Strength Training
Montis can plan strength sessions that fit around your endurance training. It keeps the exercises, sets, reps and loads you give it, and it never makes up weights.
What Montis does
- Decides what strength should do for you right now: build strength, maintain it, do less, or skip it this week. Your endurance goal comes first.
- Writes each session to your Intervals.icu calendar as a WeightTraining workout. The exercises, sets, reps, loads and RPE or RIR go in the description as plain text, with no power, pace or heart-rate targets.
- Keeps your loads and units exactly as you gave them (kg or lb).
- Uses RPE or RIR instead of weights when you have not given a baseline.
- Keeps heavy leg work away from your key hard sessions and races.
What Montis does not do
- It has no exercise-by-exercise history. It does not read the sets, reps or loads you completed, and it does not treat total kg lifted as history.
- It has no strength progression engine. It will not decide on its own to move you from 70 kg to 72.5 kg.
- In a chat, it does not remember your baseline after the conversation ends.
- Fitness and fatigue numbers (CTL, ATL, TSB, ACWR, ADE, ESPE) never set your weights. They only decide how much strength fits into the week.
- It does not treat injuries or write rehab. If you report pain, it will not add load and may suggest you see a professional.
Give it a baseline
For exact weights, tell the AI Coach what you currently lift. For each exercise, give:
- The exercise name and your equipment.
- Sets × reps and the working load.
- How hard it felt (RPE or RIR), and how many times you have done it successfully.
For example: Back Squat, 3 × 6 @ 70 kg, RPE 7, done twice. Without this, Montis writes sets, reps and a target RPE or RIR only.
Moving your lifts on
Montis suggests a change only when you tell it what you actually did: sets, reps, load and how hard it felt. It then changes one thing at a time and marks it as advice. If it does not have enough to go on, it repeats the session.
Strength in the AI Builder
The AI Builder in the Montis App has its own strength option.
- Set RESTRICT TO PRIMARY SPORT to ACTIVE.
- Under ALSO INCLUDE AUX DISCIPLINES, press STRENGTH so it shows ACTIVE.
- Optional: tick ALLOW MULTI DAY ACTIVITIES to put strength on the same day as an endurance session. Otherwise strength goes on its own days.
- To get working weights, add them to Persistent Personal Directives. Otherwise the plan uses sets, reps and RPE.
The Builder works a little differently from the chat:
- It plans 1–2 strength sessions every week while STRENGTH is active. It does not skip strength.
- The dose follows the phase of the plan (see the table).
- Across loading weeks it plans one small step, such as 1–2 more reps per set or 0.5 more RPE. This is a planned step, not a response to what you lifted.
- It keeps heavy leg work out of the 24–48 hours before key VO2max or anaerobic sessions, tests and races.
| Phase | Typical session |
|---|---|
| Base | 3 × 8–10 @ RPE 6–7 |
| Build | 3 × 5–8 @ RPE 7–8 (maintenance) |
| Peak, taper, race | 2 × 4–6 @ RPE 6–7, low volume |
| Recovery week | Mobility and light core, half the sets |
On your watch
Planned strength workouts follow Intervals.icu's normal calendar sync to Garmin and other devices. Montis writes the session as text in the description, so how it looks on your watch depends on Intervals.icu and your device.
Terms
- RPE: rate of perceived exertion, how hard a set felt on a 1–10 scale.
- RIR: reps in reserve, how many more reps you could have done.
- WeightTraining: the Intervals.icu workout type Montis uses for strength sessions.