Assuming you don’t use any of the controls to attempt to affect the distribution of weekly hours between swim, bike and run, how does Athletica decide how many hours to assign for training in each discipline? Is there some substantive evaluation of your current strengths / weaknesses and opportunity for improvement which drives this? From my perspective, Athletica is very swim-biased, assigning much larger amounts of time to swimming each week than seems right. For example, below is next week’s plan and I 'd really like to understand why it is so swim-heavy and run-light, please, so I can have confidence in the recommendations. Thanks much.
Hi @BrentK ,
Athletica leverages your fitness and fatigue numbers and your power/pace profile to estimate hours of training that appear appropriate. Your strengths and weaknesses are determined in your test week as this determines your threshold values and predicts sustainable pace. The purpose of being swim heavy in many contexts is due to the low neuromuscular strain of swimming (non-body weight exercise) relative to running (high body weight exercise). As the sport you are training for is aerobic endurance based, the better you can build your aerobic system the better you will perform typically. Do let me know if you require further clarification. Best, Paul
Hey there,
I’ll chime in here about swimming. although the plan gives you frequent swims, and we all know getting to the pool adds up time-wise so it’s not always possible to swim 4-5 times a week… what I’ve done is to do two long sessions in stead of 4 shorter sessions. I start the watch, get the first one done, stop the watch, save and then on to the next one, so athletica records both sessions as completed.
That way I am still doing plenty of swim work (note my swim is my strength so I don’t necessarily need to be in the pool much to hold on to my swim fitness) but not wasting time in traffic etc
Hope this helps you look at the swim volume with different set of eyes.
although the plan gives you frequent swims, and we all know getting to the pool adds up time-wise so it’s not always possible to swim 4-5 times a week… what I’ve done is to do two long sessions in stead of 4 shorter sessions. I start the watch, get the first one done, stop the watch, save and then on to the next one, so athletica records both sessions as completed. 
