My question is this: if you have, say, a week off for a holiday or something like that, and the week before is already scheduled to be a rest week, should we move the rest week to the week off? Because if we let the schedule adjust itself, it will just delete the week off and keep the week before as a rest week. But it seems inefficient not to count on the almost non-exercise of the week off, and not putting more load on the week before.
And if we decide to postpone the rest week, if we do the week that we should have done during the holiday week in advance, it will have less TSS than the week before the originally planned rest week, and so we still arrive at the rest week with no progression from the previous weeks, but with an increase and a decrease.
If your week off is gonna be a week fully off (travel, vacation, business, etc), the I will usually go into it a bit more tired than normal going into a normal rest week.
I need to be in Taipei and China the week of Jan 13, but my plan has a rest week the week right before that. So I will adjust it to change the rest week to a full week of training. That said, you need to listen to your body….if the workouts are too hard or you are overly fatigued, stick with the originally planned rest week.
I do this too. Or, if I’m already feeling some fatigue, I sometimes move it so I have 2 weeks on, a recovery week, 1 week on, and then the travel week.
As @Power13 has described, oftentimes “time off” isn’t really restful.
Travel and work can be stressful, and even “relaxing” vacations can leave us exhausted by the end. This is why we don’t assume that all time away from TrainerRoad will have you return fresher than when you left.
If you are confident enough to make adjustments to the schedule, feel free to do so, but I’d do your best to ensure that you’re still getting a solid recovery week every 3-4 weeks. Missing an opportunity to truly recover and adapt in the span of 8-9 weeks could (and likely will) cause issues down the road.