The guide to the whole app

Chat is the home screen and the way into the plan. What you ask for happens in the same reply.

1. Workouts come to youA synced workout lands as a card on its day with the analysis underneath. It is written when the workout is uploaded, not when you ask for it.
2. It writes in the calendarCreate, change and delete planned sessions. Races, goals, training preferences, equipment and injuries go the same way. Availability it only touches when you say so outright.
3. What it answers fromWorkouts, zones, HRV, resting heart rate, the plan, the health log and the latest planning decisions. On top of that come the coach’s own conclusions about you: what it is prioritising right now and when it will revisit that, how you in particular need to be planned, and what it still only suspects and is watching. Beyond that it searches your chat history, with no limit on how far back.
4. Important questionSends the question straight to the heaviest model, with room to read up properly before answering. It costs double energy, and you get a thorough answer, not a replan: the plan only changes if you explicitly ask.
5. The conversation is browsableScroll away from the present and a pill tells you which day you are reading. It opens a calendar of every week since your first day of chat, with that week’s running volume and health marks on the row. A past day with a conversation opens it, a day with a race opens the race. "Back to today" takes you back, and so does a message you send.

The plan is laid in three layers. Blocks run twelve months out, weekly targets are set within a sixteen-week horizon, and sessions are written two weeks at a time.

1. Five block typesBase, build, peak, taper and recovery. Blocks start on a Monday, end on a Sunday and cover the whole year without gaps.
2. Your races set the structureThe period ahead is redrawn from scratch at every season planning, from the races you have entered. The blocks follow your races, not the other way round. Weeks you have already trained are never touched, and keep the phase they were actually trained in.
3. Weekly targets, not sessionsVolume, number of intensity days and longest long run per week. Targets move through the block, and how fast the volume may grow is set by what you have actually been running.
4. The year in barsOne bar per week in the block’s colour. Browsing reaches back to your first year with training or a plan in the app, five years at most.
5. Races that sit close togetherThe A race owns the season. A B or C race too close to it gets no peak or taper of its own, but becomes a tune-up inside the build, with a few sharp days before and straight back into the build after. How much rest goes in after a race follows what the race took: a marathon earns a recovery block, a 5k a few easy days.

The week view is where the plan meets the day.

1. The week’s volumeThe heading is planned distance, the total below it what you have done. Both count only sessions with a distance, so a 45-minute strength session shows as a row but not in the kilometres.
2. Health on its dayHRV and resting heart rate from the night before sit next to the session they affect, and the heart turns red outside your baseline. An open injury or illness shows as a mark on the same row.
3. The day rowType, start time and target pace. The volume on the right turns green only once a completed workout has been linked to the planned one.
4. Linking happens on its ownA synced workout is paired with the day’s planned one as long as the two are close enough in volume and intensity. If they sit at opposite ends of the scale, planned easy against completed hard, they are left apart: the planned row stays there as missed next to the run you actually did. If it comes out wrong either way you relink by hand.
5. Unplanned sessions get a type tooA run you simply went out and did is classified from its own laps against your zones, so the row reads Threshold or Recovery in the type’s colour and your own workout name moves down a line. Your earlier history is reclassified on the next sync, which is what lets the coach find your last threshold session from before you had the app.
6. The plan line on topThe block plan in miniature over a fixed window around now: two months back, four forward. Saturated up to today and pale after it, with your races as flags above and the months below. A tap anywhere on the line opens the Overview, which is the only way in. A race further out than four months has no flag yet.

The session view has three states that follow from the data: planned, completed and missed.

1. Forecast at the start timeTemperature for your town on the day and hour of the session. The heat warning weighs in the dew point and trips earlier for pace-driven sessions than for easy ones.
2. The stepsWarm-up, work, rest and cool-down, each labelled with its zone and carrying a distance, a target pace and a target heart rate. Quality sessions are always built from real steps, never a single lump of minutes.
3. The coach’s briefThe intent behind the session, which stays there afterwards so you can read it against the outcome.
4. The target next to the outcomeWhere the session was linked to a planned one, the lap table afterwards gains a target column, paired work against work. A step the plan prescribed nothing for gets a dash, and if you ran a different number of work laps than the plan the column is left out rather than putting the wrong target on the wrong lap.

FROM THE COACH

With Send workouts to your watch on, planned sessions are written to your Intervals.icu calendar and from there to the watch, a year ahead. The pace target goes as a band around the target pace rather than one exact number, and warm-up and cool-down as open steps you end with the lap button. Under Connections you can have the watch steer on heart rate instead, on easy runs and if you want on your threshold reps as well: it then shows a heart-rate range in per cent of your threshold heart rate, with the same ceiling as your heart-rate zones in the app. It takes one reconnect of Intervals to switch on. Strength and cross training are never sent.

