How Automatic Plan Adjustments Work

What it is

Every time you log or skip a run, Pheidi re-reads your recent training and asks one question: is the plan ahead still the right plan? Usually the answer is yes and nothing happens. When it isn't, you get one of two things, a small cut to the upcoming week, or a heads-up banner, and in both cases the reason is written out in plain language on your plan.

This runs on every path a workout can be logged through: the day view, quick-complete, the mobile app, the API, and a Strava sync. It happens in the background after your save is already committed, so it never slows down logging a run.

The two signals that ease a week

Trigger	What sets it off
Load spike	Your acute:chronic workload ratio goes above 1.5, meaning the last 7 days carry more than one and a half times your 28-day weekly average. That's the ratio the injury safety guards already treat as the risk line.
Missed runs	Two or more runs in a row skipped, or logged as completed but cut to 50% or less of the planned distance. A fully-completed run breaks the streak.

Either one produces the same adjustment: the easy volume in the next week comes down by 10%. If both fire together you still get one cut, with both reasons named in it:

We eased week 7's easy volume by 10% because your recent training
load spiked (acute:chronic 1.6, above the 1.5 risk line) and you
missed or cut short 2 runs in a row. Your quality workouts, long
run, taper, and race date are unchanged.

What it is allowed to touch

The bounds matter more than the cut. An automatic adjustment only ever changes:

The next week, never the week you're in. A week already underway is left alone, so a run you were about to head out for never changes underneath you.
Easy, recovery, and medium-long runs only, and only ones still pending. Tempo sessions, intervals, and your long run keep their prescribed distance, and anything already logged stays as you logged it.
Runs Pheidi shaped itself. A run you edited by hand, a run you added yourself, and runs already reduced by a vacation or an injury are all skipped, so reductions never stack on top of each other.

And there are weeks it will not touch at all. If the upcoming week is a Peak or Taper week, or the week holding your longest long run, no cut is proposed. Your race date, your taper, and your peak week are out of reach of this system by construction, not by a rule someone remembered to add.

The two advisories

Not every signal deserves a change to your plan. Two of them are banner-only: nothing moves, you just get told.

Advisory	When it fires
Your easy paces are drifting	Your last three logged easy runs all came in slower than your VDOT easy band by more than 15 seconds a mile (9 seconds a kilometre). One run on pace breaks the pattern. The suggestion is to recalibrate your VDOT in Settings if that effort felt normal. Needs VDOT pacing and a VDOT value on file.
Your runs are feeling hard	Your last three rated runs were all logged more than a full point above their prescribed RPE band. The suggestion is sleep, easy days, and possibly an extra recovery day before the next quality session.

Everything is reversible

Each adjustment shows up as a banner on your plan overview with a button next to it. On a volume cut it reads Restore full volume, and pressing it puts the week back to its full prescribed distance immediately. On an advisory it reads Dismiss, which only clears the banner: an advisory never changed your plan, so there is nothing to restore.

That works because a volume cut is never written into your plan. It's an overlay, applied on top of the base plan when the plan is loaded, exactly like the vacation and injury layers. The underlying distances are untouched the whole time, so undoing is just switching the overlay off. The adjustment record itself is kept either way, so your activity log keeps an honest history of what was suggested and what you did with it.

Repeats and duplicates

Logging four runs in an afternoon doesn't produce four cuts. There can be one live volume reduction per target week and one live advisory per trigger; anything already standing is not proposed again. When a cut does land, it also posts a single "Upcoming week eased" entry to your activity feed.

You'll also never see this fire on a brand-new plan. Below two logged workouts none of the triggers is arithmetically reachable, so Pheidi doesn't even look.

Automatic plan adjustments live inside the Pheidi app, sign in to see yours.