Training (Coach)

Right during sign-up: straight after you pick your race, a "Connect your training data" screen appears with two cards. Strava (one button → you log in to Strava and grant access) pulls in all your activities — including everything that reaches Strava via Garmin, Zwift or FORM; this is the core data the coach needs. intervals.icu (optional — paste your API key from *intervals.icu → Settings → Developer*) pushes your weekly plan to your Garmin and reads your Garmin wellness (resting HR, HRV, sleep). You can skip this screen — the coach then shows a sample week until you connect. You can always do it later under your account → 🔌 Connections (in the account menu). Everything sits together there: Strava, intervals.icu and the calendar feed. Connect once, then it runs automatically: your activities flow in and your weekly plan goes to your Garmin (via intervals.icu) and your calendar on its own — no more per-week pushing or exporting. If your Strava connection ever expires, an orange "Reconnect Strava" bar appears at the top of your training screen. Without connected data the coach can't read your real load, form and balance — so connecting is the first step to getting real value.

In one place: your account → 👤 Profile (in the account menu). There you manage your name, your date of birth and sex (which set your age group — you see it recalculated live), your home base (your fixed departure point for travel distances), your phone number and your emergency contacts (ICE). You only fill this in once: it's shared across all your coaching, so you never re-enter it anywhere else. For your home base, enter the full address (street + number, postcode, city) — the profile shows the resolved map coordinates underneath so you can check the location is right. The map underneath automatically drops a pin on your address; if it's not quite right, drag the pin (or click the map) to your exact front door. Your emergency info (ICE) — emergency contacts, medical info and a QR code — is managed via the "🆘 Manage emergency info & QR" button in the profile; that's one central place (the same one that powers the QR emergency page). The Travel tab automatically uses your home base as the default departure address; if you travel to a specific race from a different address, you can override that per race there without changing your profile. Your email is your login and is shown for reference (you don't change it in the profile). At the bottom there's a 🔒 Change password section.

Privacy & opt-out. Everything is optional and lives only in your account — it's never shared. Your address and phone each have a "remove" button that takes the field straight back out (data minimisation); CS uses your address solely to compute travel distances. Your emergency info is shared deliberately: whoever scans your QR (e.g. a responder) sees only your first name, your call buttons and the medical notes you ticked. Want your emergency info + phone visible on race day to your inner-circle crew (on their circle screen, with call buttons)? Turn on "share on race day" in the emergency-info editor — it's off by default. *(Importing emergency contacts automatically from Garmin isn't possible: our integration uses the intervals.icu API, which provides training and wellness data — not Garmin account details like emergency contacts. So enter them manually.)*

From Garmin, via intervals.icu (the running VO2max). Garmin doesn't sync the cycling VO2max, so that stays manual.

The value in intervals.icu is often a default; we don't overwrite your manual value — you set that yourself.

Automatically, once you've connected intervals.icu (under your account → 🔌 Connections). No more per-week button: every time you make your schedule or move/adjust a session, the coach sends your week to your intervals.icu calendar as structured workouts on its own, and that syncs to your watch. It lands on the right week: early in the week (Mon–Wed) on the current week, later (Thu–Sun) automatically on the coming week. Before each sync the coach clears its own earlier "CS ·" sessions on that week, so you never get duplicate plan items — your own workouts and completed activities stay untouched. Connections shows when it last synced and has a "Sync now" button if you don't want to wait. If the connection stops working (an expired key) you get a clear notice — never a silent failure.

If you've built for several weeks in a row without an easier week in between (a skipped rest week, say), the coach deliberately schedules one: volume drops and the hard sessions (sweet-spot, brick) come out. Adaptation happens in that recovery week — pushing on stalls you, a down week lets you supercompensate. Next week you build again on fresh legs.

If you feel fresh and want to build through this time (right before a race, say), set the "How does this week feel?" feedback to "too easy": the coach then skips the scheduled recovery week and keeps building. Want it anyway, set the feedback to "just right". After roughly six weeks without recovery the coach schedules one regardless — a safety floor against overload.

The coach looks at the ratio of easy to hard training time over the last 28 days. Endurance development thrives on roughly 80% easy / 20% hard (polarized). Below ~70% easy you're training too much in the "grey zone" — that blunts adaptation and raises risk. It's a signal, not a penalty.

With a tender spot or too sharp a jump in run volume, the coach offers a low-impact alternative. You keep the aerobic stimulus without the impact that can trigger an injury. If you feel good, you just run. Flag an injury by body part (in ☀️ How do you feel today?) and the coach scales run, bike and swim separately — see *Injuries & the daily check-in*.

A per-day traffic light + the actual value for resting-HR, HRV, sleep and steps, plus a recovery score — so you see in advance that some factors affect your training and that the coach is taking them into account. The data comes from your Garmin via intervals.icu. Body Battery isn't in there, so we deliberately don't show it (we don't invent a number). If you weigh in on a Garmin scale, a ⚖️ weight tile appears in the row too (your latest weigh-in + trend arrow) — deliberately neutral, not a traffic-light verdict (weight up/down isn't inherently good or bad). See *Automatic weight* above.

In ① Set up → your check-in, below ⏱️ Time per day, is the 🗓️ Type per day row. Tap the disciplines you normally do on each day — swim, bike, run, strength. This is your fixed week rhythm and it's authoritative for the coach: it places your sessions on *your* days instead of laying them out in a default order. Leave a day empty and the coach picks a sensible fill for it. Mark a day as a training day but it still ends up empty in the schedule, and the coach fills it with an easy endurance session of that discipline — a day you normally train won't become an unintended rest day (outside taper and recovery weeks, and your ankle easing is respected). Strength is a short add-on to a training day, never a day of its own. Your setting syncs across all your devices and you always keep the final say — feel free to drag a session to another day.

