Log a rest day explicitly

Sunday was meant to be a single rest day. Tell the agent so that specific date is recorded as planned rest, with any light activity kept as optional context.

What the agent needs to hear

Behind your sentence, the agent works backwards to two pieces: the rest day declaration for a specific date — today by default — and any light activity worth noting, which is optional. A walk, some mobility, a stretch session, or nothing at all. « Rest day » with nothing else is enough.

« Rest day, 40-minute walk » attaches the walk as light-activity context, not as a cardio workout — the rest is the headline, the walk is the aside. If you only say « walked 40 minutes today » with no mention of rest, the agent treats the walk as the primary log.

Planned rest vs missed training vs cancel

Use a planned rest day for one date that was meant to be rest. Schedule time off when every goal should stop counting across several dates. Use a deload for a lighter training block that is still planned work. This recipe covers the first case: one date, recorded honestly.

Three shapes look similar on a calendar and read very differently. Planned rest is when the day is supposed to be rest — your routine has it scheduled, or you’re calling it yourself — and you log it explicitly so the day reads as compliant. Missed training is no log at all on a day the routine had queued work — it reads as a skip in adherence and drags the weekly numbers. Cancelled session is one you started and bailed on — different shape again, different downstream read.

The deciding question is simple. Did you mean to not train today? If yes, it’s a rest day. If no — either you forgot, or you started and stopped. Forgot is a missed session. Started-and-stopped is a cancel. Pick the tag that matches what actually happened.

How rest reads downstream

A logged rest day is adherent, not a gap. Three readings include it. Routine adherence counts the rest day as compliant if your routine had it scheduled, or as a one-off rest if it didn’t — either way it’s not a miss. Streak tracking treats rest days as expected absence — streaks don’t break on rest days, they continue through them. Recovery readiness uses rest days as positive signal — recent rest tilts the readiness score up for the next training day.

Not logging the rest day strips all three of these effects. The day reads as a missed session, adherence drops, the streak breaks, and readiness loses a data point it should have had.

When the agent gets it wrong

Three failures show up. The agent logged the rest day for the wrong date — usually because you logged it the morning after — say it plainly: « no, yesterday — I forgot to log it ». The agent treated « rest day, walked an hour » as a cardio session — push back: « it’s a rest day with a walk noted, not a cardio workout ». The agent treated the rest day as a cancel — correct it: « nothing was scheduled — there’s no session to cancel, just tag the day as rest ».

What makes the rest log worth keeping

Three things decide whether logging this rest day helps you later: the date is right (a forgotten rest day logged the next day still helps, but a wrong-date log corrupts the day it actually lands on), light activity is tagged separately if relevant (a recovery walk is a walk attached to a rest day, not a workout — logged the wrong way it inflates training volume and skews conditioning trends), and the rest is honest (logging rest days you actually trained is the kind of self-cooked adherence number the weekly review will spot anyway). Rest days, tagged honestly, are what make streaks and recovery reads actually readable.