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Glossary

Every concept you meet in the app, in plain words and with an example.

A B C D E F G H I K L M N O P R S T U V W Y

Load and form

Training load (LU): What a session ‘cost’ you, in a single number: the longer and the harder it was, the more points it earns. The reference point is the same for every sport — an hour of work right at your threshold is worth about 100 points. That is what lets a swim, a ride and a run add up into one honest picture of fatigue.An easy hour’s run is 40–60 points; a hard interval session of the same hour is 70–90.Read more in “Load: one score for every workout”
Intensity (IF): How hard the work was relative to your threshold. 0.7 is easy, 1.0 is right at threshold, above 1.0 is harder than threshold. Intensity and duration together give you the load score.Read more in “Load: one score for every workout”
The fallback ladder: The order in which the platform picks the signal to compute load from: power, if you have a meter; otherwise pace; otherwise heart rate; and as a last resort your own effort rating. That way every session gets a score, even one typed in by hand.A pool session with no watch and nothing but a ‘that was hard’ note still counts towards your week’s load — by feel.Read more in “Load: one score for every workout”
Normalised power and pace: A way of accounting for the fact that stop-start work and running uphill ‘cost’ more than steady work. The platform brings terrain and surges to a comparable figure so that the load score is fair.Running uphill at the same pace as on the flat counts as harder work — and rightly so.Read more in “Load: one score for every workout”
Effort rating (RPE): Your own rating of how hard a session was, on a scale from 0 to 10. When there is no other data, it and the duration give you the load score. An hour rated 7 is worth about 100 points.Until your threshold has been estimated, the whole plan can run by feel — that is a working mode, not a placeholder.Read more in “Load: one score for every workout”
Load from heart rate: If there is no power and no pace, load is computed from your heart rate relative to your threshold heart rate. The method works for steady aerobic work; for intervals, strength sessions and a poor signal the platform switches to your effort rating.Read more in “Load: one score for every workout”
Fitness (CTL): A model of the aerobic work you have banked over roughly the last six weeks. It rises slowly and fades just as slowly — this is your foundation. It is not your overall athletic ability, and certainly not a measure of health.A week’s holiday barely dents your fitness; a month without training will dent it noticeably.Read more in “Fitness, fatigue and form”
Fatigue (ATL): How much you have loaded yourself over the past week. It reacts fast: a hard block lifts fatigue within a couple of days, and easy days bring it down just as quickly.Read more in “Fitness, fatigue and form”
Form (TSB): The difference between fitness and fatigue: how fresh you are right now. A minus means the load has not let go yet; a plus means you have rested. It is a planning tool, not a verdict on how you feel, and not a goal in itself.In the middle of a build block form is usually negative — that is exactly how it should be. The plus arrives in time for the race.Read more in “Fitness, fatigue and form”
The fitness, fatigue and form chart: The familiar three-line chart that shows how your preparation is going: what you have banked, what has not let go and how fresh you are. It was invented for coaches; here everyone sees it, and every number is explained.Read more in “Fitness, fatigue and form”
A rolling average with memory: A way of averaging in which recent days count for more than old ones. Both fitness and fatigue are computed this way: yesterday’s session weighs more than one from a month ago.Read more in “Fitness, fatigue and form”
Calculation memory (42 and 7 days): How long a session stays in the calculation. Fitness has a long memory — 42 days; fatigue a short one — 7 days. These numbers are the same for everyone: tuning them to an individual from amateur data cannot be done reliably.Read more in “Fitness, fatigue and form”
Muscular and impact fatigue: A separate, fast-moving counter for fatigue in the muscles and joints specifically — from running, jumping and strength work. Its memory is only a few days. It exists so that the platform knows when your heart is fresh but your legs are not.Read more in “Fitness, fatigue and form”
Load pathways: A session has one load score, but it feeds different states: the aerobic pathway builds fitness, while the impact and neuromuscular ones build muscular fatigue. The score itself is never counted twice.Read more in “Load: one score for every workout”
Kilojoules of work: How much mechanical work you have done on the bike. It is a measure of how much has piled up already — used to see whether you started to fade towards the end of a long ride.Read more in “Durability and forecasts”
Cardiac drift: The rise in heart rate towards the end of long work, or in the heat, at the same speed. The platform does not ‘correct’ it: on hot days and long sessions it lowers its confidence in the calculation, while keeping the observation itself.Read more in “Durability and forecasts”
Stroke count: How many strokes one pool length takes at your usual pace. Built from the lengths in your watch file with the counting unit recorded (Garmin counts a full cycle of the arm wearing the watch) or typed in as one number after the pool — the two sources are never mixed. It has no effect on load or readiness.Goal: “Keep your usual count of 18 ± 1 at 1:56 per 100 m”.Read more in “Data and connections”
Control block: The lengths of one swim that can be compared with each other: one pool, freestyle without equipment, pace within ±5% of the block's median. Stroke count is computed only from them and only with eight or more usable lengths.Read more in “Data and connections”

