Yama · Training
Training Plan Builder: 5K, 10K & Half Marathon — free
There are ten thousand free training plans online. Most share the same flaw: they give you what you type in — not what you can actually use. This one is built differently. And because that's a claim, we'll show you how to tell the difference.
The guidance below is drawn from training science — your body has the final say. Health history, sleep and everyday stress shift everything, and no calculator replaces a feel for your own body.
Why free training plans usually do harm
A training plan isn't rocket science — the structure of a good build has been understood for decades. And yet most freely available plans are worse than none at all, for three reasons that all share one thing: they ignore you.
Mistake one: your time budget gets overridden. A PDF knows only one version of the plan. It doesn't ask how much you currently run, and when it does, it acts as if the answer doesn't matter. It hands you a volume that belongs to someone else — and when you realise in week six that you can't keep up, it isn't you who quits the plan, it's the plan that breaks you. An honest plan starts from where you are, not from an ideal.
Mistake two: frequency gets confused with volume. This is the most expensive and most common error. Run low weekly mileage but ask for five sessions, and you get five tiny stubs — each too short to create any stimulus. Or worse: a plan forces the intended quality in anyway, and suddenly a single interval session eats half your weekly mileage. On a base that small, that isn't training, it's a recipe for injury. The right answer when time is tight is fewer runs that matter — not more runs that don't.
Mistake three: no recovery, no periodization. Many plans are just a string of identical weeks, no rhythm. No alternation between load and recovery, no phases. Yet that's the whole point: a good plan opens with a base phase — plenty of easy running, little intensity — moves into a build with harder sessions, and finishes race-specific, close to race pace. If week one is already full of intervals, there's no base for anything to build on. The plan starts exhausted.
What an honest plan does differently
Reverse the three mistakes and you get three principles — and we built them into our calculator instead of merely claiming them.
It works with your time, not against it. You enter your current weekly mileage — honestly, not the wishful figure. If your goal doesn't fit, the calculator tells you, instead of hiding it. No other free tool does this: most quietly inflate your mileage or ignore it. A line like "At 15 kilometres a week, five sessions aren't realistic — we'll plan with three to four" is uncomfortable, but it's the most honest thing a plan can do.
The sessions scale with your volume. Run 15 kilometres a week and you get shorter intervals than someone on 40 — same training intent, adjusted dose. The interval session never eats more than a reasonable share of your week. It sounds obvious, but it's exactly what off-the-shelf plans can't do.
It actually periodizes. Base, build, race-specific — with real recovery weeks in the rhythm. Not a wall of identical weeks, but an arc that brings you into form for race day.
Try it
Enter your last race time, your goal and your current mileage. You get a complete plan — every week, every session, with pace and zones — and, when it's needed, the honest answer alongside it.
Where the numbers come from
The calculator doesn't invent anything. It derives your training paces from your last race time — using the VDOT principle, which infers the right pace ranges for every kind of session from a single race performance: easy base pace, tempo runs, threshold work, intervals. The prediction at the end isn't your goal time echoed back, but a genuine projection from your current fitness and planned mileage — which is why it's allowed to differ from your goal. That's exactly its value: it tells you what's realistic with this training, not what you want to hear.
The periodization follows the classic model of base, build and race-specific phases, with a load-and-recovery rhythm that schedules recovery weeks rather than leaving them to chance. If you want to understand how load accumulates and dissipates across weeks, see our piece on CTL, ATL and TSB; and why the final phase before a race must look the way it does is covered in the taper calculator.
Frequently asked questions
"How many runs per week do I need?" For most people, three to four is the sweet spot — enough stimulus, enough recovery. But the number is secondary: what matters is whether your weekly mileage carries the sessions. Three meaningful runs beat five broken ones.
"I only run a little — is a plan even worth it?" Yes, if it fits your volume. At 15 weekly kilometres the calculator builds you a different plan than at 40 — shorter sessions, same logic. What it won't do: hand you a load you can't carry and stay quiet about it.
"Why is there no hard interval in week one?" Because a base phase exists for exactly that: build the aerobic foundation and the resilience of tendons and ligaments first, then the intensity. Go all-out in week one and you'll have nothing left to add later — plus a higher injury risk. The stimulus comes, but it comes at the right time.
"Is my data stored?" No. The plan is computed entirely in your browser. No sign-up, no email, no server that sees your inputs. That isn't a marketing line but a technical fact — with most other tools the computation runs on a server; yours doesn't.
"How long should a training plan be?" It depends on the distance: six to ten weeks for 5 km, eight to twelve for 10 km, ten to fourteen for the half marathon. Shorter leaves no room for a base phase plus a build plus a taper. Much longer rarely helps — you can't hold peak form on standby for months.
The plan doesn't end at the calculator
A calculator tells you what a good plan looks like. What it can't do is think along when life gets in the way. You get sick, you move a session, you miss a week — and the paper notices none of it. It doesn't know whether you ran, and it won't tell you when you're doing too much.
That's exactly what we built Yama for. The app carries your plan forward: it reconciles planned against actual, shifts sessions when you skip one, pulls your taper backward from race day automatically — and it warns you when you're heading into overload, before it becomes an injury. Not as a ban, but as what a good coach does: hold you back on the day when holding back is the hardest discipline.