Hi.
In my training plan, I have gym sessions on two consecutive days. I don’t think it’s very productive.
How can I improve it?
You’re right, and it’s a bug on our side rather than something you set up wrong. You allow both riding and strength on every day from Tuesday to Friday, and when the planner picks which of those days get the gym sessions it doesn’t yet keep them apart. This week it landed the same lower-body session on Thursday and Friday, two days after your own session on Tuesday. That’s not what I’d prescribe: legs need around 48 hours between heavy sessions, and it eats into the quality of your rides too.
I’m fixing the planner so strength sessions are spaced out, with at least a day between them. For this week, I’d simply delete Friday’s session from the IntervalCoach calendar; Thursday’s then sits a comfortable 48 hours after Tuesday’s. Once the fix is live, the following weeks will be rebuilt with the spacing applied.
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Changelog: Week of October 10
Swim sessions built for the swimmer
Swim sessions now fit your level in the pool. If you’re new to swimming, sessions stay under 1,500 m, hard repeats are no longer than 50 m with at least 30 seconds’ rest, and every session opens with technique drills. Developing swimmers get up to 2,500 m. Experienced swimmers keep the sessions they had. Sets read the way a coach writes them on the board: “8x 50 m at CSS, 35 s rest”, with the drills named and the same pace per 100 on every repeat. Swims are written in distances with a pace per 100, in metres or yards. If Intervals.icu has no CSS for you, it’s taken from your recent swims. When you replace a planned swim, you can choose recovery, technique, endurance, threshold or VO2max.
A plan that reaches past race day
Your plan now continues after your goal race. The weeks after it start with a recovery week, and on Max the plan reaches eight weeks ahead, as it does before a race. On a plan toward a race months away, the taper starts from the fitness your plan builds by then. The later weeks follow the load already on your calendar. Your long day keeps its length instead of shrinking with the rest of the week. New plans place your first recovery week based on your own recent training. If you train more than one sport, each sport is planned by your own load per hour in it. Fitness tests go on the day that suits them best, and the 20-minute test in Settings now gives you an actual 20-minute test. The Getting Started goal opens with a base block. Polarized plans keep their easy days easy and their second hard session as VO2max. Your training schedule also offers 35, 40, 50 and 55 minutes per day.
Readiness you can tune
A new setting, HRV source (Settings › Training), lets your readiness use the rMSSD reading from apps like HRV4Training or Elite HRV instead of Apple Health’s SDNN. HRV from Apple Health now goes into Intervals.icu’s SDNN field, so it no longer overwrites those readings. A large HRV swing over the past week now changes today’s session only when something about today agrees. The long-term fatigue check works from your first week, using the eFTP history already in Intervals.icu. Coach+ can explain the fatigue warning with the numbers behind it, and “OK” in your morning check-in no longer counts as a bad mood.
Your sessions, rated and analysed on the page
You can now rate a session’s effort (RPE) and your feel right on the activity page, using the same scale words as Intervals.icu. When a ride reaches IntervalCoach without its data, for example through Strava, you can upload the original .fit file from that page and get the full analysis. Planned runs, walks, hikes and swims show their estimated distance. Recovery time is now one number everywhere. Analyses compare a session with an earlier one that had a similar lead-up, and they wait until Intervals.icu has finished processing before they start. Strides no longer count against an easy run. Personal records are out of beta for every trial, Pro and Max member. Story cards have a new look, and indoor sessions show the shape of the workout.
Coach+
Coach+ can rebuild your plan from scratch, swap two sessions in one go with a single Undo, and on a rest day help you merge, shorten or ease sessions. If you ask it not to change your sessions, it offers to turn on “Preview before applying”. It builds run repeats by distance, such as 6 x 1000 m, also when you train by heart rate. It looks up hikes, walks and any other sport on Intervals.icu, and it understands race targets like “sub 4 hours”.
A refreshed look, in beta
A calmer IntervalCoach that puts today first is available on the web. You can turn it on in Settings › Beta and switch back any time.
Bug fixes & reliability
Days you clear now stay empty through the Sunday plan update. Monday mornings no longer count as a week behind. Your calendar shows the same weekly target as your Training Plan, and the plan’s on-target stats count only finished weeks. Total TSS on Analytics no longer counts re-analysed sessions twice. Analyses and morning workouts arrive reliably during busy Sunday hours. Notes from a single workout analysis are no longer treated as your own coaching instructions. Turning the plan off removes its targets from Intervals.icu.