Strength is off to begin with. Turn it on under Preferences and the strength session becomes a row in your calendar with exercises, sets, reps and load, not a reminder to think of something yourself.

1. You tick what you haveEquipment under Profile is a list to tick: gym, dumbbells, barbell, bands and a pull-up bar, but also a treadmill, a running track and hills nearby. The coach stays inside what you ticked when it builds the session. Bodyweight always counts, so an empty list does not stop strength sessions, it just gives you bodyweight ones.
2. The session is a prescriptionBlock by block with exercise, sets, reps, load and rest, plus a muscle map of what the session actually works. A circuit block shows rounds instead of sets per exercise. The content cannot be edited in the app; swaps you make in chat.
3. Where it lands in the weekHard days hard: strength lands on a day that is tough anyway, ideally a few hours after the run, or on an otherwise easy day. Heavy work the day before your long run or a quality session is what the coach avoids, because it steals the session that matters more, and two heavy ones back to back likewise. Light mobility and prehab are the exception and can sit anywhere. Strength sessions do not compete for the places in your running-day ceiling.
4. The volume follows the blockThe mark to aim at is two sessions a week through base and build, one maintenance session while you peak, and at most one light session in the taper with the last heavy one a good ten days before your A race. Progression adds weight or reps, never both in the same week. These are the principles the coach plans by, not a schedule it fills in: your week, your history and the time you have decide what actually lands there.

FROM THE COACH

Equipment works just as well said in chat: write that the dumbbells are gone and the dumbbell exercises go with them. What is missing is the log afterwards. You cannot record what you actually lifted, so progression follows what the coach wrote rather than what happened. With your watch running it is time and average heart rate that come back, not distance and pace, and the session still gets a load figure that counts into fitness, fatigue and form.

The priority on a race drives how the season is divided and how long you taper.

1. A, B or CA gives a peak of a couple of weeks and up to two weeks of taper. B a shorter peak and one week of taper. C gets no peak at all, just a few easier days going in. That describes one race at a time: when a B or C sits close to your A race they are weighed against each other instead, and the smaller race becomes a tune-up without a peak of its own.
2. The coach’s race planWritten once the race is within three months and updated more often as the day nears. It covers race day only: form, target and strategy.
3. Suggested target timeThe coach’s own read alongside yours. If the race came from the catalogue, surface and elevation are taken into account.

FROM THE COACH

The race catalogue lists real races near your town, but so far only covers Sweden. If yours is missing you paste the organiser’s link. The app also looks for race-like efforts in your synced history and offers them up as completed races.

Zones are estimated from your own training. They are not imported from Intervals.icu, and cannot be typed in by hand.

1. Three numbersThreshold heart rate, max heart rate and threshold pace. That is what the estimate returns, and everything else is derived from them.
2. Ten bands from three numbersFive heart-rate zones from threshold heart rate and five pace zones from threshold pace, from recovery down to repetition. When the thresholds move, all ten bands move with them. The heart-rate bands follow Joe Friel’s %LTHR model for running and the pace bands are fractions of the same threshold pace; the app spells that out on the screen so you can check the arithmetic.
3. When they are redoneDuring setup, every three months, right after each completed race, and whenever you ask.
4. What it readsYour ten fastest runs over 5 km in the last ninety days, ranked on grade-adjusted pace so hilly runs are not penalised, plus every race with an official time in the last year.
5. The trail behind themAt the bottom sits a collapsed card with one measure at a time: threshold pace, threshold heart rate or max heart rate, and how far the value has moved. A row is written only when a value actually changes, so the card appears once there are two points to draw a line between. Why the coach changed it is not there; you get that by asking in chat.

Two separate things drive where sessions land. Preferences say how you want to train, availability when you can.

1. The base templateFrom the start, weekday evenings and most of the weekend sit open, the same every week. The moment you change a day it leaves the template for good.
2. Several windows a dayContiguous cells become blocks, and each block can be limited to running, strength or cross training.
3. Running days is a ceilingThe number under Preferences is an upper bound, not a target. That is also where you set long-run day, rest days and how many quality sessions you want.
4. A note for the weekA free-text note that travels into the planning, for what is not a time of day.

FROM THE COACH

Emptying a day and resetting it are different things. An emptied day means you cannot train then and does not fall back on the base template. Move a window a planned session sits in and its start time follows, as long as it still fits.

HRV and resting heart rate come from your watch through Intervals.icu. Both are measured overnight, so the morning number describes the night that was. Injuries and illness no watch measures, and those you enter yourself in the Health log.

