How Peakly plans a week

The rules behind the planner, written up with the research they came from. Every one of these is something Peakly does, so you can check the answer against the app.

• How many rest days a week do you actually need?

  One to two full rest days a week suits most people training hard, and one is usually the floor once weekly volume is high. The number is not fixed. It moves with how much you train, how old you are, and how well you sleep, and the research behind it is thinner than the confident advice online suggests.

• What should you do the day before a match or a race?

  Train short and easy, or take the day off. Drop the volume, and keep whatever intensity you would normally use, because cutting intensity is what costs you performance. A hard session the day before leaves fatigue that has not cleared by the time it matters.

• How often can you train the same muscle?

  Leave roughly 48 hours between sessions that load the same muscle group hard. Training a muscle twice a week generally beats once, but the benefit comes from spreading those sessions across the week. Two hard sessions on consecutive days means the second one arrives before the first has been recovered from.

• How do you fit two sports into one training week?

  Pick which sport the week is built for and place its hardest session first, on a day you are fresh. Fit the second sport around it, and keep the two apart when they load the same thing. Most conflicts between sports come from where the sessions sit in the week rather than from the sessions themselves.