In the iOS & Mac apps
On iPhone, you can share a story card for any activity and preview it before you share. If your FTP in Intervals.icu doesn’t match what you’ve been riding, the app warns you and fixes it in one tap. When a session is done, Today shows what you actually did. A retake in a spot-check HRV app no longer gets averaged into your day. Restore Purchases now moves your subscription after you sign up again.
On the blog
This week we published Personal records are now part of every Pro, Max and trial account.
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Thanks for the nice updates
What I am currently missing (or dont find how to do easily) is adjusting a scheduled workout.
For example a workout scheduled i can click make easier now; but instead i think i would be handy to adjust more settings, like example make it shorter or longer in time (because of sudden time constrains that day) and provide ability to have tss adjusted to time or kept.
As reallife example i had a 3 hour outdoor ride planned, but due to time constraints wanted indoor 1h15 ride with equal TSS
Tomorrow I have more time and want to adjust the planned run to longer than planned.
The refreshed design goes live for everyone on Tuesday 13 October, on the web and in the iPhone and Android apps. Thanks to everyone who switched it on early, a lot of what changed in the last two weeks came from this thread.
Before it goes out to everyone, I’d love to hear from those of you who’ve used it for a while:
- The focus tile next to readiness: does it show you something useful, or do you skip past it?
- The training trend that’s now on Today (last 7 weeks of load in This week, and fitness, fatigue and form up to race day in the goal card): do you look at it, and is anything missing?
- What you’d miss if you went back to the old design, and what you still miss from the old one.
A sentence or two is plenty. If you’re OK with me quoting you (by your forum name) in the launch post, just say so.
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Good point. The Swap option on a planned session lets you pick the type and Easier / Same / Harder, but not the length, so a 3-hour ride swapped on “Same” comes back at roughly 3 hours again. That’s a gap, and I’m adding a duration choice to it, with the option to keep the TSS or scale it to the new time.
Until then, Coach+ does both of your examples. Open the planned session and tap “I’m short on time”, or just ask it something like “Turn today’s ride into 1h15 indoors with the same TSS” or “Make tomorrow’s run 90 minutes instead”. It builds the new session and replaces the old one after you approve it. For the indoor part, “Make it indoor” on the session page switches it without changing the workout.
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New in beta: the IntervalCoach workout builder
Edit any planned workout step by step, or build a new one from scratch, without leaving IntervalCoach.
What it does
- Edit a planned workout. Open a planned session and choose Edit workout. Change steps, durations, targets and repeats. It saves straight to your Intervals.icu calendar, so it syncs to your watch, head unit or Zwift as before.
- Build a new workout from the + in the calendar.
- Describe the workout (Max plan). Type what you want in your own words, or add a photo of a session from a coach or a training plan, and the builder fills in the steps. Anything you didn’t specify is marked, so you can check it before saving.
- 8 sports: ride, run, trail run, swim, walk, hike, rowing and Nordic ski, each with its own targets: power, pace, heart rate, cadence or stroke rate, and distance.
It’s also behind Edit on a Coach+ suggestion and Adjust in Train.
Turn it on
Settings → Beta → Workout builder. Available on every plan; describing a workout is part of Max. On the web now, and in the iPhone and Android apps with their next update.
Not yet supported
Nested repeats, custom zones, %LTHR targets, lap-button steps and hidden-power steps. Workouts that use them open read-only with a note, so nothing is lost or changed by accident.
Feedback
This is a first version. Tell us what works, what feels clumsy and which workouts it can’t handle yet. Screenshots help.
I am struggling with this. I subscribed for the max option. I have a goal event in July. My base week had three threshold sessions. This week is scheduled for two V02 sessions. . I asked the coach + why these were scheduled in my first base weeks and it said it didn’t know why ? It then asked if I wanted to change them. I asked for a sensible base period sessions, and it gave me a sensible mix of zone 2 + some threshold. Good. Tonight it then sends me an email summarising the week as vo2. I asked coach + why send an email with a wrong summary and it says it doesn’t know why the email sent that. I don’t understand why the system appears to have two processes where one doesn’t seem to know what the other is doing. Am I doing something wrong or is it inherent in the system. If the later can I get a refund because it’s taking a lot of time trying to sort this nonsense out
Regarding beta Workout editor i would suggest adding pace as an option and when pace related step is entered show an estimated distance on the step and for whole workout if possible
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Hi team and community,
I’ve been exploring interval coach last couple of days and I am really liking it. It will probably be replacing my subscription on Join.
