What happens after a hard ride: how an adaptive plan eases your next day

You went out for a planned 80-TSS endurance ride, a group formed, and you came home with 130 TSS and legs that did not want the stairs. Tomorrow says "Threshold 3 × 12". What now? On a fixed plan, the answer is you. On an adaptive plan, Moveee judges the ride against what was planned that evening, works out how far you overshot, and eases the hard sessions in the days ahead in proportion, then shows you exactly what changed with an Undo button. This post walks through that chain and says plainly what it does not do.

When it runs

Not the moment the ride lands. A Strava import only raises a flag. The re-tune itself runs once a day at 20:00 in your time zone, with a 07:00 catch-up for rides uploaded late in the evening, and it also runs just before your daily plan email so that email reflects the change. The earlier version reshaped the week every time a ride synced, which shuffled things several times a day and judged days you had not finished; the evening pass is deliberate.

There is one exception. If you log a post-ride check-in (how it felt, how hard it was, whether you finished it), the re-tune runs immediately, anchored to that ride. The check-in is the fastest way to tell the plan something is wrong.

Step one: the verdict

The ride is compared with the day's planned session on two axes: load (your TSS divided by the planned TSS) and intensity (your intensity factor minus the typical IF for that kind of session, which is 0.68 for endurance, 0.80 tempo, 0.88 threshold, 0.92 VO₂). At least 125% of the planned load, or an IF at least 0.12 higher, is "Overreached". Load at 70% or less with no extra intensity is "Under target". A ride on a day with nothing planned is a "Bonus ride". Everything else is "On plan". You can read more about the matching rules in planned vs actual.

Step two: how far off were you?

The engine turns the ride into a single deviation number from 0 to 1, taking the largest of three signals.

• Objective. For an overreach, the bigger of (load ratio − 1) ÷ 2 and the IF excess ÷ 0.25. Riding 1.5× the planned load scores 0.25; three times scores 1.0. Twelve hundredths of extra IF scores about 0.48. A bonus ride scores its TSS ÷ 250.
• Subjective. From the check-in: feel "OK" scores 0.1, "Tired" 0.45, "Cooked" 0.85; RPE scores (RPE − 6) ÷ 4, so an 8 is 0.5 and a 10 is 1.0.
• Physiological. If your form (fitness minus fatigue) has fallen below the plan's recovery floor, the shortfall ÷ 25. The floor depends on the hardness you chose in the wizard: −18 at level 1 down to −36 at level 5, and −28 at the default level 3.

Below 0.15 nothing happens; a slightly enthusiastic ride is not a crisis. At 0.66 and above the ease is deep. This is a crude but honest reading of the fitness–fatigue model that most training software rests on: fatigue rises faster than fitness after a big dose, and the sensible response to an unexpected dose is to shrink the next one rather than stack another on top. The same principle appears in the monitoring literature: the athletes who get into trouble are usually the ones whose load kept climbing while their recovery signals were already saying stop.

Step three: what changes

The deviation sets a window: deviation × 7 days, rounded, and at least one. A 0.31 deviation edits today plus the next two days; a full 1.0 edits the week ahead. Inside that window:

• Every VO₂, threshold and tempo session becomes an endurance ride, or a recovery spin if the deviation is 0.66 or more.
• Long rides are only touched at 0.5 or more, and then become a shorter endurance ride, never a recovery spin.
• Load is cut by a factor of 0.8 − 0.45 × deviation, floored at 0.35. At deviation 0.31 that is 0.66, so a 90-TSS threshold day becomes an endurance ride of about 59 TSS and roughly 75 minutes. Nothing goes below 40 TSS for endurance or 25 for recovery.
• The workout is rebuilt, not just relabelled: the intervals are replaced with the easier structure, so the graph you open shows the ride you are actually being asked to do. It is retitled "Endurance (auto-eased)" or "Recovery spin (auto-eased)".

Some things are never touched: completed sessions, lead-in rides, race day, openers, rest, recovery and endurance days, and anything in Race week. A workout you added yourself with the plus button sits outside the plan and is left alone.

The two engines

What you have just read is the deterministic path, and it only ever eases. When a coach model is configured (it is, on moveee.app), a second path runs instead: the same ride, verdict and rider context (fitness, fatigue, form, hardness, blocked dates, your feedback) go to the model with the window, and it is told to respond in proportion and prefer zero to three edits. That path can ease, rest, swap two days, harden a session one level, add up to 25% load, or design a custom session, within guardrails: no session above 140 TSS, no hardening in recovery, taper, race or post-race weeks, no back-to-back hard days, and nothing before today or outside the window. It is the only path that can bring a hard day forward, which it does when you were "Under target" and not cooked.

You do not see which engine ran. Both produce the same thing: one adaptation record with a card.

What you see

On the dashboard, the calendar and the plan page a card appears: "Plan updated · your coach adjusted the days ahead". It quotes the ride ("Your last ride: 130 TSS at IF 0.93 vs 80 planned · felt tired"), gives a one-line reason ("You rode harder and longer than planned (130 vs 80 TSS) — so I eased your next 2 sessions to help you absorb it and come back stronger"), and lists each changed day with the old title struck through and the new one beside it. Two buttons: "Keep changes" and "Undo", which asks "Undo these changes and restore your plan?" and puts everything back from a snapshot.

On the calendar the changed chips wear a warning ring and a dot for three days, with the tooltip "Your coach re-tuned this — was Threshold 3 × 12". A folded "Changes to this plan" panel on the plan page keeps the history, and each row has a "Put back" button that works for 30 days, skipping any session you have since completed. The daily plan email leads with "Heads-up — we adjusted today" and the before-and-after TSS, but only for today's session; later days are on the calendar.

Who gets it

Adaptive is part of Moveee Pro, free for 14 days from the day your first plan is saved, not from sign-up. The wizard turns it on by default for anyone entitled. When the trial ends the plan stays, it just stops re-tuning; deleting and rebuilding does not restart the clock. Free plans are fixed blocks, but they still get the two build-time protections every plan has: a recovery floor that turns days into recovery if the projected form drops too low, and a one-off ease of today's or tomorrow's hard session if you rode at IF 0.85 or 80 TSS or more in the two days before the plan was built.

What it does not do

• It only reacts to Strava rides, check-ins and the drift email. Rides that arrive by other routes do not trigger a re-tune. Nor does it read WHOOP recovery, HRV or heart rate directly; those are on your health page, not in this loop yet.
• A ride on a rest day gets no verdict. Without a planned session to compare against there is no ratio, so a hard bonus ride can only reach the plan through your check-in or through form falling below the floor. Log it.
• It eases the window, not just the next day. "Eases your next hard day" is the common case at low deviation; at high deviation it is the next several. Look at the card's list.
• It is not a physiologist. The thresholds are fixed numbers chosen to be conservative. The research on individually guided training, where daily readiness decides whether a hard session happens, does show it can beat a fixed schedule on average, but it also shows wide individual variation. If the plan eases a day you know you can ride, press Undo; that is what the button is for.

The best way to use the feature is the boring one: ride, sync, and once a day spend five seconds on the check-in. Everything the plan changes is shown to you with a way back, so trust it, watch it, and correct it when it is wrong. Start a plan from the wizard with adaptive on, and read Fitness, Fatigue and Form to see the model it is protecting.