What the coach can and can’t do

The coach is a calm, pragmatic endurance and triathlon coach for one athlete: you. It is useful when it works from your own data and honest about what it does not know. This article says what it does well, what it will not do, what data it can and cannot see, how it treats memory, and what happens when it hits a limit.

What it does well

• Reads your sessions, fitness trend and recovery, and answers with dates and numbers.
• Says when your data is thin or a value is unknown, instead of guessing. A threshold Form does not have is reported as unknown.
• Turns agreed constraints (days, hours, access, a race date) into structured Run, Ride, Swim and gym sessions, with explicit steps and targets, and adjusts the coming week after a weekly check-in.
• Researches races and public GPX routes on the web and puts them in front of you to approve.
• Reads attached photos and files, such as a race brochure.

What it will not do

• Diagnose an injury, prescribe medication, or tell you to push through red-flag symptoms. In a weekly check-in, symptoms such as chest pain, breathing difficulty, dizziness or a racing heart at rest, fever, and pain at rest or at night are the kind it treats as reasons to stop and get checked.
• Name an illness from a reading. A Garmin figure that looks unusual is a reason to ask how you feel, not to label it.
• Save a race, send a plan to your watch or change your calendar on its own. Each is a button on a card that you press: Add race, Approve & send, Apply to my plan.
• Change your FTP, your other thresholds or a race’s estimated time from your training data. It only sets one when you state the number or ask for the change (“my FTP is 295”, “set my run split for Noosa to 42 minutes”).
• Read your other apps, email or device. It only knows what Form holds, what you attach, and what it finds on the public web.

What data the coach can see

• Sessions from your training source (Garmin, Intervals.icu, files you uploaded, and sessions recorded in Form), including streams and splits for any session you attach.
• Wellness: weight, resting heart rate, HRV, fatigue. With Garmin, also sleep, stress, Body Battery and the rest of what Garmin sends.
• Gym sessions logged in Form.
• Your profile: sports, thresholds, training method and periodisation, saved races (with their estimates) and courses, and your sex and birth year if you add them under “For your coach”. Blank fields are left blank, not guessed.
• Your weekly check-ins and block reviews.

What it cannot see is anything Form does not hold. After you connect Garmin, if Form has little from before, the coach is told for the first six weeks that a short history is missing data rather than rest, and asks what it cannot see before writing a plan. Garmin’s history from before you connected only comes in through your Garmin data export or files you upload. The coach never says it has searched your device or your email.

How it counts hard days

The coach counts hard sessions across all your sports together: two or three a week in total, not two or three for each sport. A week that stacks hard bike, hard run and hard swim sessions fails that count even if each sport looks fine alone. Your three thresholds (bike, run, swim) are kept independent: it will not work one out from another. It also checks that an interval target can actually be held for its length, so it will not write six-minute reps at 115% of FTP.

Monthly allowance

Each athlete has a monthly allowance for coach use, counted from the first of the month. Form checks it before each question. When you reach it, you are told your usage has run out for this month and the date it refreshes (the first of next month), and the message is not sent. It is based on the amount of text the coach reads and writes, so a long plan or a long chat costs more than a short answer.

Memory

Memory is off until you turn it on. When it is on, the coach can keep durable notes such as a goal, a preference or a constraint, and uses them in later chats. It saves one only when you ask it to (“remember that I can’t train Tuesday nights”) or explicitly confirm. It does not save things it has inferred, and does not mention memory during ordinary coaching.

1. If memory is off and you ask the coach to remember something, a card asks “Turn on memory?”. Press Turn on memory & save to switch it on and save the note, or ignore it.
2. To review what is saved, open your profile (your name at the bottom of the sidebar) and choose the Memory tab.
3. Under Saved items, use Edit or Delete on any item. To add one yourself, type it under Add memory (up to 500 characters), choose what kind it is (Preference, Goal, Constraint, Background or Other) and how sensitive it is (Low, Medium or High), and press Add memory. Deleting stops Form using it. You can also tell the coach “forget that”.
4. Turn memory on or off with the switch at the top of the tab (“Memory is on” or “Memory is off”) and press Save memory setting. With memory off the coach stops using memories. Your saved items stay there until you delete them.

A goal you enter during setup is kept as a memory while you leave its tick box on.

Uncertainty and errors

• Thin data. With few sessions, or a short Garmin history, the coach says so and widens its ranges.
• Race and course research. It can pick the wrong event or a stale date. Open the source link on a race card and check before you add it.
• Delivery issues. Answers are written out as the coach produces them. If a reply fails, even part way, a “Form · delivery issue” box says what to do, and your message is kept so you can send it again.
• Plans. If a draft is cut short or refused for a rule, the coach repairs it before you see it. If something is missing, tell it in the chat.