Training around your shift pattern
Six rosters, six worked fortnights. Each one is produced by the same rule engine that builds my own plan: the shift decides how big each day can be, the hard session goes in the best window that is left, and endurance fills the rest. Nothing here is a template with the names swapped — change the roster and the plan genuinely changes.
Four on, four off — nights
6.7 h over a fortnight · 6 sessions · 2 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…
Four on, four off — days
8.4 h over a fortnight · 6 sessions · 2 hard
Twelve-hour days plus commute leave an evening that looks usable and is not. The temptation is to squeeze four short evening rides into the block and…
2-2-3 Panama
9.4 h over a fortnight · 7 sessions · 2 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…
Seven on, seven off — nights
6.7 h over a fortnight · 6 sessions · 2 hard
Seven consecutive nights is a full circadian inversion, and then you invert back. The week off is genuinely free, but the first two days of it are…
Continental rotation
11.8 h over a fortnight · 11 sessions · 3 hard
The rotation moves forward every two days, so your body never settles into any rhythm. The upside is that no block is long enough to do real damage;…
Five nights on, two off
10.5 h over a fortnight · 14 sessions · 2 hard
Only two days off, and the first is lost to sleep. That leaves one genuinely free day a week, which has to carry the entire training stimulus — so…
Why the roster comes first
Every training plan ever written assumes your Tuesday looks like your Wednesday. On a rotating roster it does not, and that single assumption is what makes ordinary plans unusable — not the volume, not the intensity.
So the order is reversed here. The roster is the input. What fits is the output. A twelve-hour night is not a day with a compromised session in it; it is a day with no session in it, and pretending otherwise is how people spend months tired and slower.
Your pattern not here? The week planner takes any combination of shifts you type in. If you work something common that I have missed, tell me and I will add it — the list above is meant to grow.