TRAINING PLAN GUIDE - GENERAL RULES

We write our training plans the way we do for a specific reason - we’re trying to ensure that you balance out the recovery from the training, with the training stress itself. In many ways, it’s helpful to think of the recovery day as the most important day of the week - if you don’t recover adequately from training, you might was well not be training at all. It’s that important! For this reason, we try to schedule a full recovery day after your longest, most fatigue producing day of the week (usually your longest ride), and we try to balance recovery into the week by spreading out the harder, more intense, or longer sessions, with shorter, lower intensity sessions. We understand that you won’t always be able to do the sessions on the days they are written, but, if you are going to move them about, remember our guiding principle - RECOVERY FIRST.

This means that, if you’re left with the choice of either having to do two long or hard sessions back to back, or skip one, we’ll often advise you skip one. What we don’t want is you digging a fatigue hole so deep that you can’t get out of it. We’ve seen, in the past, highly motivated athletes do things like complete their longest ride from one week on a Sunday, then, realising that they have a lot of disruption to their schedule the following week, they’ve tried to complete the endurance ride from the following week the very next day. “It was the only way I could fit it in,” they’ve said - possibly expecting to be rewarded for ‘getting it done, no matter what. We don’t want you to do that!

Remember, you’ll always have to plan ahead - and if, in planning ahead, you realise that you can’t get everything done that week and still recover adequately - that’s OK. The smart thing to do is to choose what to do, and what to leave out, to balance out your training load with your recovery requirements.

For our coached athletes, we’re always here to answer questions and advise - but please ask before you do something if you’re unsure. It’s one of the areas where it’s NOT better to ask for forgiveness than permission !

If you do have to move your sessions around, use these rules for moving training plan sessions to different days.

General rules:
* ALWAYS have a recovery day each week - either total rest or only do the recovery swim. The best day of the week for this is the day after your longest session.

* If you are completing a swim + another session on the same day, whenever possible complete the swim first.

* Other swims can be completed on any day, in combination with any other session.

* Don't ever complete a Key Run on the same day as a bike session, unless written in the plan as a specific 'Brick' run.

* Other runs can be completed on the same day as either bike or swim sessions.

* When you’re in competition season, don’t complete your long run on the day after your long endurance bike, unless the training plan already has that in the schedule. Especially for our Ironman athletes, we we only schedule the long run the day after the long ride on a very small number of weeks - and only when you’re well trained. It’s really important to try to complete your long run on fresh legs - that really limits the risk of injury.

If you’re using the app on your phone or ipad, the way to move sessions is to change the date of the session. You can simply drag and drop it on the calendar if you use a traditional computer.