How the plan is built
Structure
- Three blocks of 3 + 1. Three weeks of rising load, then recovery. Each block ends with a ramp test.
- Written in % of FTP. A new test changes one number; every watt target, zone and workout file follows.
- Time near threshold grows from about 50 minutes a week to over two hours above 85% FTP.
- Tools: sweet spot 88–90%, threshold 95–98%, over-unders 105/90%, VO₂max used sparingly.
Built around shift work
- Early shift (05:30–14:00): the ride is a short evening session, 45–65 min, after a 04:15 alarm.
- Afternoon shift (13:30–22:00): a free morning, 08:00–10:30. The best window in the roster — thresholds and VO₂max land here.
- Night shift (21:30–06:00): easy Z2 only, around 16:00, after a slept-through day. Never any intensity.
- First night of a run is a free day until 21:00, so it takes a full session.
- The day after the last night shift is always off.
It adapts itself
- Every morning the plan reads Body Battery, sleep, HRV and how the rider feels.
- Body Battery under 65, sleep under 6 h, HRV under 85% of the 7-day average → the hard session moves to the next suitable day within four days.
- Under 5 h of daytime sleep during nights → no riding that day.
- Each session is rated 1–5 afterwards. Two consecutive "too hard" ratings drop the work intervals by 3%; "too easy" adds 2%.
The rider
- 45 years old, 181 cm, 86.75 kg, on a strict ketogenic diet.
- Rotating shifts: early, afternoon and night, in runs of three to five.
- Wahoo KICKR Core in ERG mode, Zwift, Garmin watch.
- Already rode 100 km once, in July 2026 — the point now is to do it comfortably, and faster.
If you're here because of the roster rather than the watts, the longer read is Cycling training on rotating shifts — what actually works: the same rules, explained properly, with what they cost.
How to read the plan — every term explained
The sessions are written in the shorthand a coach would use. Here is all of it in plain language. Nothing on this site needs any knowledge beyond this list.
- FTP
- Functional Threshold Power — roughly the highest power you could hold for an hour. Every target in this plan is a percentage of it, which is why one new test rewrites the whole plan.
- W/kg
- Watts divided by body weight. The number that decides how a climb feels. It improves from both ends: more power, less weight.
- Ramp test
- A short test that raises the power every minute until you cannot hold it any more. FTP is estimated from the last minute you completed. Takes about 25 minutes including warm-up.
- Zones Z1–Z5
- Bands of effort as a percentage of FTP: Z1 recovery, Z2 endurance, Z3 tempo, Z4 threshold, Z5 VO₂max. The plan names a zone for every interval.
- Sweet spot
- 88–94% of FTP. Hard enough to build the engine, easy enough to repeat twice a week without wrecking the rest of the roster. The backbone of this plan.
- Threshold
- 95–105% of FTP, in blocks of 8–20 minutes. This is the work that moves FTP directly.
- Over-unders
- Alternating just above and just below threshold inside one interval — for example 2 minutes at 105% then 2 at 90%. Teaches the body to clear lactate while still working.
- VO₂max
- Intervals of 3–5 minutes at 110–120% of FTP. Very effective, very expensive in recovery, so this plan uses it sparingly — and never on a night shift.
- TSS
- Training Stress Score. One hour at exactly FTP equals 100. It lets an easy two-hour ride and a short brutal session be compared on one scale.
- CTL / ATL / TSB
- Fitness, fatigue and form. CTL is a 6-week rolling average of daily TSS, ATL a 7-day one, and TSB is CTL minus ATL — negative means tired, positive means fresh.
- ERG mode
- A smart trainer mode where the trainer forces the target power regardless of gear or cadence. You pedal; it does the arithmetic.
- Body Battery
- A Garmin watch estimate of how much you have in the tank, 0–100, built from heart rate variability, stress and sleep. This plan uses it as a go / no-go check each morning.
- HRV
- Heart rate variability — the variation between heartbeats, measured overnight. A sharp drop against your own recent average usually means poor recovery, illness coming, or a bad night shift.
- Z2 / endurance
- 56–75% of FTP. Conversational. Boring, unglamorous, and the single biggest driver of aerobic fitness. Most of the hours in this plan are here.
Still unclear? Ask me — if a term needs explaining, the explanation on this page is the thing that is wrong.