Thresholds and zones

Threshold: The intensity above which fatigue starts to snowball. In plain terms, the pace you can hold for about an hour. It is the main reference point: both your zones and your load score are built from it.An error of just a few per cent in your threshold shifts every load calculation noticeably — which is why it is worth keeping current.Read more in “Thresholds and zones”
FTP (power threshold): Your threshold on the bike, expressed in watts. Your cycling zones are built from it, and your cycling load is computed against it.Read more in “Thresholds and zones”
Critical power (CP): A separate model built from several efforts of different lengths: how much you can hold for a long time, and how much you have in reserve for short surges. It is not the same thing as FTP, and it is never written into the FTP field.Read more in “Thresholds and zones”
Critical velocity (CV): The running counterpart of critical power: the speed you are able to hold for a long time. It is used as the reference for computing running load from pace.Read more in “Thresholds and zones”
eFTP: A threshold estimate that arrives from an external service. We treat it as a second opinion and a reason to double-check, but it does not change the platform’s own threshold.Read more in “Thresholds and zones”
CSS (threshold swim pace): Your threshold pace in the pool, roughly estimated from 400 m and 200 m swims. It is the least reliable of the automatic estimates — an amateur simply does not swim fast very often — so this is where the platform is most likely to suggest a short test.Read more in “Thresholds and zones”
LTHR (threshold heart rate): Your threshold expressed in heartbeats per minute. It is needed for heart rate zones, and for computing load when there is neither power nor pace.Read more in “Thresholds and zones”
Maximum heart rate: The upper limit of your heart rate. The platform does not rely on it: both your zones and your load are computed from your threshold and your resting heart rate, not from your maximum. Estimating the maximum from your age (something like ‘208 minus 0.7 × age’) is far too crude to build anything on.Read more in “Thresholds and zones”
Intensity zones: A scale from easy to hard, cut from your threshold: your sessions are prescribed on it. Internally the platform works with five zones and shows three plain ones — easy, moderate, hard.Read more in “Thresholds and zones”
VO2max: How much oxygen your body is able to use flat out — roughly speaking, the ceiling of your endurance. It falls with a long lay-off and with age, but a ceiling is not the same thing as a result on race day.Read more in “Thresholds and zones”
Aerobic threshold: The lower of the two threshold points — the edge of genuinely easy work, below which you can keep going for a very long time. It is the reference for your easy sessions.Read more in “Thresholds and zones”
Threshold confidence: How much the platform trusts your current threshold. High means a confirmed test, a race, or two estimates that agree from the past six weeks; a single estimate gives medium; the older the data, the lower it falls. Low confidence stops load from being built up.Read more in “Thresholds and zones”
Field test: A one-off hard effort to pin down your threshold: 20 minutes on the bike, 30 minutes running, 400 m and 200 m swims in the pool. A test is not compulsory: without one the platform works by feel and from your ordinary sessions. When a threshold is due for a check, the coach suggests the test with a card in the thread — it takes the place of a regular session.Read more in “Thresholds and zones”
DFA alpha 1: An advanced way of catching the aerobic threshold from the tiniest variations in the gaps between heartbeats. It only works with a chest strap: the optical heart rate from a watch is not good enough for this. For us this is an experimental topic: the method is not used in the app and has no effect on your plan.Read more in “Thresholds and zones”
MLSS: A laboratory description of the highest load that can still be sustained. Every field estimate of threshold — FTP, CP, CV, CSS — sits near that region, but none of them counts as a measurement of it.Read more in “Thresholds and zones”

