How to Plan a Week of Workouts in Under 5 Minutes

I can make a beautifully organised training week if you give me half an hour and no interruptions. It will have sensible spacing between hard sessions, an ambitious long run and perhaps even some strength work.

By Wednesday, it will be fiction.

The weeks I actually complete are usually the ones I plan quickly. I look at the week that is really coming, choose the important session and stop before I begin optimising a life I do not have.

Here is the version that takes me about five minutes.

Start with the diary, not the training plan

First, count the days on which training can actually happen. A day with an early meeting, school pickup and dinner plans is not secretly a two-hour training window because a spreadsheet says it is.

Three days is fine. Four is fine. If six is already normal for you, write six. The useful number is the honest one.

I also mark any day that could go either way as optional. That one word prevents a surprising amount of guilt later in the week.

Decide what matters most this week

Most weeks have one session I particularly want to get right: intervals, hills, a tempo run, a long ride. I put that in first, on the day when I am most likely to have the time and legs for it.

Then I describe why I am doing it. Nothing elaborate:

• 25 minutes of controlled tempo
• short hills, strong but not flat out
• long run, easy throughout

That note is more useful than a screen full of precise numbers if I have forgotten the point of the session by Thursday.

Fill in the unremarkable days

The rest is mostly easy training and rest. A perfectly respectable week might contain one harder workout, one longer easy session, a couple of short easy sessions and a couple of days off.

It will not look exciting on Instagram. It may, however, get done.

I check the spacing here, too. If the hard session and long run have ended up back to back, I move one now rather than relying on enthusiasm to solve the problem later.

Write enough to help your future self

I write workouts as if I were explaining them to someone while tying my shoes. For example:

15 min easy warmup
6 x 2 min hard with 30 sec easy jog
10 min easy cooldown

Or simply: "Easy run. Last 10 minutes steady if the legs feel good."

That is enough. Half-asleep me can understand it, and there is no prize for making the instructions sound like a laboratory protocol.

Then leave it alone

This is the part I am worst at.

Once the week makes sense, I try not to keep reopening it. A missed night of sleep might justify a change. Seeing somebody else's heroic Tuesday session on Strava does not.

Workout Writer is handy here because I can type the sessions in the same plain language, turn them into structured workouts, and send them to Apple Watch or Garmin. But the planning method works just as well in Notes or on paper. The app should remove the rebuilding, not give you another calendar to fuss over.

A five-minute plan is not supposed to predict the week perfectly. It just needs to tell you what matters, what can move and what you can let go.