Fitness States: Your Training Story, Clearly Told
Understanding where you are today—and what to do next—just got a whole lot clearer.
Training data can be overwhelming. Ride after ride, the numbers pile up—power output, heart rate, duration, intensity—all valuable, but what does it actually mean for your fitness right now?
If you’ve explored Wahoo Cycling Metrics and Dimensional Training Load, you understand how Wahoo quantifies training stress across neuromuscular, aerobic, and anaerobic systems rather than collapsing everything into a single number.
Fitness States are Wahoo’s next evolution in training intelligence. They transform those complex metrics into a single, intuitive snapshot of your current training status—so you can understand where you are, why you’re there, and what to do next with confidence.
What Are Fitness States?
Fitness States connect Fitness Score, Training, and Mental Capacity into one clear story. Rather than asking you to decode raw data, they give you a straightforward summary of how your recent training is affecting you right now.
Fitness States answer three critical questions:
- Where you are today: Is your fitness building, holding steady, or declining?
- Why it’s happening: How are recent training load and recovery interacting?
- What it means for training: Should you push, maintain, or back off?
The Five Fitness States Explained
Detraining
What it is: Training has eased off for an extended period, leading to a gradual decline in fitness.
How it feels: You feel a bit rusty—paces or power that once felt easy now take more effort.
How it changes: This state develops over multiple lighter days or weeks; a missed workout or short break won’t put you here.
Recovering
What it is: Your body is repairing and adapting after recent training stress so you can return stronger.
How it feels: Energy is coming back and soreness is fading, though it may take several days to feel truly sharp again.
How it changes: A string of easier days moves you into recovery; a single rest day during a normal training week doesn’t automatically trigger this state.
Maintaining
What it is: Training is supporting your current fitness without pushing for further gains or losses.
How it feels: Workouts feel familiar and manageable, and performance remains steady.
How it changes: Consistent, balanced training keeps you here; one unusually hard or easy day won’t shift your state.
Building
What it is: You’re training consistently with enough challenge to drive improvement—without overdoing it.
How it feels: Workouts are demanding but achievable, and progress shows up week over week.
How it changes: This state is maintained through repeated days of productive training; a single easy or rest day won’t knock you out of it.
Peaking
What it is: You’re sharpening for top performance—slightly less total work so you feel fresh, while keeping a few short, crisp efforts.
How it feels: Snappy, light, and focused—even if total training time is a bit lower.
How it changes: You reach this from a good taper, decreased volume but keeping intensity high leading up to a target event. You can only reach this state a few times a year.
Overtraining
What it is: Training stress has exceeded recovery for too long, increasing fatigue and the risk of declining performance or injury.
How it feels: Heavy legs, poor sleep, irritability, workouts feel unusually hard, and performance slips.
What to do today: Back off. Prioritize rest, easy movement, sleep, and nutrition.
How it changes: Leaving this state requires several easier days—or a lighter week—not just one day off.
How Fitness States Build on Wahoo’s Dimensional Approach
Traditional platforms collapse all workout stress into a single score. But as we’ve explored in our deep dive on Dimensional Training Load, different types of training stress your body in fundamentally different ways.
Fitness States take that dimensional understanding and translates it into something meaningful. Instead of interpreting the trends of multiple training load curves, Fitness States synthesize that information into a clear assessment of your current status. They’re informed by the same sophisticated, multi-dimensional analysis that makes Wahoo Cycling Metrics so powerful, just presented in a way that answers: Where am I at today?
Training Capacity: Putting Readiness Into Context
Understanding your Fitness State is powerful—but what does it mean for today’s training? The new Training Capacity dial gives you clear insight into how your training, mental state, and recovery are affecting your capacity to train right now. After every activity, the dial updates to show the impact of that session—along with an explanation of why it changed.
Why Deeper Insights Matter
Fitness States and Training Capacity work together to turn training data into confident decisions:
- Know your current training status. See whether training is building, maintaining, recovering, detraining, or tipping toward overtraining.
- Train at the right level each day. Get a clear signal of how much load your body is ready to absorb right now.
- Balance progress and recovery. Understand how training, rest, and mental state interact to influence readiness.
- Avoid digging too deep. Spot when capacity is dropping before fatigue turns into stalled progress or injury.
- Turn insight into action. Use clear explanations and visual feedback to adjust intensity, volume, or recovery with purpose.
Training Smarter, Not Harder
No more guessing. No more overthinking. Just clear, actionable insights that help you train with confidence, today, tomorrow, and every day after.
Ready to see your training story unfold? Explore Fitness States and Training Capacity in the Wahoo App, and start making smarter decisions about your training today.
