Training on a 2-2-3 Panama roster
The 2-2-3 Panama rotation gives you a different week every week. Here is a full fortnight of cycling sessions placed around it, with the reasoning for each day.
Who works it. Security, utilities, process plants and hospitals running fourteen-day Panama rotations, usually on twelve-hour shifts.
What makes it hard. Nothing repeats. Week one and week two are different shapes, so a plan written as 'Tuesday is intervals' is wrong half the time. The pattern is generous with days off, but they arrive in twos and threes that never land on the same weekday.
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 2-2-3 (Panama) 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 1–2 Mon–Tue | 12 h day | Rest A twelve-hour shift. Nothing planned: thirty easy minutes after food at most, and it does not count as training. | — |
| Day 3 Wed | 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 4 Thu | 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 |
| Days 5–7 Fri–Sun | 12 h day | Rest A twelve-hour shift. Nothing planned: thirty easy minutes after food at most, and it does not count as training. | — |
| Day 8 Mon | Day off | Long ride 2 h 15 · 135 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. | 103 |
| Day 9 Tue | 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 |
| Days 10–11 Wed–Thu | 12 h day | Rest A twelve-hour shift. Nothing planned: thirty easy minutes after food at most, and it does not count as training. | — |
| Day 12 Fri | 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 13 Sat | 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 |
| Day 14 Sun | Day off | Sweet spot 3 × 10 · 70 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. | 65 |
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 12, day 14; the longest ride on day 8. Change the roster and both move, which is the entire point.
The three things this roster decides for you
Stop planning by weekday. Plan by position in the cycle.
On a 2-2-3 the useful unit is 'first day off', 'second day off', 'third day on' — not Monday. Once you label days that way the roster stops feeling random.
Every break is two or three days, and that is enough.
You never get a four-day block, but you get breaks constantly. One quality session and one longer ride per break is a perfectly good training rhythm — better than most people with a fixed schedule actually manage.
The three-day stretch is the one to respect.
Two twelve-hour days is survivable; three in a row is where sleep debt accumulates. The day after a three-day stretch is a recovery day, not a training day.
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.