I’m building out my training plan through Memorial Day Weekend with Plan Builder. I’ve used plan builder a few times before and have had pretty good success until now.
With this spring I have a trip where I would be effectively off the bike and relaxing on a beach somewhere. So I went ahead and included these 10 days off in the process.
Looking at the resulting plan (screenshot above), it seems to me that Plan Builder doesn’t adjust anything based on time off but just deletes the scheduled activities of those days. Build phase starts with a normal 3-week block followed by a recovery week. Then I’ll get a ramp test, endurance 30 min, and 1 workout before the 10-day break. After I get back the final week of build workouts before another rest week. This would be 4 out of 5 weeks of recovery, TSS well below normal which doesn’t make much sense.
I’m probably stretching the parameters of the plan builder here but was wondering if anyone else has had different experiences with plan builder using time off.
Happy to clarify! For shorter breaks like your week to ten days off, it’s unlikely to result in a significant loss of fitness, so your plan will be adjusted simply to move around the time off. Longer periods off the bike will likely result in more substantial adaptations that reduce the intensity or duration of your upcoming workouts, as you gradually build back to your previous level of fitness.
So I’m curious - does Plan Builder account for the activity completed within a block?
Our only the duration of the block itself?
The way I read this:
Is that Plan Builder doesn’t help you build your fitness in blocks of work (meaning 4 weeks of workouts between ramp tests, as in this example).
Instead, what it implies is that Plan Builder schedules ramp tests every four weeks, and if your time off is less than some threshold (I’m guessing maybe 3 weeks?), it just had you do whatever workouts for between those 4 weeks.
I would expect Plan Builder to reschedule the ramp test so that I performed 4 weeks of workouts in between ramp tests.
The way in which your plan adapts/restructures as a result of time off is based upon the duration of your time off, so results can vary, but Plan Builder is not just omitting that week or deleting it. Your plan is instead being adapted by moving, restructuring, or sometimes both, the workouts during your assigned time off.
I’m tagging on with this thread, I created a plan using plan builder: HV leading into an event. Plan started in November.
I won’t be training from the 8th-18th January. Plan builder in the next 37 days has only scheduled 7 days of hard workouts, the rest are recovery days.
It certainly seems plan builder just puts the time off into the calendar without any real thought about the training plan.
Below is what it has created:
26/12: recovery week
02 Jan: 1 week of Build
08-18th planned time off
19/01; 4workouts (3 effort, 1 recovery)
23 Jan: recovery week
It definitely feels like I would have been better off manually adjusting the plan vs plan builder giving 2 recovery weeks with not much to recover from.
In regards to different adaptations you may have been expecting, we don’t automatically assume that one’s time off is as restorative as a rest week, and often times it’s best to take the rest week after time away to ease back into things. However, some might like to take a different approach.
Given the amount of time between your time off and your A race, you will need a rest week somewhere, and if you’d like to move it, I’d refer to the methods described in the thread linked above.
If you have any issues with these workarounds, don’t hesitate to reach out! We’d be happy to give you a hand.
