Why are the two hardest workouts of the week on back to back days?

Training
1

In the training plan I am doing (SSB1 Mid Volume), it had the two hardest training session each week (highest TSS) on back to back days. Is that for a specific reason for that, other than those rides are by default on the weekend? It seems easier to me to do one of the hardest rides after a rest day, and then other hardest ride of the week after the other rest day. I my case I have Sunday and Thursday as rest days. Could I structure my week to have the two hardest workouts of the week on Monday and Friday coming off my rest days? Right now the hardest ride is on Friday, followed up with the 2nd hardest ride of the week falling the next day on Saturday.

2
  • I suspect it is for this reason exactly, since that is likely the most common for actual weekends and based on the assumption that people have more time for the workouts vs the “work week”.
  • Do what works for you. The whole point and function of the Calendar is to allow adjustments as needed, for each person.
3

My mainly uninformed thoughts: I think having back to back hard days is a really good thing for a cyclist to develop. I personally really like that I can do big days on the weekend and have Monday and pat myself on the back for putting in solid work on the weekend. I don’t know if there’s any evidence that having them back to back is any better than shuffling the week around, but since my big rides would be on weekends anyway, I like being in good shape to do long rides on Sat and Sun. I haven’t done back to back centuries on the weekend (yet) but I’ve done back to back 75+ mile rides and I think putting in the big workouts on the weekends is part of helping me do that.

4

I’ve recently adopted the fatigue dependent method as detailed here:

Like @mcneese.chad said, it’s simple to rearrange the order of workouts. For me, I just swapped Weds with Thurs when adding the plan to my calendar.

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5

I routinely swap the notional Saturday and notional Thursday workouts because I have time to do so (I also slide everything left one day, so I only workout on Saturdays, again because I have time during the week right now and would rather have Sunday off with the family.)

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