Activities & sync

Activities are the rides openkoutsi analyses to track your fitness and check your training plan. You can add them manually or have them appear automatically.

Uploading activity files

Drop a file from your head unit or training app straight onto the activities page. openkoutsi reads three formats:

Format	Typically from	Carries
.fit	head units (Garmin, Wahoo, Zwift…)	everything — power, laps, the device's own totals
.tcx	training platforms and older devices	power, laps, distance
.gpx	phone apps and route exports	position, elevation, usually heart rate — no power

All three are analysed the same way, automatically, for:

• Training load
• Normalized power (where the file recorded power)
• Zone distribution — how long you spent in each power/heart-rate zone

Workouts are also categorised automatically using Coggan-style zones, and you can override the category by hand if needed.

You can also drop many files at once, gzipped files, or a whole .zip archive — see bringing your history with you for the Strava bulk-export route. Large drops become a background import with a progress panel and a per-file result list, so nothing has to be watched.

A ride with no power is still a complete ride

A .gpx file has no power data to read, so an activity imported from one has no average or weighted power, no power records and no power-zone time. That is the file, not a failed import: the training load comes from heart rate instead, and the ride counts towards your fitness and fatigue as normal. The activity says so on its own page.

Your route is not stored

GPX and TCX files are made of GPS coordinates. openkoutsi uses them only to derive distance and elevation gain and then discards them — no route or location data is ever saved. See Your data & AI.

Downloading the original

Every uploaded or imported activity keeps the original file, exactly as you sent it — a GPX stays a GPX. The download button on an activity gives it back in its own format, and it is the file openkoutsi re-reads if you reprocess the activity later.

Average speed

An activity's summary shows its average speed, next to distance and duration.

openkoutsi shows the speed your recording carried — the average of the device's own speed readings, which is the figure your head unit displayed and the one Strava and Wahoo report for the same ride. For a workout you logged by hand, or a file that carried no speed readings at all, the speed is worked out from distance and elapsed time instead.

Why the two figures can differ

A ride with stops in it — traffic lights, a café, waiting at a junction — has a lower average once the stopped time counts towards it. That is why openkoutsi prefers the recorded figure wherever there is one, rather than recomputing it and quietly disagreeing with your head unit.

Adding activities manually

Not every workout comes from a device. When you train without a head unit — or want to log a session from a notebook or spreadsheet — use Add activity on the activities page to enter the details by hand.

Every field is optional, so fill in as much or as little as you remember:

• Sport type and date
• Duration (minutes) and distance (kilometres)
• Average and maximum heart rate
• Average power and average cadence
• Elevation, a name, and either an RPE (1–10) or an explicit training load

If you don't provide a training load, openkoutsi estimates one from what you did enter, in this order of preference:

1. an explicit training load value, if you gave one;
2. otherwise your RPE (perceived effort), scaled by duration;
3. otherwise your average heart rate, using the maximum heart rate on your profile.

Manually added activities are tagged with a Manual source badge and count towards your fitness metrics and training-plan matching just like uploaded or synced rides.

Only need to log the effort?

Entering just a date, duration and RPE is enough to keep your fitness, fatigue and form curves accurate on days you trained without a device.

Rating perceived effort (RPE)

Power and heart rate tell openkoutsi how hard a ride was; RPE (Rate of Perceived Exertion, a 1–10 score) tells it how hard the ride actually felt. Illness, heat, poor sleep and life stress can all make an easy-looking ride feel brutal — recording your own read on the session gives the AI coaching analysis a signal the numbers can't provide (for example, a modest intensity paired with a high RPE points to a fatigued day).

The after-ride prompt

After a significant cycling ride lands — whether it synced in the background or you uploaded a FIT file — openkoutsi gently asks you to rate it the next time you look at your dashboard. That includes bringing the app back from the background: if you leave it open on your phone, ride, and come back to it later, the prompt is waiting for you. A ride that arrives while you are already looking at the dashboard is picked up within a minute, and the refresh button next to the "updated N min ago" label asks for anything pending straight away.

• Rate — pick an effort from 1 (very easy) to 10 (maximal). You can also add a short note and tick "This was a commute" to tag the ride.
• Skip — move on without rating this ride.
• Ask again later — dismiss the prompt; the same ride leads the queue next time.

If several rides are waiting, the prompt works through them one after another in a single sitting until the queue is empty or you dismiss it. Only cycling rides are prompted, and rides tagged as a commute drop out of the queue — so everyday commutes and easy spins don't nag you.

No backfilling your history

The prompt only ever asks about rides that arrive after you start using the feature — it will never march you through your entire past activity history.

Setting RPE from the activity

You can also set or change the RPE on any activity at any time. Open the activity and use the 1–10 selector in the Labels & Notes card, right next to where you edit labels and notes. Tap a number to set it, or tap it again to clear it.

Turning the prompt on or off

Prefer not to be asked? On your profile, toggle "Ask me to rate effort after uploads" off (or back on). Turning the prompt off doesn't stop you setting RPE by hand from the activity view.

Labels, and finding your commutes

Every activity can carry a label: race or commute. Labels are more than decoration — a ride labelled commute drops out of the RPE prompt, hides its aerobic metrics (stops and traffic make the numbers meaningless), counts towards the Commuter badge, and can be filtered out of the activity list so you see only real training.

Set a label by opening an activity and tapping it in the Labels & Notes card.

