The rules: how I decide what to ride

My first version said Body Battery under 65, do not ride. I broke it repeatedly, because somebody who wants to ride will ride. The rule was not too soft or too hard — it was the wrong shape.

Every rule here lets you ride. What changes is what you ride. There is no instruction to stay off the bike for a number on a screen, so there is nothing to argue with and nothing to cheat. The only exception is illness, and that one is at the bottom.

Before any measurement, the shift decides the size of the day. This is the part every normal training plan gets wrong, because it assumes every Tuesday is the same Tuesday.

Add roughly 30 minutes of commuting each way to every shift above. That is not padding — it is the difference between a window that exists and one that does not.

Layer 1 says a quality session fits today. Layer 2 asks whether it should happen. Five things, checked on waking — not at four in the afternoon, when the number only tells you that you have been at work.

• Body Battery on waking under 65
• Sleep under 6 hours — or under 5 hours of daytime sleep on a nights day
• HRV status "low", or Training Readiness under 50
• Resting heart rate 5 beats above your own baseline — mine is 59, so 64
• Feeling 2 out of 5 or worse, decided before you look at any of the above

Count them. That is the whole method:

Two signals is not a punishment. Endurance on a tired body is still the best aerobic stimulus available that day. It is not the session skipped; it is the session done differently.

Why a count instead of thresholds that each veto the ride: one bad number is noise. Three bad numbers at once is information. A single gate turns every morning into a negotiation with one statistic.

The two layers above look at today. This one looks forward, and it is the layer I did not have — which is exactly why I buried myself at the end of September.

• Two days before a run of nights: train normally. It is a free day. Use it.
• The day before the first night: endurance only, finished early. You are about to lose four nights of normal sleep. Go in rested, not emptied.
• The longest ride of the week does not go in the last three days before a night block. Long rides cost more recovery than intervals do, and you will have no way to pay it back.
• After a night block, two quiet days. Easy riding is fine from the first day; intensity waits until the third.
• If tomorrow is a 12-hour shift, today is not the day for the long ride.

Here is what those rules are made of. On 3 October I rode 72 km outdoors — three and a half hours, 525 m of climbing, the biggest day in months. On 4 October the first of four night shifts started. A week earlier my HRV had dropped to 26 ms and Body Battery had not cleared 50 for seven days. The ride was not a mistake; the ride immediately before four nights was.

• Endurance is never made up. It is gone, and chasing it costs more than it returns.
• Quality moves, within four days — and only onto a day that Layer 1 says has room for it.
• Never two quality sessions on consecutive days to catch up. Two per week is the ceiling whatever happened, because the session that broke you is always the one you were making up.

A fever, or symptoms below the neck: no training. That one is not a signal to be counted against the others, and Body Battery has no say in it.

And if heavy fatigue lasts more than about a week despite the rides being dropped, it has stopped being a training question. See a doctor. No decision table on a website covers that.

These pull against each other. Watts come from quality sessions, which need fuel and recovery. Kilograms come from an energy deficit, which limits both. You can chase both, but not both at full speed, and the order of sacrifice has to be decided in advance:

• The deficit never takes a quality session. Those two sessions a week are what builds FTP. If something has to give to an energy shortfall, it is an endurance day — never one of those two. Doing it the other way round is how people get lighter and slower at the same time.
• Losing weight too fast is a sixth signal, checked weekly rather than daily. A trend steeper than roughly 0.7 kg a week sustained over three weeks adds one signal to the count in Layer 2. Past 45, too steep a deficit takes muscle with the fat, and then watts per kilogram improves on paper while the climb gets no easier.
• Watch body fat next to body weight, not body weight alone. Weight falling while lean mass holds means the deficit is right. Both falling together means it is too steep — and you will see that weeks before you see it in an FTP test.

How large the deficit should be and what to eat are not training questions and are not answered here. What a ride needs in food and fluid, in general ranges, is on the nutrition calculator.

It is one rider's decision system, built from one roster and one set of numbers, and some of it is reasoning rather than evidence. The thresholds are a starting point, not findings: mine came from watching my own session ratings for a few months and they have already changed twice.

It is not coaching, and nobody is watching your numbers but you. What it does do is turn a daily argument with yourself into a count you can do in ten seconds before you get out of bed — which is worth more than the precision of any single threshold in it.

You can see the rules being applied, and broken, on the plan. The longer version of why a rotating roster breaks normal training plans is on the shift work page.