I get this question a lot and rightly so – as none of us are pro athletes that do not have to worry about pesky things like the day job, picking the kids up from school etc
Good news is that it is generally fine to move sessions around to match your work/life balance and training availability.
In fact, it is one of the benefits of being a Training Peaks permium subscriber as you can easily drag/drop the sessions in your calendar
Having said that please follow the key guidelines below to make sure you are not making some basic mistakes
- Don’t fight the constraint – If you find yourself pushing lots of sessions to the end of the week, treat the end of the week as your cutoff and do NOT push those sessions to the following week. Those are simply missed sessions. Don’t sweat it, and focus on hitting good numbers next week
- Be conscious of intensity/muscle overload – Be careful not to do too many difficult sessions back-to-back, or too many sessions that are targeting the same muscle groups, e.g. hard bike workout followed by a hard run workout. As a general rule of thumb – think easy session- hard session – easy session etc
- Learn to prioritise –If you’re really crunched, prioritize in this order:
Long bike/brick → long run → endurance swim
- Dont be afraid of swopping in sessions – If training with your club/training partners works better for you during a standard week – that is ok as the plan can accommodate that
For example, it is completely cool to swop in a club swim session for a speed or technical session in the plan (as long as that is the coaches focus for that set)
This applies to the bike and run sets too e.g. a vo2 run session with a club track session would be good.
But a couple of things to note –
(1) Make sure you are swopping like with like e.g. speed with speed, long slow with long slow etc
(2) There are some key sessions you should definitely complete on your own and at your numbers e.g. Endurance swims, any race pace run/bikes etc – do not fall into the trap of training with your mates all the time and either under/over training as a result (remember these are the people you need to beat on race day for the bragging rights 😉