Lifting + running week planner

How this works

The planner runs over every pair of days you set and looks for one thing: a heavy leg session sitting close to a hard run.

Endurance work switches on AMPK. AMPK suppresses mTOR, the signal that turns a hard set into new muscle, and that suppression runs for about 24 hours before it clears.2 Same day is the worst version of it. Back to back costs you less. Two days apart and the two sessions never meet, which is why the planner goes quiet at a two-day gap instead of telling you to do less.

Upper body never enters the arithmetic. In Wilson's pooled 21 studies the interference turned up when the sessions sat on the same or consecutive days and both of them loaded the same limbs.1 Both conditions had to hold. So upper-body days can land wherever they fit your week, and the tool leaves them alone.

There is a third and lighter check: heavy legs the day before a long run. That one is Formi's own call rather than a finding from either paper. Tired legs make a long run worse without doing much to the muscle you just built, so it weighs less than a hard-run clash.

How it picks the fix

It does not follow a rule. It takes the sessions you entered and tries every way those same sessions can sit across seven days — a few thousand versions of your week — scores all of them, and keeps the ones that come out cleanest. Of those it shows the one that disturbs the fewest days.

Nothing is added and nothing is dropped. You get your week back with the same sessions in it, which is why the answer can name what moved instead of handing you a different training plan. If no arrangement clears the week, it says so rather than showing you the least bad one as though it were the answer.

What it can't see

One session per day. That is the shape of the form, and it hides the most severe case in the model underneath it. Legs in the morning and intervals the same evening score double what the same pair scores on back-to-back days, and there is no way to type that in here. If you already double up, this page will read your week as cleaner than it is.

When strength and running have to share a date anyway, lift first and run six to eight hours later. Hold that one loosely. It is reasoning drawn from the 24-hour window rather than something measured directly, which makes it the piece most likely to move as more work comes in.

Everything else about you is invisible here too. How hard your hard run actually was. How you slept, and what last week already took out of you. A week that comes back clear means these pairs do not collide. Whether it is the right week for you is a bigger question than this form asks.

The long version of all this, including the number most people meet secondhand, is in the guide: lifting and running in the same week.

Planning one week takes a minute. Redoing it every time the week moves is the part people drop. Formi keeps that up for you, whatever you train. One coach. Every sport.