Readiness and recovery

Readiness (the day’s light): The daily answer to ‘push today or take it easy’. Green means no warning signals agree with each other, amber means it is worth easing off, red means rest, grey means there is still too little data and the platform says so honestly. Grey is never passed off as green.Read more in “Readiness: your traffic light”
The two readiness systems: The platform looks separately at how your body as a whole has recovered (heart rate variability, resting heart rate, sleep, how you feel) and at your muscles and joints (soreness, impact and strength load). These are different things and must not be muddled.Your heart has recovered but your legs have not after a long session — the muscular side decides the day.Read more in “Readiness: your traffic light”
The worst system decides: The day’s colour is taken from the worst verdict known, not averaged. Caution is cheaper here than optimism.Read more in “Readiness: your traffic light”
Heart rate variability (HRV): The tiny differences in the gaps between heartbeats. The better your body has recovered, the larger they usually are. It is a morning marker of how your nervous system has rested — but on its own it diagnoses nothing. Unusually high while you feel poorly is not a sign of rest either.After a hard week or a sleepless night, variability usually dips.Read more in “Readiness: your traffic light”
Resting heart rate: How many beats a minute your heart makes at complete rest, usually overnight or right after you wake. A noticeable jump often goes together with being under-recovered or coming down with something; for the platform that is a reason to plan an easier day, not a conclusion about your health.Read more in “Readiness: your traffic light”
The morning check-in: A quick set of questions that takes under ten seconds: sleep, fatigue, stress, muscle soreness. Entirely optional — but it is what makes the day’s light accurate when you have no devices.Read more in “Readiness: your traffic light”
Muscle soreness: The soreness that turns up a day after a session. It feeds the muscular side of readiness and affects whether hard impact work can go in today.Read more in “Readiness: your traffic light”
Your personal baseline: The platform compares you only with yourself: the past seven days against the four weeks before them. No population tables. Changing device resets the baseline and starts the collection again.Read more in “Readiness: your traffic light”
Smallest worthwhile change: A narrow band meaning ‘within your usual spread’. Movement inside it is just noise, with nothing to react to. A change only counts as a signal when it steps outside.Read more in “Readiness: your traffic light”
Protection against flicker: The light does not flicker because of one random day: red requires two strong signals to hold for two days running, and softening the colour takes two days of improvement. Fewer false alarms, and fewer reasons to distrust the status.Read more in “Readiness: your traffic light”
Unusual recovery: Resting heart rate up, variability down — the platform carefully turns the day red. The onset of an illness often looks like that, but the platform does not detect illness from devices and makes no diagnosis: judging symptoms is up to you.Read more in “Safety and where medicine begins”
The neck check: A popular rule of thumb: symptoms above the neck (a runny nose) supposedly allow very easy work, while symptoms below the neck or a temperature do not. We do not use it as permission to train: the split is not considered scientifically sound, and a dangerous infection can look exactly like an ordinary cold.Read more in “Safety and where medicine begins”

Durability and forecasting

Durability: How well you avoid fading towards the end of long work: whether you hold pace and power the way you did at the start. Many people consider this the fourth quality of endurance — after the ceiling, the threshold and efficiency. We show it as a trend, not as a single score.‘You are holding on better at the end of a three-hour ride than you were a month ago’ — that is durability improving.Read more in “Durability and forecasts”
Heart rate and pace drifting apart: How much the ratio of speed to heart rate worsens between the first and the second half of a long session. We show it only as your own personal trend, and only once enough similar sessions have piled up.Read more in “Durability and forecasts”
What skews the picture: Heat, terrain, a half-eaten breakfast and starting too fast all inflate the gap between heart rate and pace on their own. That is why only similar sessions are compared — otherwise the ‘trend’ would be nothing but noise.Read more in “Durability and forecasts”
Goal readiness: An assessment of whether your preparation is on course: ‘on track’, ‘at risk’ or ‘we don’t know yet’. It is about your training foundations, not a guarantee of a result or a forecast of your finish time.Read more in “Durability and forecasts”
Guide from your thresholds: What your confirmed thresholds turn into on the race distance under stated assumptions — ranges per leg and their honest sum. Not a forecast: weather, form on race day and hit probability are not part of it.Read more in “Durability and forecasts”
Converting a result to another distance: A historic formula that carries a result from one distance across to another. Here it does not work as a ready-made forecast: too much depends on having prepared for that particular distance.Read more in “Durability and forecasts”

