Feature Request: Allow me to “pause Workout Plan” for a defined period of time (few days, a week, etc.) so that the plan does not continue to run.
Use Case: I travel for work and am sometimes away from home for a week at a time. If I’m in the middle of a training plan and have to leave, the plan continues to run and I miss out on the workouts that are being served up to me. This makes me have to start back from square one, which is frustrating.
Hi Paul,
This has been a common request, and one that we are considering. The reason we did not implement such a feature from the outset is that simply pausing a plan indefinitely and then picking up right where you left off is not actually an appropriate way to progress. If, for example, you were to take two or three weeks off, it wouldn’t be appropriate to simply drop you back in where you left off. It’s not the “pause” part of the plan that’s complicated; it’s the “resume.” That’s tricky to do intelligently.
I realize that there’s some frustration because if you don’t pause the plan, it simply advances you along, which is also not ideal. But our primary focus with these training plans was to deliver a plan, and all of the requests for the ability to pause indefinitely, do any workout at any time, etc all run contrary to that. If it’s just a collection of workouts that can be done at any time, that’s not a plan. We have standalone individual workouts and also workouts that are a part of a set that can be done in this way.
If your schedule regularly has you away for a week at a time, I’d suggest one of those options as opposed to a plan that was designed, explicitly, to be done as a block.vBut we are working on ways to build additional flexibility into the plans that preserves the overall structure and guidance that they are designed to provide.
Best,
Jordan
Thanks for the explanation Jordan - and totally understand. I wish my schedule was a little less up in the air, and I love the plan aspect of things telling me to “do this workout now!” since my willpower is somewhat lacking at times.
Do you think an alternative could be to, if I’m gone for a week, just run an FTP test when I get back and then restart the plan using the new FTP number?
Appreciate your response and insight, and will be on the lookout for updates to come.
Keep up the good work,
Paul
Hi Paul,
An FTP test is a really hard effort and something we try to avoid having folks do unless absolutely necessary. It’s also unlikely that, in a week, your FTP will have changed in a meaningful way. What has changed significantly, however, is your ATL (Acute Training Load, which tracks over a period of roughly 7 days). It’s the balance of ATL and CTL (cumulative training load - which tracks over a period of about six weeks) that is increasingly seen as being critical to appropriate training progression.
There are reasonable algorithmic calculations that can be made about ramping training back up - there’s good research on the appropriate ratios of ATL:CTL https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/early/2016/01/12/bjsports-2015-095788.full for some light reading - that can offer guidance about bringing intensity back up after a break. It’s this - as well as loss of fitness for longer term breaks - that should be considered.
We understand the power and importance of a “do this workout now” - or, rather, now-ish - which is why we didn’t want to just implement a half-baked solution in this regard. If we allowed you to pause the plan and then dropped you back in, that would serve at least to a certain extent as a tacit acknowledgement that it was appropriate to do so. By not pausing the plans, we at least are not saying, “it’s okay to stop and start as you please.”
Thank you for the kind words. We’re always looking to make Zwift better and feedback from real users is a key part of that.
Ride On,
Jordan
The workout in the plans are good but unless you do the training plan you cannot access them. Please make them available to access as individual workouts for those who cannot follow the plan schedule or may just want to do one workout from a lan.