How Moveee builds your training plan: what the wizard asks and why

The plan wizard asks you about eight things and then builds a periodised block from them in a few seconds. This post goes through each question in the order you meet it, says what the engine does with the answer, and is honest about what the wizard does not ask.

The short version: three inputs do most of the work — your fitness score from recent rides, the hours you give it, and how hard you want to train. Everything else shapes the details.

Before the form opens

Two things have to be true first. Your rides have to be imported and your power profile built, so the engine has a fitness score to work from. If either is still running you will see a message such as "We're still building your power profile" instead of the form. And on the free tier you get three plan builds per calendar day; Pro is unlimited. Three sounds mean until you realise each build deletes the previous plan, so it mostly stops people thrashing.

Detail level: Beginner, Intermediate, Expert

The three buttons at the top of the page do two jobs. The obvious one is how much of the form you see. Beginner shows goal, adaptive, target, timing, training days and the hardness scale. Intermediate adds weekly hours, sessions per day and your long-ride day. Expert adds a time-crunch switch, an intensity emphasis, an experimental "let the AI shape each week" option, the build-to-recovery rhythm and monthly caps on hard sessions.

The less obvious job is that the level changes how fast the engine is allowed to raise your load. The safe weekly gain in fitness score is 3 points for a beginner, 5 for intermediate and 7 for expert. If you have read our post on ramp rate, that is the number the level sets. Picking Expert because you like more buttons also tells the engine you can absorb a steeper build. Be honest here.

Your goal

• Race / event peaking. Build from your start date to race day, then ease out through a post-race week.
• General fitness & FTP. A 3, 6 or 9 week block, or a custom end date no more than nine weeks from the start. This is the default.
• Maintenance. Hold your current fitness at a flat load, in a "Maintain, Maintain, Recovery" rhythm with no build-up.

Adaptive plan

A toggle, on by default if you are entitled to it. Adaptive re-tunes the plan as you train; a fixed block is built once and holds. It is part of Moveee Pro, free for 14 days counted from the day you create your first plan, not from when you signed up. Once the trial ends the toggle locks, the plan still builds, and it simply stops re-tuning. We cover what adaptive actually changes in what happens after a hard ride.

Your target (race plans only)

Pick an event from the calendar or set a date. The event search lists your starred favourites first, then every upcoming race; past ones are hidden. If the event has routes, you choose which one you are riding, and the engine uses that route's climbs to shape your key race-week session: a hardest climb under seven minutes points it at VO₂ work, a longer one at threshold. A custom date has to be in the future. For fitness and maintenance plans this card is replaced by a note that the block starts when you choose and runs up to nine weeks.

Plan timing

The start date can be any day from today to a week out, and defaults to tomorrow. If you start later than today, the engine bridges the gap with a lead-in: easy endurance rides if you are fresh, recovery spins if you are carrying fatigue, and rest on your non-training days. Those lead-in rides sit outside the plan, so they do not count towards its load.

Weeks run Monday to Sunday, and the block begins on the Monday of your start week; days before your start date are simply left empty.

When can you train?

This card is prefilled from your last eight weeks of rides: the days you rode at least twice become training days, your moving time per active week becomes your hours, and the weekday with your longest average ride becomes the long-ride day. Adjust anything.

• Training days. Monday to Sunday toggles. Tick nothing and the engine assumes six days with Friday off.
• Weekly hours. From 1 to 30, in half-hour steps. Beginners do not see this field and get 1.5 hours per training day instead, capped between 3 and 12.
• Sessions per day. "Once a day" or "Up to twice a day". A two-a-day only splits a steady ride of at least 90 minutes into two halves of 45 minutes or more; hard sessions are never split.
• Long-ride day. Pick one or more, or leave it to the engine, which then puts the long ride on the latest weekend day you train.
• Time-crunched (Expert). Adds a hard day where there is room, lets quality land on weekends and fills easy days with tempo. The engine still never puts two hard days back to back.