Planning and periodisation

Periodisation: How your preparation is laid out over time: foundations first, then the specifics, then shedding fatigue before the race and recovering after it. Planned rest is as much a part of periodisation as the work is.Read more in “How the plan is built”
Annual phase: The top level of the plan: recovery after the season, general preparation, preparation for your main race, and the racing period. The platform derives the phase from your races and explains the choice; there is no separate phase switch in the interface.Read more in “How the plan is built”
Base, build, taper, transition: The four kinds of block within the year: foundations, specific work, shedding fatigue before a race, and recovery after it. Each has its own job, and there is no sense in skipping over them.Read more in “How the plan is built”
Macro-, meso- and microcycle: Three scales of planning: the whole season, a block of several weeks, and a single week. These are coaching terms; in the interface we usually put it more plainly — season, block, week.Read more in “How the plan is built”
How much of your training is easy: A guide to how much time goes easy and how much goes hard: around 80–90 % easy in the base phase and 75–85 % in the build phase. It is a range to steer by, not a universal law.Read more in “How the plan is built”
The grey zone: Moderate intensity — ‘not easy any more, but not hard yet’. We do not ban it: how much of this work you do depends on the phase and on what you are preparing for.Read more in “How the plan is built”
Ramp rate: How fast you are allowed to build fitness in a week. The ceiling depends on experience: lower for a beginner, higher for an experienced athlete. It is a conservative safeguard, not a prediction of injury.It is this ceiling that stops you ‘catching up’ what you missed on holiday in a single week.Read more in “How the plan is built”
Acute to chronic workload ratio: A popular metric that was for a while considered a predictor of injury. The evidence around it is contested, so we do not use it as a predictor of injury.Read more in “How we make methodology decisions”
Deload week: A planned easy week after several loading ones: volume comes down by 25–40 % (usually by 30 %), while at least 80 % of the sessions are kept. This is the week in which the gains actually happen.Read more in “How the plan is built”
Taper: Cutting volume before your main race while keeping the frequency and short reminders of intensity. It usually takes about two weeks. The job is to shed fatigue without losing fitness.Read more in “How the plan is built”
Detraining: The loss of adaptation over a confirmed break. One important caveat: silence from a sync is not proof that you were not training, so ‘unknown’ is never treated as zero.Read more in “How the plan adapts to life”
Coming back after a break: A careful restart after time off: the longer the break, the gentler the start. Coming back from illness or injury follows a separate, more conservative route.Read more in “Safety and where medicine begins”
Overtraining: A drawn-out state in which performance falls and recovery does not come for weeks. It is a clinical framing, not a number on a chart: the platform does not make that diagnosis, but when things worsen over a long stretch it backs off sooner rather than later.Read more in “Safety and where medicine begins”
Brick session: A double session, most often a ride with a run straight after it. It only goes where you have the time and where it will not wreck your recovery.Read more in “How the plan is built”
A, B and C races: A is the main race of the season, the one the taper is built for. B is important, but without a full taper. C is a tune-up, slotted into an ordinary week.Read more in “How the plan is built”
A one-tap swap: If you miss a session or the week goes sideways, the platform offers a ready-made fix for the days ahead, and you either accept it or decline it. There is no need to rebuild the plan by hand.Read more in “How the plan adapts to life”
No data does not mean a missed session: If a sync stayed silent, the platform does not count the session as missed and does not go rebuilding the plan for nothing. Missing data is missing data, not zero load.Read more in “How the plan adapts to life”
Recalculated forwards only: When your threshold or zones are updated, the new values apply to future sessions. Past records are not rewritten after the fact — otherwise your form history would jump about after every refinement.Read more in “Fitness, fatigue and form”
Strength periodisation: The bulk of the strength work falls in general preparation, and as races come closer its volume drops to maintenance — so that the gym does not get in the way of the main event.Read more in “Strength training”
Your strength profile: An explicit list of what is available to you: place, equipment, experience, time and preferences. The platform does not guess: no gym means different exercises, not an empty week.Read more in “Strength training”
Supercompensation: A coaching model: after work and rest, the body comes back a little stronger than it was. It is a useful picture to have in mind, but there is no separate number by that name in the platform.Read more in “How the plan is built”
Week's terms: Outcomes of the week worked out in advance: what happens to fitness by the next key day if you skip a session or overdo it by half the working time. Computed when the week is published and refreshed as facts arrive; with insufficient data the numbers stay hidden.“Skipping Saturday's long ride: projected fitness by Monday 41.4 instead of 42.8 · same zone”.Read more in “How the plan adapts to life”
Receipt: A short record with no buttons where there is nothing to decide: miss recorded, so many planned load points not done, no need to add them to the next sessions. It comes instead of a proposal when there is no change to a future session or the proposal has expired.Read more in “How the plan adapts to life”
Written off: The planned load of the week's missed sessions. Shown as a caption next to the week totals but never subtracted from the plan or from the completion denominator: no debt arises, and “how much of the plan was done” stays honest.Read more in “How the plan adapts to life”

