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Age-aware training: smarter intensity spacing for masters athletes

Feature Request

Recovery between hard sessions takes longer as you get older. The planner should take your age into account when building the week: fewer back-to-back intensity days, a guaranteed recovery gap between hard sessions, and a more conservative load ramp for masters athletes.

Posted by Martijn Russchen ·
Status: Completed3 comments

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Comments3

  • Martijn Russchen

    Team•

    Aug 24

    This is live. You will find it as Age-aware planning under Settings → Training, in the Preferences section.

    Once you switch it on, the coach uses the birth date from your Intervals.icu profile: from 50+ it keeps at least two days between hard sessions and plans at most two quality sessions a week, and from 60+ it also progresses your training load in smaller steps against your own history. It is off by default, and nothing changes until you enable it.

    Two fixes went out alongside it, both from athletes who went looking for this and could not find it. The setting had been sitting in the Cycling part of the settings page, which meant anyone who does not ride a bike never saw it at all. It has moved up to Preferences, where it belongs, since it applies to every sport. And it is now in the iOS and Android apps too, not just on the web.

    Thanks to everyone who voted for this one.

  • Martijn Russchen

    Team•

    Jul 28

    Agreed on the mechanism, and your three concrete rules translate almost one-to-one into how our planner already reasons about recovery: we model per-athlete recovery curves per stimulus type, so age-aware spacing would enter as a prior on those curves rather than a blanket rule. That's the right shape for it: a 60-year-old who demonstrably recovers fast shouldn't be capped by his birth year. Noted on the ticket.

  • Sacha Ban

    •

    Jul 27

    Recovery kinetics change measurably with age, not just subjectively. Masters athletes (50+) take longer after high intensity before markers like HRV or neuromuscular output return to baseline. A planner that applies the same recovery gap between hard sessions to a 30-year-old and a 65-year-old systematically overestimates what the older group can absorb.

    The risk isn't gradual, it's structural. Too short a gap between two intense sessions leads to overreaching more often in masters athletes, and it often only shows up days later, once the plan has already moved on. Unlike with younger athletes, the margin for error is smaller.

    Concretely, this feature would mean:

    • A guaranteed minimum gap between two high-intensity days, scaled by age

    • A more conservative load ramp during progression, not just a lower starting point

    • No two consecutive days of VO2max or comparable intensity without a buffer between them

    Most planning tools treat all users the same regardless of age. Getting this right would be a real differentiator, and it would speak directly to a segment of serious athletes who are currently underserved by every platform they try.