Free 30-second tool
What should I ride today?
Four questions about your time, your legs, your energy, and your last training day. You get a specific session, its structure, and the reasoning behind it.
Question 1 of 4
How much time do you have today?
No account, no email, no download needed. About 30 seconds.
The short answer
In one paragraph
On most days, most riders should ride steady aerobic endurance — Zone 2, around 70–80% of FTP, conversational. A harder session is worth doing when three things line up: your legs feel fresh, your energy is genuinely good, and you did not train hard in the last day or two. When your legs are heavy or your energy is poor, an easy recovery spin or a rest day protects the rest of your week better than pushing through does.
That is the whole framework, and it is deliberately boring. The mistake most time-crunched amateurs make is not that they train too little — it is that they take the hard session on the day their body was not ready for it, then spend the next two days recovering from a workout that was never going to be good. The decision that actually moves fitness is not which interval set; it is whether today is a hard day at all.
The tool above makes that call from four answers. What follows is the reasoning it uses, so you can make the same call yourself on a day you do not feel like tapping through a form.
How the decision is made
The order matters more than any individual rule. Signals that say back off are checked first and cannot be overridden by anything below them — that is the single most important property of the model, because the failure mode we care about is prescribing intensity to someone who should not be doing it.
- Protective signals first. Heavy legs and poor energy together mean rest. Either one on its own means an easy recovery ride. Nothing further down can upgrade those days.
- Then what you did last. A hard interval day, a long ride, or hard strength work behind you rules out another hard day. Back-to-back quality is the most common way amateurs end up tired rather than fitter.
- Then your legs and energy. A little residual fatigue, or energy that is fine but not good, both point to steady aerobic work rather than intensity.
- Quality last, and only if it is earned. Fresh or normal legs, good energy, and an easy or aerobic day behind you. That combination is rarer than most training plans assume, which is exactly why it is worth spending well.
- Time shapes the session, never the intensity. A short window can move you from an interval set to a single steady block, or shorten the warm-up. It never turns an easy day into a hard one on the grounds that you only have half an hour.
The sessions it can recommend
Six outcomes, easiest to hardest. These are the app’s own session types, with one deliberate omission: SmarterTraining also prescribes VO₂ max intervals, but only once it has enough training history to be confident that kind of work is warranted. Four questions cannot establish that, so this page stops at threshold rather than being less careful than the product it is demonstrating.
| Session | What it is | When it gets chosen |
|---|---|---|
| Rest or very easy | A day off, or light movement only | Heavy legs and poor energy on the same day. |
| Recovery ride | Easy spinning to move blood, not to build fitness | Heavy legs, poor energy, or tired legs and flat energy after a hard day. |
| Zone 2 endurance | Steady aerobic base work | The default. Any day with a hard session behind you, tired legs, or middling energy. |
| Tempo | One controlled block at a steady, sustainable effort | Good energy and normal legs, but not enough time for a full interval set. |
| Sweet spot | Sustained sub-threshold blocks | Good energy, normal legs, an easy or aerobic day behind you, 45 minutes or more. |
| Threshold | Repeatable blocks at your threshold | Fresh legs and good energy, with no hard day behind you. The hardest session this page will prescribe. |
Targets are expressed as percentages of your FTP. If you want the full seven-zone table in watts, the cycling power zone calculator will produce it from the same number.
What this tool does not know
Four answers is enough for a sensible default and not enough for a real coaching decision. Being clear about the gap is more useful than pretending it is not there, so: this page has no memory. It does not know any of the following, all of which change what today should be.
- Your training history. Three hard days in the last week and three in the last month are very different situations, and this page cannot tell them apart.
- How your last sessions actually went. Whether you finished the intervals or fell apart in the third one is among the strongest available signals, and you have not told it.
- Everything else you did. Rides, runs, matches, and gym sessions all count as load whether or not they were on the bike.
- Sleep, work stress, illness, and travel. All genuinely change what you can absorb today.
- What you have coming up. A hard session two days before an event you care about is a different decision.
It also does not produce a readiness score, and deliberately so. Turning four multiple-choice answers into a number like “73% recovered” would imply a precision that nothing here supports. The honest output is a session and a reason.
And the standard caveat that is not boilerplate: this is training guidance, not medical advice. A questionnaire cannot tell you whether you are ill, injured, or under-recovered in a way that matters. If something feels wrong beyond ordinary training fatigue, that is a question for a doctor, not a form.
For the longer versions of these questions, see should I skip today’s workout, training when your legs still feel heavy, and what to ride the day after a hard one.
Frequently asked questions
- What cycling workout should I do today?
- For most riders on most days the answer is a steady aerobic ride — Zone 2, roughly 70–80% of FTP, at an effort you could hold a conversation through. A harder session earns its place only when your legs feel fresh, your energy is genuinely good, and you did not train hard in the last day or two. If your legs feel heavy or your energy is poor, an easy recovery spin or a full rest day will do more for the rest of your week than pushing through.
- Should I train if my legs feel tired?
- Usually yes, but not hard. Residual fatigue is a reason to take the intensity out of a session rather than to skip it — an easy or steady aerobic ride keeps the habit and the aerobic work going at a cost you can absorb. Intervals on tired legs tend to come out lower quality than the same session two days later, so you pay the recovery cost without getting the training benefit. Heavy legs combined with poor overall energy is the one combination worth treating as a rest day.
- Can I do intervals two days in a row?
- Occasionally, but it is rarely the best use of two days. The second session is usually lower quality than the first, and the recovery cost lands on the days after it, which is how a good week turns into a flat one. Putting an aerobic day between hard days generally produces better intervals and more total useful work across the week.
- How accurate is this recommendation?
- It is a reasonable coaching decision based on the four things you told it, and nothing more. It does not know your training history, how your last sessions actually felt, your sleep, your stress, or what you have coming up this weekend — all of which a coach would weigh. Treat it as a sensible default for today rather than a verdict, and adjust it if you know something it does not.
- Is this the same as the SmarterTraining app?
- No. This page runs a simplified version of the same decision order the app uses, from a one-off set of answers. The app makes the call from a daily check-in plus your training history, rides imported from Strava and Apple Health, feedback on how each session went, and any events you have coming up — then guides you through the workout, controlling a smart trainer over Bluetooth if you ride one, and adjusts tomorrow based on what actually happened.
- Do I need a power meter or smart trainer to use this?
- No. The targets are given as percentages of FTP, and each one has a plain-language description of the effort — conversational, steady, hard but repeatable — that you can ride to by feel. If you know your FTP you can enter it to see the same targets in watts.
What the app does that this page cannot
SmarterTraining runs the same decision order, with all the context this page is missing. It reads a roughly 30-second daily check-in, your recent training, rides imported from Strava and Apple Health, your feedback on how each session landed, and anything you have coming up — then recommends one workout and explains why it picked that one. If you ride a smart trainer it can run the session for you over Bluetooth; if you do not, it guides you through the same workout on whatever you are riding. Tomorrow’s recommendation accounts for what actually happened today.
If you want the full walkthrough, screen by screen, read how SmarterTraining works or the adaptive cycling training overview.
Get this decision made for you, every day
SmarterTraining recommends one workout that fits your recovery, your schedule, and the day in front of you, and explains why. The workout library and trainer control are free; the adaptive coaching layer is a subscription with a 7-day trial.