During the Training Plan set up phase, athletes can input the number of hours that they wish to apply weekly towards their training. In general, higher maximum weekly hours enable athletes to achieve higher levels of fitness. However, in the case where an athlete is undertrained, they made not be able to reach their maximum weekly hours initially. They may still need to build their training loads in order to permit them to apply the maximum weekly hours towards training.
For example, an athlete may only be training 4 hours a week but may decide they wish to invest 14 hours a week into training. Initially, Xert will not allocate all 14 hours since this would likely be too much training for the athlete. The principle of progressive overload with recovery will limit the number of hours the athlete can train but this number will increase over time. Eventually, given enough time, the athlete will reach a level of fitness that will allow them to train 14 hours a week. This volume is then maintained until they reach their goal or, if 14 hours isn’t sufficient, they’ll receive an warning that the target cannot be achieved. Some training goals/events may require more hours than 14 and thus many not be achievable without committing the extra time needed to your training.
Feel free to experiment and do “what-if” scenarios to get a sense of what’s limiting your ability to improve sufficiently to reach your goals. Sometimes, you don’t have enough time to train before the event date. Sometimes, you don’t have enough weekly hours available to reach our target training level. Either way, you may need to reduce your Event Readiness which can allow you to complete the event but not at the level that will be optimal for performance. Ideally, given enough time and and choosing goals that are within reach, you’ll be able to execute a training plan than helps you reach your goal within the time you have available to train.