Training on four on, four off nights
What a cycling week actually looks like on a four-on four-off twelve-hour night roster: where the hard session goes, why the block days carry nothing, and a fortnight of sessions worked out in full.
Who works it. Continuous-process industry, refineries and power generation, warehousing, and a good share of twelve-hour nursing contracts.
What makes it hard. Four twelve-hour nights wipe out half the cycle, and the recovery days that follow are not training days either — the first one is for sleep. That leaves a narrow, very good window in the middle of the off-block, and almost everyone wastes it by training on the wrong days.
What a fortnight actually looks like
This is not an example typed out by hand. It is the output of the same rule engine that builds the plan on the front page, run against a four on, four off (nights) roster. The shift decides the size of each day, then the hard session goes in the best remaining window, then endurance fills what is left.
| When | Shift | Session, and why it is there | TSS |
|---|---|---|---|
| Days 1–4 Mon–Thu | 12 h night | Rest A twelve-hour shift. Nothing planned: thirty easy minutes after food at most, and it does not count as training. | — |
| Day 5 Fri | Day off | Endurance 45′ · 45 min First day after the nights. Easy riding resets the body clock faster than lying still. Below 40 on Body Battery, skip it without guilt. | 31 |
| Day 6 Sat | Day off | Tempo 2 × 12 · 62 min The hard session goes here: the best window of the week — slept, with a free morning. Quality needs Body Battery of at least 50, over 6 h of sleep and HRV still balanced. Miss one and you move the session by a day rather than shortening it. | 52 |
| Day 7 Sun | Day off | Long ride 2 h · 120 min The week's longest ride. On a low-carb diet this is what moves fat, not the intervals. Below 40 on Body Battery, skip it without guilt. | 89 |
| Day 8 Mon | Day off | Sweet spot 3 × 10 · 70 min The day before a run of nights. Quality is fine, a long ride is not: two hours costs far more recovery than seventy minutes of intervals. Quality needs Body Battery of at least 50, over 6 h of sleep and HRV still balanced. Miss one and you move the session by a day rather than shortening it. | 65 |
| Days 9–12 Tue–Fri | 12 h night | Rest A twelve-hour shift. Nothing planned: thirty easy minutes after food at most, and it does not count as training. | — |
| Day 13 Sat | Day off | Endurance 45′ · 45 min First day after the nights. Easy riding resets the body clock faster than lying still. Below 40 on Body Battery, skip it without guilt. | 31 |
| Day 14 Sun | Day off | Endurance 60′ · 60 min Endurance fills the rest of the week. It is what the base is actually made of. Below 40 on Body Battery, skip it without guilt. | 42 |
Sessions are written as percentages of FTP, so they scale to whoever rides them — there is nothing here tuned to one person's numbers. The quality session lands on day 6, day 8; the longest ride on day 7. Change the roster and both move, which is the entire point.
The three things this roster decides for you
The block is maintenance, not training.
Four nights in a row is a sleep-debt problem before it is a training problem. Anything you ride during the block is withdrawn from the recovery you need to train properly on day six. Plan nothing; thirty easy minutes if you feel like it, and it does not count.
Day one off is not day one of training.
You finish the last night in the morning and sleep through the day. Treating that as a free day is the most common mistake on this roster — it produces a session you ride badly and recover from slowly.
The middle of the off-block is the best training window any shift worker gets.
Two consecutive properly slept days with no work either side. That is where the hard session belongs, and on a four-day break you can put a long ride next to it without either one ruining the other.
Do it with your own dates
The fortnight above starts on an arbitrary Monday. Yours does not. The week planner takes the shifts you actually have next week and places the sessions the same way, in your browser, with nothing sent anywhere.
The reasoning behind every placement is written out on the rules page — including the rule I got wrong first time and had to change after it failed against my own data. Eating around the same roster is covered on the nutrition page.
I work a rotating roster myself and publish the whole plan and its results, including the weeks that go badly. That is the only claim this site makes: not that it works for everyone, but that it is real and you can check it.