Below your new weekly schedule is 💬 Talk to your coach — the place to respond to what the coach built and explained. Everything in one spot: How does this week feel? (too light / just right / too heavy — "too light" makes the coach add a bit across the board and can skip a scheduled recovery week); When does your taper start? (travelling to your race early? set the date — from that week the coach cuts volume for the taper); and Something up? to report illness, injury, a procedure or travel (the coach proposes an ease-off window). Each choice drives a concrete adjustment and the coach re-plans your week right away — no black box, you always see what it does.

There's also a free-text line — "Or say it in your own words". Type a short message (e.g. *"taper from 11 Oct"*, *"this week feels too light"*, *"day off on 20 Sep"*, *"9 hours this week"*, *"more cycling"*) and the coach shows exactly what it understood before you press Apply. It's deterministic keyword recognition (no AI, no cost, nothing changes until you confirm), so it only acts on what it clearly recognises. Ask for more or less of one discipline ("more cycling", "less running") and it shifts the mix a little — bounded, so it stays a 70.3 mix and no discipline drops out; say *"reset balance"* to put it back to default.

A specific date you can't train once — say a support day at someone else's race. Add the date in ① Set up → your check-in and that single day drops out of that week; the coach spreads its volume across your other days (nothing is cut — your weekly load stays the same, just packed into 6 days). So it's not a whole week off, and it doesn't touch your standing week rhythm: only that date. Past dates fall off the list automatically, and the setting syncs across your devices.

Tap a bike session on your week board → in its details you'll find "🧪 Make this an FTP test". That day becomes a real 20-min FTP test (warm-up + opener → 20 min all-out → spin-down), pushed to your Garmin like any session. Key point: a test deliberately has a low average power (the warm-up and spin-down pull it down), so the coach counts it done the moment you ride it — never as a shortfall. When you're finished, a prompt appears to adopt your measured FTP under *Your level*, so your zones and progression line up again. (CS doesn't auto-read the FTP value; you enter it — or ask me.) Undo any time with "↩ Back to the ride".

A brick is a ride finished with a short run (10–15 min) — race-transition (T2) feel, one outing, no second trip out. Under ① Set up → your check-in one control picks where you want bricks: Off · Weekend · Weekday · Both.

• Weekend — the brick hangs off your long weekend ride and is a standing part of your build: planned every week, and a completed brick counts as planned (won't drop out of your schedule or show as an "extra").
• Weekday — the coach tacks a short brick run onto a midweek ride (T2 practice).
• Both — a brick in each.

The coach attaches the brick to the ride itself — it's not a separate session, so it doesn't count as a double and doesn't need its own slot. (This used to be two separate toggles; together they confusingly produced two bricks — now it's one clear choice.)

If you've been training a discipline on a *different* day than you set for several weeks (e.g. you run on Wednesday while you set Thursday), the coach flags it with a blue 🧭 card above your week budget: *"Your run session has been on Wed lately, not Thu. Update your pattern?"* Tap Yes, update and your week pattern shifts with it (your week reshuffles immediately); tap No, keep it and that proposal won't return. The coach never reshuffles silently — it proposes, you decide. Odd extra sessions on your fixed day deliberately don't trigger this.

Yes — via Actualiteit ("what's up") you report something that doesn't fit your standing settings: ill, an injury/pain, a medical procedure, under-recovered, or travel. You pick what's going on, tell it briefly in your own words (a roomy text box), and the coach then asks a few targeted follow-up questions to assess it well — like a short chat, but fully deterministic and free of AI/cost. For illness it uses the *neck check* (symptoms above the neck without fever → easy training is fine; chest/fever/gut → rest until symptom-free, and swimming comes out); for an injury it asks where it is and how it feels, steering the per-discipline limiter. The coach proposes an ease-off window based on your answers (you often can't say how long you'll need — that's exactly the advice you want); you accept it or set your own end date. Inside that window the intensity comes out (quality work drops to easy aerobic — the aerobic stimulus stays, the sharpness goes). Important for your safety: for an open wound / medical procedure or illness the coach removes swim sessions entirely in that window (rather than just softening them) — swimming with an open wound is an infection risk, in the pool too, and that kind of risk doesn't go away by swimming slower. For an injury, swims stay: water is often the safe, impact-free option there. The explanation banner above your week says exactly what changed and why, and the report auto-expires on its end date. Context-only reports (travel/other) don't soften your week — they're just background.

Once a session is done (green/amber on "this week"), a compact green 🧭 Coach analysis bar appears on the card. Tap it and the session details open; right at the bottom are the coach's observations — so your calendar stays uncluttered. That coach-read is a rule-based evaluation in a few lines. It compares your execution against the plan (TSS/duration, or distance for swims), reads your RPE tap (😌·😐·🥵) against the load you actually did (did it feel harder, easier, or right on?), and gives a forward look to your next session (green, or deliberately easy). Important: the read invents nothing — every line comes from your own numbers, and a line we can't back up we don't show. Alongside execution/RPE/forward-look there's also an objective layer from your watch data (per-second streams): your average HR zone, your aerobic decoupling (does your heart rate climb vs your power/pace? a low value = strong endurance base), and your cadence (steady or fading). These appear once you sync with Strava — the streams of every run/ride ≥20 min are then pulled in and computed.