting for you.

As other athletes mentioned, do stay in touch with how you’re feeling physically and mentally moving through your plan as you see yellow/red days, though. Those days act as warning signs for when your training is getting tough, so if you start to feel excess fatigue, don’t be afraid to back off a bit to keep everything on track!

Hope that helps answer your questions – feel free to let us know if you have any more!

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I think the base LV plan does but I’m on the Masters LV and its only got 2 intense days.

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I’m doing a plan with 4 days a week (Tue, Thu, Sat, Sun) and have been getting yellow every day after a workout. That means I get yellow for the Sun workouts, which so far have been 45 min Endurance workout. Is it correct to assume that if this was indicative of a problem, the plan would make appropriate adaptations?

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That’s correct – if there were an issue, your plan would propose adaptations for you. Getting yellow days after your harder workouts isn’t necessarily a “surprise” or “unexpected,” and you should be able to do those Endurance rides even on yellow days. :slight_smile:

Your plan looks to be set up quite nicely from what I can see – it looks like you have what we’d consider a “normal” amount of yellow days, and they seem to fall on rest days/easier days rather than on the days of your harder workouts.

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I am able to complete the 3 assigned workouts every week without any issues. These workouts are 1 hour and 15 minutes each, and I feel well-rested with fresh legs on the days that I have a hard workout. However, on the days that I do not have a prescribed workout, I can get on the bike and do an endurance ride for about 1 hour or 1 hour and 15 minutes.

Given that my plan includes 3 workouts per week, I feel that I need to take it quite easy on the days when I don’t have any assigned workouts. I wouldn’t want to add any intensity on those days to ensure that I feel fresh for my hard days. I feel like I could add more volume, but it needs to be in mid Z2 or lower. Last week, I just wanted to go skiing on a yellow day, so I did, and although I initially planned it to be for an hour, I ended up skiing for 2 hours because I really enjoyed that day, and the conditions were excellent. As a result, I ended up getting another yellow day, as you can see on my calendar.

As for my post-workout surveys, all the assigned workouts feel “hard,” and I select this option because I can still do one set of intervals if needed. In other words, I do have something left in the tank, but at the same time, my progression levels are increasing without me overloading myself.

Thanks, Zack, this is another great idea. I typically do another “productive” endurance workout, but I did try some “achievable” ones, and they seem very manageable. Right now, fatigue is manageable, and all my workouts are on green days. I am also looking for ways to increase volume, and yesterday I had a yellow day, so I did a 1h15m achievable endurance workout. Though there was a bit of heaviness in my legs when I first started to spin, 20 minutes in, I felt fine, and the intensity was very manageable.

@ZackeryWeimer Would you say that as long as an athlete is adhering to RLGL’s recommendations — that is, doing an endurance ride on a yellow day and a rest day on a red day — it does not really matter how many red or yellow days one has on the calendar?

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I think it depends on your intent.

RLGL gives an objective view on your subjective experience. If you have a random life and get out for long hard rides whenever you can, and there’s no real structure then you will likely feel that it’s contradicting what you can do, if you have a fairly consistent, structured week then the reds and yellows should appear when you think they would, and you have an easy day planned anyway. I’ve found it discourages catchup days and hero rides.

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Generally speaking, if every day on one’s Calendar were to be a red/yellow day, we might recommend going through Plan Builder again to see what its recommended volume would be and making adjustments from there.

But if red/yellow days seem to pop up in “alignment” with the plan (e.g., if we see red/yellow days happening around hard days rather than on them or if we see them appearing on days that were already meant to be rest days/Endurance days), then we wouldn’t worry about it too much. :slight_smile:

Plus, as an athlete continues to train, Adaptive Training/Red Light Green Light will learn what the athlete is capable of in training and we may start to see those red/yellow days change/disappear altogether.

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