Form Band

What it is

Form Band is a fitness-and-fatigue curve. It tracks three things over time: how fit you are, how tired you are, and how fresh you feel today.

It is the same kind of curve TrainingPeaks and Intervals.icu made popular for runners. Kinoku makes it wider, so it counts your gym days too. And it makes it private. No cloud, no account.

The three curves

Training builds you up and wears you down at the same time. The three curves track both:

• Fitness (CTL) — a slow, 42-day average of your daily training load. It builds slowly and fades slowly.
• Fatigue (ATL) — a fast, 7-day average of the same load. It jumps after hard weeks and drops fast during an easy week.
• Form (TSB) — fitness minus fatigue. It reads as how fresh you are. A negative number means you are tired from hard training. A positive number means you are fresh and ready.

90-day curve

The Elite Analytics Recovery tab plots all three over the last 90 days. It marks four zones:

• Peaking (Form above +5) — fresh enough to race or chase a record. A good week to spend it well.
• Productive (Form from −10 to +5) — where most training sits.
• Dig-in (Form from −20 to −10) — hard, on-purpose overload. Fine for 2 to 4 weeks, not more.
• Overreached (Form below −20) — a sign to rest before you get hurt.

Each night at 3 a.m. on your phone, Kinoku reads the past day and updates the curves.

What counts as load

Form Band covers more than one sport. It adds up:

• Gym work — your sets, weighted so a heavy 5×3 squat counts more than a light 5×10 curl, and tuned by RPE when you log it
• Runs — a run stress score from your heart rate or pace, whichever is richer
• Brisk steps — time spent walking above your brisk pace, turned into a steady load

You see one curve for all your training, not a separate one per sport. That is the big difference from run-only tools that skip your gym days.

Why the curve matters

Most people lose track of when they are fresh or worn down. They find out the hard way: a missed record or a small injury. Form Band makes the state easy to see ahead of time:

• You can check if a planned peak is landing in the fresh zone
• You can spot a hidden overload two weeks before you feel it
• You can back up a rest week with a chart, not a hunch
• You can see if your easy weeks ease the fatigue or just shift it

How Kinoku works it out

The curve uses a model first written by Banister in 1975, with later tweaks by Calvert and Skiba. The exact math, the decay rates, and how the three curves combine are on the methodology page.

For the full story on why this works and how to read it day to day, see the Banister pillar article in /learn.

Form Band and readiness

You can turn on a Readiness layer too (also Elite). It reads Form Band along with your sleep and HRV. From that, it can tweak tomorrow’s planned weights and reps.

A low Form plus poor sleep and HRV trims tomorrow’s plan. A high Form plus good sleep and HRV can add a little. Nothing changes on its own. Kinoku shows the idea, and you decide.