How hard would you like to train?

A scale from 1 (Very easy) to 5 (Maximum), default 3. This is the most misread control on the page. It changes how hard each quality session is and the overall load multiplier (from 0.82 at level 1 to 1.22 at level 5). It does not change how many hard days you get; that comes from the phase of the block and your training days. At level 1 nearly every quality day is tempo; at level 5 they are all VO₂ or threshold. Level 3 alternates hard and tempo.

The expert extras

Intensity emphasis lets you point the block at Endurance, Threshold or VO₂ max; "Balanced" lets the engine choose your weakest energy system from your power curve. The rhythm option is Recommended, 2:1 or 3:1 build-to-recovery weeks. Recommended leans 2:1 if you are a beginner, on hardness 1 or 2, already overreached, or riding 12 or more hours a week; it goes to 3:1 for an expert on hardness 4 or 5 with at least 7 hours. Finally you can cap VO₂, threshold and tempo sessions at four, two or one a month, or never.

What the engine does with all this

Race plans run Base, then build weeks, then a Peak week, then Race week, then a Post-race week. Fitness plans cycle build weeks and a recovery week in your chosen rhythm. That structure is ordinary block periodisation, and the reasoning behind it (concentrated loads followed by absorption) is well described in the literature.

Each week gets a training-load budget that is the lower of two ceilings. The first is physiological: your current fitness score, times seven, plus what a safe ramp adds. The second is practical: your hours, times the load an hour of that week's session mix actually carries. Whichever is smaller wins, so a rider with lots of hours but little fitness is held back by the ramp, and a fit rider with a busy week is held back by the calendar. This is the same fitness-and-fatigue thinking that underpins the Fitness & Form chart.

The budget is split across your days by role: a long ride pulls 1.7 shares, threshold 1.25, VO₂ 1.2, tempo 1.15, endurance 1.0 and recovery 0.5. Then the week is checked against your hours and padded or trimmed in 15-minute steps until it lands within half an hour of target; only steady rides grow or shrink, and quality days keep a minimum length (60 minutes for VO₂ and tempo, 75 for threshold).

Hard days go where you are freshest: the day after rest or recovery, never adjacent to each other, and never on the Monday after a weekend long ride. Build weeks get two hard days, Peak gets three, Base and Recovery get one. This mostly-easy-with-a-few-hard-days shape is what the intensity-distribution research in endurance sport keeps landing on.

The race week is a taper: one key session three to five days out, easy spins, openers the day before, and nothing hard within two days of the start. Tapering studies consistently show that cutting volume while keeping some intensity is what preserves fitness into race day, which is exactly the shape the engine draws.

After you click "Build my plan"

The plan is saved, the engine builds it immediately, and you are sent to the calendar, where a loader shows three steps: reading recent rides, balancing the block, polishing workouts. A background review pass runs (the optional AI weekly emphasis, a light review, and for Pro riders per-workout coach notes), the plan flips to active, and route suggestions for each session start filling in behind it. The page polls every few seconds and reveals the workouts when they are ready.

What the wizard does not ask

• No training philosophy. There is no polarised-versus-sweet-spot choice. The engine only ever writes tempo, threshold or VO₂ quality sessions, and the hardness scale decides the mix.
• No blocked dates here. Days you cannot train are set on the calendar, not in the wizard. The engine reads them when it builds; see blocked dates.
• No FTP field. Sessions are written as a percentage of FTP and converted to watts from your profile when displayed. No power data at all? The plan still builds, because load comes from hours and fitness score, but targets show as %FTP, or heart rate if you have set a threshold heart rate.
• One plan at a time. Building a new plan deletes the old one and its workouts.
• Race plans have no length cap beyond the date you give them; a race six months out gets a six-month block, which is longer than most riders should plan in one go.

If you have not built one yet, the wizard takes about two minutes. Start on Intermediate, tell it the truth about your hours, and leave hardness at 3 for the first block.