I am facing difficulties managing the recovery windows that are set in place after workouts. In particular whenever I do 1h an weightlifting session, supersets upper and lower body, therefor I think the TSS of 17 is overestimating the total stress on my legs as well.
it gives me a 48h recovery window and results in a intensity cap on my cycling workouts. I do my lifting twice a week in the evening, and therefore it effectively caps about half my week.
how should I deal with this? I feel I get a moderate training stress from lifting and I don’t really want to shorten it. And I understood combining lifting and cycling has many benefits. But I also want to remain doing the threshold and vo2 cycling sessions.
You’re not doing anything wrong, Eddie. You found two real problems, and I’ve sent you an email with the details for your account.
Threshold and VO2 weeks in base: the plan’s default training model rotates its weekly focus through aerobic, threshold and VO2max weeks, and it kept doing that during the base phase. With a goal in July your base phase is long, so you got that rotation from the start, which isn’t what base should look like. I’ve fixed it: in base, a loading week now has at most one quality session and the rest is endurance. Threshold and VO2 work start when the plan moves into build. Your load and recovery weeks stay the same.
The email: when you changed your instructions in Coach+, your week was rebuilt, but the weekly email described the week by its old focus instead of the sessions now on your calendar. Coach+ can’t see the emails, which is why it couldn’t explain it. That’s a fair complaint, and I’m fixing it so the email always describes what’s actually on your calendar.
Good idea: both just shipped. For runs you can type a pace target as a pace, like 4:30/km, and every timed step with a pace target now shows roughly how far it takes you, with the total distance for the whole workout. It’s live on the web within a few hours.
Thanks Thomas, I’ve answered you by email as well. Every strength session used to get 24 to 48 hours of recovery depending on its length, and anything from 24 hours on capped your next rides. So two evening lifting sessions effectively capped half your week, as you say.
I’ve changed that: a strength session now only holds back your next hard ride when you rate it as hard (7/10 or more), or when the analysis sees a clear reason to ease off. The recovery card on the session still shows how long your muscles need. Rate your lifting sessions on the session page after you finish, so the analysis knows how hard they really were. You keep your lifting and your threshold and VO2 rides.
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I’ve changed that: a strength session now only holds back your next hard ride when you rate it as hard (7/10 or more), or when the analysis sees a clear reason to ease off. The recovery card on the session still shows how long your muscles need. Rate your lifting sessions on the session page after you finish, so the analysis knows how hard they really were. You keep your lifting and your threshold and VO2 rides.
Hey Martijn,
did you change that in generall or only for “Guids” Account. Because im facing the same Problem with two strenght Workout an a bunch of quality bike sessions per week.
Best regards
Great answer. Thanks for replying so quickly. I responded to your excellent dm to me saying I would delete my post. But given how you replied so helpfully and quickly I’m leaving my original post on here to give your excellent response some context and to show my appreciation for the quality of your service. Thank you
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It’s a general change, for everyone, not just one account. It’s in the last step before going live. From then on an easy or unrated gym session no longer caps your next rides. Only a session you rate 7/10 or harder does, or one where the analysis sees a clear reason to ease off.
One thing that helps either way: rate your strength sessions after you finish. If your watch upload doesn’t carry the rating, the analysis can’t tell an easy upper-body session from a heavy leg day.
Thanks Eddie. Glad it helped.
You’re a legend!!! That was the last thing that kept stressing me out from time to time. Thx (i upgraded to the yearly plan finally)
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Glad that one’s gone for good, and thanks for going yearly! Shout here if anything else ever starts nagging.
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Hi there, just went into month 2 of the Pro version. Just received a mail that you’re shutting down, is that correct? If so huge pity, was just starting to really get into it.Will enjoy whatever time’s left. Thank you & all the best.
The email you got is most likely from Intervals Pro. That’s a different app with a similar name, and it has nothing to do with IntervalCoach. Whatever happens to Intervals Pro doesn’t affect IntervalCoach or your subscription here.
IntervalCoach is not shutting down, and I have no intention of shutting it down. Your Pro subscription carries on as normal, and new features keep landing every week.
Well huge relief then. Hope Garmin’s upcoming API changes don’t affect you too badly. Let’s train! Cheers
Thanks! I’m on it. The goal is that your Garmin data keeps reaching your training without you having to change anything. I’ll share more here once there’s news. Enjoy the training!
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