Letting openkoutsi find them for you

Riding to work and back means tapping that label some five hundred times a year, so openkoutsi can spot commutes for you. Go to Settings → Commute detection and describe what your commute looks like:

• Sport types — the exact ones, so an e-bike commute can be told apart from your weekend road rides even when the distances overlap
• Distance and duration bands
• Times of day — your local clock. Most people want two windows: one out, one back
• Days of the week

No GPS involved

openkoutsi never stores where your rides went, so it cannot recognise a commute by its route. It goes by the shape of the ride instead: the same short trip, at the same times, on working days. That works well, and it means your address is never in the picture.

You always get the last word

A rule suggests the label; it never applies it on its own. Suggestions reach you in three places:

• The after-ride prompt arrives with "This was a commute" already ticked, and a line saying why. Leave it ticked to confirm, untick it to say no.
• The activity page shows the suggestion with Yes / No buttons.
• Activities → Suggested commutes lets you work through a whole backlog at once.

Saying no is permanent: that ride will never be suggested again, even if you reprocess it later. If you would rather stop being asked about a rule you trust, turn on "Apply this label without asking" for it.

Let openkoutsi write the rule

Once you have labelled ten rides as commutes, the settings screen offers to build a rule from them — sensible distances, durations and time windows already filled in, ready for you to adjust. Below ten rides there simply isn't enough to go on.

Your history

New rides are checked as they arrive. To look at everything you have already imported, use Scan my history in the settings card. That is a deliberate button rather than something that happens by itself, because it can look at a decade of riding at once.

Editing a rule re-checks everything still awaiting an answer: narrow a rule and the suggestions it no longer stands behind quietly disappear, widen it and rides it now covers are picked up. Answers you have already given are never touched.

Rides you tagged in Strava

If you tick Commute on a ride in Strava, openkoutsi takes it at its word and labels the ride straight away — no confirmation needed. That is your own decision arriving with the ride, not a guess. Wahoo has no equivalent, and a bulk export from Strava arrives as plain activity files with the flag stripped out, so for imported history the rules above are what will find your commutes.

When a rule looks wrong

The settings card watches for two things and tells you about them, without changing anything by itself:

• rides you labelled by hand that a rule nearly caught — a sign the rule is a little too tight
• rules whose suggestions you keep turning down — a sign they are too loose

You decide what, if anything, to change. Only you know whether that 9 km ride was the commute or the long way home.

Syncing from Strava

Connect your Strava account to import your history and have new rides flow in automatically:

1. Your administrator configures Strava credentials on the instance.
2. From your settings, connect ("authorise") Strava.
3. openkoutsi imports your recent history and keeps up to date as you ride.

Knowing whether your import finished

Bringing a decade of riding across takes a while, and it does not always get through in one go. Your profile page shows, under each connected service, what the last import did — so you never have to guess whether an activity list that stopped growing is finished or stuck.

What it says	What it means
Importing your history…	A sync is running right now. Leave it be; it updates on its own
Import finished	It reached the end of your history. Nothing is waiting
An amber line	It stopped before the end. It says why, what it did manage to bring in, and how far back it reached

When you see the amber line, press Sync now to carry on. The import picks up where it stopped rather than starting over, so each run gets further back through your history than the last.

Why an import stops partway

Four things can end one early, and the line on your profile names which:

• Strava or Wahoo rate-limited us. They cap how many requests the app may make, and that budget is shared by everyone on your instance. Rather than import rides without their power, heart-rate and cadence data, the import stops. This is the common one, and waiting an hour before pressing Sync again is usually all it takes.
• The service stopped sending activity data. Usually a provider having a bad afternoon.
• The import hit its own safety limit — a guard against an implausibly long walk through your history.
• Another import took over. One runs at a time per service.

Nothing is ever lost to a stop: rides that arrived incomplete are filled in by a later sync, and a ride the import was thrown out in the middle of is not kept half-finished.

If it keeps stopping in the same way

The line tells you when the same thing has happened several runs in a row. One stop is a busy afternoon; three in a row usually means your history is longer than the request budget your instance has in one sitting — keep pressing Sync every so often and it will work its way back — or something your administrator should look at. Show them the line: it says exactly what happened.

Imports are paced on purpose

A big import is deliberately slowed down so it does not make the rest of openkoutsi sluggish while it runs. That makes a first full import take longer in real time than it otherwise would; your administrator can change the pace if they would rather it finish sooner. Rides already imported are skipped at full speed, so resuming a stopped import is not slowed by this.

Syncing from Wahoo

Connecting Wahoo works the same way and also enables pushing structured workouts back to your Wahoo account (see Training plans & workouts).

Reconnecting for new permissions

Some features need additional Wahoo permissions. If you connected Wahoo before a feature was added, you may need to disconnect and reconnect to grant the new access.

Syncing zones and FTP

You can sync your heart-rate / power zones and FTP from a connected provider so your profile stays consistent with the device you train with.

Linking activities to your plan

When you have a training plan, uploaded activities are matched automatically to the planned workout for that day (by sport, and when the training load and duration are close enough). You can also link or unlink manually from the plan calendar or the dashboard activity calendar. When linking manually you can pick from activities recorded within two days of the planned workout, so a session done a day early or late still counts towards it.

More detail coming

Step-by-step screenshots for connecting providers will be added here.