Two questions: where am I, and what's the next move?
Open ridetool.cc/me and you see your fitness, your power-to-weight, how rested you are today, and the shape of the last 12 weeks of work. In plain English. No coach-speak. No scoring you against other riders. You vs. you.
The math underneath isn't invented. It's the Banister impulse-response model (1975) and the Coggan training-load framework — the same models used by coaches, TrainingPeaks, and Intervals.icu. We didn't reinvent the wheel. We built a better dashboard on top of it.
We don't show you formulas. The math runs underneath. You see the questions you'd actually ask: am I fitter than last month? am I rested enough to push? when can I ride again?
Most fitness apps store your rides and show them back to you. RideTool computes.
The moment a new ride arrives, it's scored and fed into the model — your card updates before you've put the bike away. And once a day, around midnight in your local timezone, the whole model reruns even if you didn't ride. Fatigue decays on rest days just like it builds on riding days. Your freshness number shifts overnight whether or not you touched the bike.
Your threshold power — the baseline that scores how hard every ride was — is tracked over time. If your fitness improved in March, your March rides are scored against your March baseline, not whatever number you happen to have set today. That's why your fitness history is honest instead of retroactively wrong.
Every ride is scored using the best data available: power if you have it, heart rate if you don't, duration and elevation as the final fallback. No ride is left unscored.
The long trajectory of your training. It rises slowly with consistent riding and falls slowly with time off. Coggan's name for it is CTL — Chronic Training Load, a 42-day weighted average. We just call it Fitness.
The 2-week and 24-week lookbacks tell you whether your engine is on the rise, holding, or slipping. The verb is the headline. The number is the receipt.
W/kg — the only metric that moves with both levers. Train harder, lose weight, or both, and the number reflects it. That's why it's the body-layer headline.
Computed from your most recent FTP and your most recent weight log. The card stamps both with the date they were sampled, so you always know how fresh the number is.
If you don't have power data, the tile prompts you to log weight and add FTP. We'd rather be honest about a missing input than fake a number.
How rested you are today. Coggan's name is TSB — Training Stress Balance. We use the freshness verbs instead — tired, almost ready, ready, fresh, peaked — so you don't have to translate a number into a decision.
The 3-day lookahead assumes you rest each day, and shows you when freshness comes back. The honest answer to when can I ride again? — math, not opinion.
The bars at the bottom of the chart are your per-ride efforts. Coggan calls each one TSS — Training Stress Score, which weighs intensity by duration so a long easy ride and a short hard ride can be compared honestly. We just call it Effort.
The line is your Fitness over the same 12 weeks. When the line rises, your engine is growing. When it dips, you've taken time off. The slope is the ramp.
The last 7 days render brighter so you can see your most recent work at a glance. Click a month label below the chart to open that month; click anywhere on the chart to open that week.
If your power meter is dead, your HR strap is in the wash, or you don't have either, your ride still produces an effort number. That's dTSS — a distance-and-duration estimate that lets the model keep moving.
It's rougher than power-based TSS. The alternative is a hole in your chart, which is worse. The principle: RideTool should work without gear; gear makes it better.
As you connect power and HR, the same rides get re-scored with the better signal. The chart fills in around you.
When you log an injury, the Me card surfaces a Healing banner at the top, and your injury days show as rose dots along the bottom of the chart. The Coggan math keeps running — we don't lie to it — but the chart annotates why the dip happened. So a fitness drop reads as "you got hurt and held the line," not "you fell off."
The Share button on the Me card copies a public link to your clipboard. Anyone with the link sees your card exactly as you saw it when you shared. A sign-up prompt appears at the bottom for friends who land on it. See Sharing Rides.
No. RideTool works with any bike and any sensor setup. With a power meter the numbers are more precise. Without one, we estimate from heart rate or duration. The Me card works the same — the trajectory just gets sharper when you add power.
They're a direct translation of the Coggan numbers. On the rise / holding / slipping comes from the slope of your fitness over the period. Tired / ready / fresh comes from your TSB (freshness). The thresholds and the full math are in Training Metrics.