Would love to see the 9 day week implemented in TR as an option. I’m probably not alone in my view, at least for some of us older semi or fully retired folks, that this is a great alternative to the standard 7 day training week. More flexibility and more room to get the rest needed. I implemented it a couple months back and while tricky to do in a weekly-based training platform, it has worked very well for me.
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Yep. It’s been asked on a number occasions for the ability to create schedules based on something other than the trad 7 day workweek. 7 days works for many but there are also those where a different schedule would better match their work/life schedule, or be physiologically advantageous.
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Welp, maybe if folks keep asking for it, it will become a thing. 
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Maybe the new AI (hopefully not in the same vein as New Coke) will be smart enough to be able to plan something other than a 7 day week…
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I’ve been hoping for, but not expecting, something that combines cycling and running training. What I’ve come up with is to alternate cycling and running workouts with a day off between each workout. That is, cycling day, day off, running day, day off, cycling day, etc. For cycling, I pick something from TrainNow. For running, I sometimes use the workout suggested by my Garmin watch; otherwise, it is just an endurance run. With this strategy, I throw away the idea of a training week completely.
I came up with this strategy after taking a TR Masters Plan and replacing the light cycling days with running days. Then I decided that I needed a day off before the run that would normally fall on Sunday, after Saturday’s hard cycling workout.
My “plan” feels consistent, but I’ll admit that it has little structure and there’s a problem figuring out how to schedule recovery “weeks”. The load may be low enough that recovery weeks aren’t needed (Oh no! You can’t say that!), but I did take two days off in a row recently. I’m also looking at how I might eliminate a day off every once in a while.
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I did this myself by just doing an interval session every 3-5 days. I would just plan my progression and then not do the next workout until I was well recovered - about 4 days. But sometimes life would push that next session to 5 days.
In between, I’d do easier rides with a focus on endurance.
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I know it’s not the same as having TR come out with some sort of 9 day week but with adaptive training and potentially the new updates doesn’t TR sort of adjust and manage it anyway? Couldn’t you just push workouts around on the calendar.
I’ve had a coach for awhile and she never shows me workouts beyond 7 days. And that’s intentional so I focus on the current week and she will setup next weeks schedule partially based on how things went this week.
that’s how I think about adaptive training to some degree.
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I hear what you’re saying. I literally setup my training using the 7 day approach and then adapt it to the 9 day approach which really works well for me (based on my own experience; not suggesting it would work for everyone). But having to tweak the schedules is a bit more work than you might think which is ok I guess, but I think it would be great if they could more seamlessly adapt to different training modalities; not everyone’s schedules work within the confines of a traditional calendar. Until then, I’ll just go ahead and continue to pound square pegs into round holes lol!
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Well, certainly there is no limit to the number of ways you can work around it based on your personal needs. I just think that AI should be smart enough to be able to do it for us. Maybe I’m just lazy lol!
Ai doesn’t do the work for TR’s programmers. It doesn’t do anything they don’t program it to do. Nate doesn’t simply type into an Ai chatbot “rewrite all our software to allow 9 day training weeks” and then the work is done.
It honestly sounds like a lot of work for TR to implement for the handful of people that might use it. Instead they’ve chose other methods of training load control.
Yeah. That makes sense. Certainly the older I get, I need that extra recovery. of course the older I get I also end up being happy just being consistent and keeping some intensity in play.
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Fair enough. Doesn’t mean we can’t request it as a feature and it doesn’t mean they have to honour the request either. The 9 day thing is admittedly a bit of an outlier but for me, it really works so it can’t hurt to at least ask them to consider it for the cohort of folks who may like the 9 day approach.
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Even something as simple as a workout every other day doesn’t fit into a 7 day schedule.
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Well, I have a workaround… the common denominator for 7 days or 9 days is 63. That means you can do 7 “cycles" of 9 training days or 9 “cycles of 7 training days in 63 days. Soooo, 63 days is pretty darn close to 2 months. Therefore, I setup a plan that lasts for two months, I have all the workouts I need for a 9 day period over 2 months (minus a day or two). I do have to figure out where I want to slot each workout based on the protocol outlined in the 9 day program which is not as straightforward as it sounds but it sorta works. That said, I’d rather spend my time training than fighting with schedules hence my feature request.
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