1. Your own baselineBuilt from your own readings over the last three months, with the odd extreme night cleaned out. There is no table of what counts as good, only what is normal for you.
2. Deliberately asymmetricFor HRV, low values are flagged. For resting heart rate, high ones.
3. The band movesThe baseline is recalculated week by week, so the band drifts across the chart instead of sitting still.
4. The coach’s analysisThe recovery check is kept here every Wednesday, including the weeks you get no notification.
5. The health log is a year at a glanceThe log opens on one dot per week over the last twelve months, with day statistics for the same period below it. In between sits an expandable trend card for how much of those days were affected, and at the bottom a timeline where the healthy gaps are counted in days.
6. Severity is a course, not a valueA cold that breaks out, or a niggle that turns into an injury, is the same entry all the way through. You update the state on the open entry and the change applies from that day, so earlier days keep the severity they had. The coach can update the same entry from chat, and never files a second one.

Every session gets a load figure from your own thresholds. From it come fitness, fatigue and form.

1. 42, 7 and the differenceFitness is a 42-day exponential average of daily load, fatigue a 7-day one, and form the difference between them.
2. A bar is a dayThe day’s total load, so two sessions on the same day make one bar. A dip in a curve means that day’s load was below the average, not that a session was skipped.
3. Dashed is projectionAfter today your planned sessions are drawn dashed, out to the end of next training week.
4. The period only changes the viewToday’s values are identical in all three views. The period only picks how much history you see.

Four write-ups at different range: the session automatically, the session in depth, the week and the whole history.

1. The workout analysisWritten automatically when a workout syncs, as long as the workout is recent. Old imported history is not analysed after the fact. It can adjust upcoming sessions, not just comment. Quality sessions are set against similar ones up to two years back, but recent outweighs alike, and the comparison is work against work rather than a whole-session average against a single rep.
2. The deep diveA walk-through of one single session that you order yourself, from a button on the workout. It reads the full time series, the laps and the most comparable sessions in detail, and builds on the workout analysis instead of repeating it. The result is a card on the workout and a short heads-up in chat. The document never asks you to do anything, but bring it up in chat and the coach can pull the whole text rather than just the heads-up. It costs energy every time, requires Pro or Elite, and cannot be run twice.
3. The recovery checkWednesdays, against HRV, resting heart rate and load. Weeks with neither readings nor training are skipped.
4. The deep analysisA summary plus strengths, weaknesses, training patterns and recommendations, with your whole history as the material.
5. One a month automaticallyOn Pro and Elite, on the same day of the month you subscribed. The server finishes even if you close the app.
6. What the coach carries forwardAn analysis is not a document that gets filed away. The summary, the strengths and the weaknesses follow into planning, chat and the race plan. What the coach decides to act on it writes down as a commitment, while what it only suspects becomes a hypothesis it watches until your training settles the matter.

A mode where you build the weeks yourself and the coach stops writing in the calendar. Instead it reads your plan and answers with suggestions you approve line by line.

1. Dictate the sessionWrite what you want added. The coach reads it but does not write it.
2. It becomes a cardThe coach answers with a suggestion you take a stand on, never with a change already made. Before each new week there is also a review of what you have planned, on the same evening as regular weekly planning. That one is included.
3. Line by lineEach row on the card is approved or declined on its own. The card is valid to the end of the week, and a new one replaces an unanswered card.
4. The rest staysBlock structure, zones, workout analyses, check-ins and the recovery check work as usual. The only thing that moves is who writes the sessions.
5. If you plan in Intervals.icuTurn on Get workouts from Intervals.icu under Connections and the runs you put in there are mirrored into your calendar, tagged with the provider’s name. You can read them here but not change them, because the change belongs where you created the session. Otherwise they are ordinary planned sessions: the coach plans around them, they show in the form curve, and the completed run links to them as usual.

Read about Self coached →

Energy is the budget for what you ask the coach for. What it does on its own is free on the paid tiers.

1. It comes back, day by dayOn Pro and Elite a charge stays for a good week and is then released. No weekday resets anything, and the line under the meter says when the next portion is back.
2. Free is a trialA one-off pot that never refills. There the coach’s own work costs too, and when the pot is empty the coach goes quiet rather than raising an alarm.
3. The coach’s work is includedWeekly planning, reminders, workout analyses, the race plan and the recovery check all cost zero on Pro and Elite. In practice energy is your chat budget.
4. Bought energy does not run outExtra energy sits in its own pot the window does not touch, and is used only once the week’s allowance is gone.

See pricing and tiers →