Nutrition

Energy deficiency (RED-S): The harm done by systematically not eating enough for the training you do: bones, hormones and immunity suffer, and performance falls. It is the central safety topic in nutrition: ‘eat less’ does not mean ‘better’.Read more in “Nutrition”
Energy availability: A research measure: how much energy is left for your body after training. It cannot be computed reliably from app data, so we neither compute nor show it — we look for signs of a deficit another way.Read more in “Nutrition”
The carbohydrate absorption ceiling: Past a certain amount of carbohydrate per hour, the body cannot absorb any more of it from a single source. A mix of two kinds of sugar raises that ceiling and lowers the risk of stomach trouble on a long day.Read more in “Nutrition”
Exercise-associated hyponatraemia: A dangerous fall in blood sodium below 135 mmol/l. The cause is mainly one thing — drinking beyond your losses, not a shortage of salt. That is exactly why ‘drink more’ is poor advice, and why sodium in long work is there to replace losses, not as a reason to drink still more.Read more in “Nutrition”
Training on low stores: An advanced tactic for working with your glycogen stores. The platform neither prescribes nor suggests it: protocols of this kind are worth building with a specialist.Read more in “Nutrition”

Special conditions

Age 50 and over: Age on its own does not earn you an arbitrary penalty to your load. What changes is other things: more time is left between hard sessions, and readiness makes the plan cautious more often.Read more in “How the plan is built”
Bones and muscle mass: With age, muscle and bone tissue are lost faster. Strength work and moderate impact work are linked with maintaining them — and heavy jumping exercises only appear once it is clear that they suit you.Read more in “Strength training”
The menstrual cycle: If you want to, you can keep a diary of how you feel and adjust your load gently around it. We do not impose rigid periodisation by cycle phase: the evidence for that is still weak.Read more in “Safety and where medicine begins”
Absent periods: An important warning sign, linked to energy deficiency and bone health. It is a reason to see a doctor, not a task for training adjustment.Read more in “Safety and where medicine begins”
Heat: The platform does not issue special heat protocols. Ordinary work in the heat can be eased off by feel, and warning signs of overheating are a reason to stop immediately — and, with confusion or vomiting, to call emergency medical help.Read more in “Safety and where medicine begins”
Altitude: Altitude training schemes are a topic for well-prepared athletes under supervision, and we do not prescribe them. On altitude we give you information and ask for care: severe altitude sickness is life-threatening.Read more in “Safety and where medicine begins”
Indoors and out on the road: The platform always remembers where a session took place. A separate indoor threshold only appears once enough evidence of a consistent difference has built up — not after a couple of hard evenings in a stuffy room.Read more in “Thresholds and zones”

