Blocked dates: telling your plan about the week you can't train

Everyone has a week they cannot train: a work trip, a family holiday, a house move. The question is what your plan should do about it. If it pretends the week exists, you come back to a calendar full of red and an engine that thinks you are fresh when you are not. Blocked dates are how you tell Moveee the truth in advance. A blocked day gets nothing planned, its share of the week is spread over the days you do have, and the engine plans around it when you next build.

Where you set them

Blocked dates live on the calendar, not in the plan wizard. Hover a day that has not happened yet and you will see two small icons in its corner: a plus, to add a workout, and a crossed circle whose tooltip reads "Block this day — mark yourself unavailable to train". Click it. If a session is already planned there you get a confirmation: "Block 14 Oct? Any session planned that day will be removed." Confirm and the day is marked, any not-yet-completed sessions on it are deleted, and the notice reads "14 Oct blocked — no training planned that day."

It is one day at a time. There is no range picker and no reason field; a fortnight away means fourteen clicks. That is a limitation, and we say so rather than pretend otherwise.

A blocked day is easy to spot afterwards: the date is struck through, the cell is greyed, an "Unavailable" chip sits where a session would be, and you cannot drag a workout onto it. The plus button is replaced by an undo arrow. Trying to add a workout to a blocked day from elsewhere is refused with "That day is blocked. Unblock it first to plan a session."

Past days cannot be blocked. If you try, the app says "You can only block a day that hasn't happened yet." They already happened; if you did not ride, the calendar already knows.

What the engine does with a blocked day

When the plan engine builds a week, it first works out which weekdays are unavailable, either because you blocked them or because they fall outside the plan's start and end dates. Then it does two things.

• It plans nothing on the day. No session, no rest chip, nothing. The day is left empty rather than marked as rest, so it does not read as a coaching decision.
• The week's load is shared out over the remaining days. The blocked day drops out of the weighting pool entirely before the weekly budget is divided. The comment in the engine puts it plainly: a day off should not "quietly shrink the week's real training load". Because the split is weighted by role, a long ride still pulls more than a recovery spin, so the redistribution keeps the week's shape rather than flattening it.

Two caveats follow from that. First, the weekly budget is also capped by your hours (see how the plan is built), so the extra load on the surviving days is bounded by what those days can carry, and steady rides are trimmed back to your hours target in 15-minute steps. Second, if you block every training day in a week the engine has nothing to redistribute to, and it falls back to a default load rate and plans nothing. A fully blocked week is simply a gap.

The exceptions

• Race day is never skipped. In a race week the engine skips blocked days "but never skip race day itself". If you block the race date by mistake, the race session is still written.
• Lead-in rides respect blocks. If your plan starts later than today, the bridging rides between now and the start leave blocked days empty too.
• The adaptive re-tune sees them. Your blocked dates are part of the rider context passed to the coach model when an adaptive plan reshapes the days ahead, so a reshuffle will not land a session on a day you said you cannot ride.

Blocking after the plan exists

This is the part people get wrong. Blocking a day on an existing plan removes the session on that day and nothing else. It does not rebuild the week, and the load that session carried is not moved to another day. The engine only redistributes when it builds. So if you block three days mid-block and want the rest of the week rebalanced, rebuild the plan from the wizard; the blocked dates are stored on your account and the new plan will honour them.

Unblocking works the same way in reverse: the day opens up again ("14 Oct is open for training again"), but the session that was deleted does not come back. Add one with the plus button, or rebuild.

Should you block a week, or ride easy through it?

Blocked dates are a scheduling tool, not a training decision, so here is the training decision.

A few days off costs you almost nothing. Fitness loss in the first week or two of inactivity is small; the classic time-course studies in trained endurance athletes found VO₂max fell by roughly 7% in the first two to three weeks of complete stopping, with the bigger losses coming later, and reviews of detraining put short breaks of under two weeks in the "minor and reversible" category. So a four-day work trip is not worth agonising over. Block it and let the engine redistribute.

A longer gap is different. Beyond about two weeks, blood volume, stroke volume and enzyme activity in the muscle start to slip in a way that shows up in performance. The good news is that the dose needed to hold fitness is much smaller than the dose needed to build it: studies that cut training frequency or volume by two-thirds while keeping intensity found aerobic power largely held for many weeks, and a review of "minimal dose" training concludes the same for endurance. Practically: if you can ride twice in a ten-day holiday, unblock those two days, add a short hard session with the plus button, and block the rest.

What you should not do is come back and ride the deleted sessions in one go. The injury and illness literature is consistent that sharp spikes in load after a lull carry more risk than steady loading, which is precisely why the engine spreads a blocked day's share across the week instead of stacking it on the day after. The detraining post goes into the numbers.

Honest limits

• One click per day. No ranges, no recurring blocks, no "every Wednesday".
• No automatic rebuild. Blocking after the fact deletes the day's session and stops there. Rebuild if you want the week rebalanced.
• Blocked is not the same as rest. A rest day is planned by the engine and counted in the week's rhythm. A blocked day is invisible to it. If you want a deliberate rest day, leave the day alone and let the engine place it, or drag sessions around.
• The engine does not know why. Illness, travel and a wedding all look the same. If you are ill, the post-ride check-in ("Cooked", high RPE) is the better signal once you are back, because that does feed the adaptive plan.

Blocked dates are dull, and that is the point. Tell the calendar about the week before the week arrives, and the plan you come back to will be one you can actually ride.