I want to love Plan Builder, but whenever I add time off, it seems to be at its wits end: just cancels workouts instead of adapting.
Example: two-week vacation coming up. Zero stress: sleeping in, beach walks, questionable amounts of food. Still being somewhat active, but not working out. Plan Builder gives me a recovery week before, then… one week of training followed by a recovery week after. That’s a 1 to 3 ratio of recovery to training.
The same happens, when I am adding time off to a day of intervals. Why not move that workout to another day instead of just skipping it? Both not exactly “optimal”.
Ok, time off isn’t created equal, but why not let us:
Tag time off as stressful, regular or recovery (bonus: Add in cycling vacation / training camp for more rest after. The “stage race” workaround is not time efficient and has led to similarly weird results in the past).
Ability to move/ drop in our own recovery weeks manually, so the plan builds around them.
Simple-ish tweaks, big gains!
Extra-Points / ideas:
Pre-load & Front-Load Weeks before a big rest block (e.g. increasing volume slightly)
Adaptive Post-Vacation Ramp
Postponing a rest week a couple of days when a rest block is coming up (could also be dependent on a survey of how the athlete is feeling)
Let recovery-week ratios adapt to my load, fitness, and feedback—not a fixed formula
Agreed. I do my own adapting anyway, but I’ve had these same issues when I have time off coming up, either work or vacation that keeps me off the bike.
I make that my rest period, I don’t want it to be putting in regular rest weeks before and after that. I want 3-4 weeks of training on either side of that time off.
Thanks for the feedback on this one. I think our developers are aware of this, but I’ll pass your thoughts along to them to hear anyway.
Our plans are built backwards, starting from your target event to today, so it can be tough to move the rest weeks around once you’re in the flow of a specific plan.
In these situations, it might be a good idea to get a couple of easy rides in after your time off in order to warm back up and then use TrainNow to pick a couple of productive workouts in the second half of the week. Essentially, take ~half the rest week and then ramp back up. This way, you won’t have too much time working hard before your next recovery week.
Let me know if this helps, but just know that we hear you!
Thanks for the reply Eddie! I do usually just work around it the way you suggested, and it works ok. That said, it would be fantastic if Plan Builder could handle this automatically and be smart about it.
It’s not only about adding time away after a plan has been built, but also about when the time away is entered before building the plan. In both cases, having Plan Builder adjust recovery week placement and training loads depending on the „classification“ of the time off on its own would make it a lot more flexible and save a fair bit of manual tweaking.