How the platform thinks

One load score for everything: Every sport comes down to one plain number, so that swimming, cycling and running add up into one honest picture of fatigue instead of each living a life of its own.Read more in “Load: one score for every workout”
Evidence tiers: Every rule in the methodology carries a reliability label. Robust findings are wired in hard; contested ones are made adjustable and marked as such; weak and individual ones stay an option you can choose, not a law.Read more in “How we make methodology decisions”
Safety guardrail: A soft, adjustable safety limit — the weekly ceiling on load growth, for example. It exists to slow you down, and it is a deliberate decision rather than a law of physiology.Read more in “How we make methodology decisions”
We lean towards doing less: In doubt the platform picks the easier option and backs off sooner. The cost of one extra rest day is nothing next to the cost of overtraining or training through illness.Read more in “How we make methodology decisions”
We propose, we do not rewrite silently: Ordinary changes to the plan arrive as a suggestion with ‘accept’ and ‘decline’ buttons. Only hard safety rules apply themselves — and the platform always says so plainly when they do.Read more in “How the plan adapts to life”
Planning and medicine are different things: Fitness, fatigue and form are tools for planning your training, not indicators of health. Everything to do with illness and warning signs lives in a separate circuit, always with a caveat and with advice to see a doctor.Read more in “Safety and where medicine begins”
Explainability: Every decision the platform makes has a stored reason: which rule fired and on which numbers. Nothing happens ‘just because’, and you can check it.Read more in “How we make methodology decisions”
The AI coach: An assistant that explains decisions in plain language and can ask the engine to make a change. It does not rewrite the plan itself and it does not invent numbers — the sums are still done by the deterministic engine.Read more in “Privacy and the AI coach”
Calibrating: An honest status while there is not enough data: the platform says ‘still getting to know you’ rather than passing a rough guess off as a precise estimate.Read more in “How we make methodology decisions”
Thin data is no reason to push: When confidence is low, the platform does not build load, does not show a forecast and leaves the light grey. Uncertainty should make the plan more careful, not bolder.Read more in “How we make methodology decisions”
Data completeness: Every record is marked with how complete it is: everything is there, some of it is there, or nothing is known. ‘Unknown’ is not the same thing as rest or a missed session.Read more in “Data and connections”
Personal data isolation: Medical and personal data are stored in the platform’s database on servers in Russia and are never passed to a language model. The ban covers derived values too — readiness, illness, cycle, pregnancy, signs of energy deficiency.Read more in “Privacy and the AI coach”
Importing your history: You can bring your past sessions in from a file or from an external service, so that the platform knows your background straight away. It is not compulsory: without a history everything starts with a two-week calibration by feel.Read more in “Data and connections”
Your hours budget: How much time a week you have for training. It is worked out from your weekly schedule: the sum of the time given to the days is your weekly volume. If life keeps diverging from the schedule, the platform will offer to update it, but it will not change it behind your back.Read more in “How the plan is built”

Devices and services

The platform does its own maths: Your plan, thresholds, load, form and readiness are computed and stored here. External services are sources of raw data and a place to cross-check, but they take no part in the calculation. If an external service goes down, your plan carries on working.Read more in “Data and connections”
Watches, rings and bands: Sources of heart rate, variability, sleep and power. We take their raw measurements, but we do not use their branded readiness scores: every manufacturer has its own closed formula, and they cannot be compared with one another.Read more in “Readiness: your traffic light”
Strava: Connects as a source of your workouts: the platform takes the fact and the detailed recordings and does all the maths itself. To others, the public page of such an activity shows only the sport, date, load estimate and a link to Strava; the Strava caption is added only if you switch it on: what the plan was, how it went, load and fitness — nothing about health or readiness.Read more in “Data and connections”
intervals.icu: A second possible source of data: alongside your sessions it brings in wellness figures, and it can receive a copy of your plan. Its own threshold and load estimates are a second opinion to us, not source data.Read more in “Data and connections”
Notification: A message to your phone or browser about what the coach put in the thread while you were away: a suggestion, a workout rating, a receipt, the week review, check-in, team and followers. The text names the reason but carries no medical details; only in the daytime window and never on a day of a medical stop. Switched on once after the first published week, switched off in the profile.Read more in “Data and connections”