Adjusting macros after poor sleep: a field guide
How KEXBI reads sleep disruption, suggests how hard to train, and offers to rebuild the day around your recovery.
How KEXBI reads sleep disruption, suggests how hard to train, and offers to rebuild the day around your recovery.
A field guide to the warning headings KEXBI surfaces on your day. Three sectors, three failure modes, one composite label, and the Rebuild action. What each one means, and what to do about it.
The Sleep Impact Score breaks last night's sleep into something your day can use. Most of the time, the card reads green and the directive is "eat as planned, train as planned". When it does not, the headings get specific. This piece is a field guide to what each heading means.
The companion piece, The Sleep Impact Score, walks through how the three sectors and the failure-mode formulae are computed. This article assumes that. The job here is plain-English decoding: when you see Anabolic Resistance · Triggered on your card, what is the engine telling you, and what should you do.
Every sleep card carries three sector scores. Each sector reads a different layer of last night's sleep against your personalised baseline, and each has its own four-step status ladder.
The Performance and Repair directives above are quoted from the app, the lines you see under each sector tile on a card where the score has dropped out of green. The Fuel lines describe what Rebuild offers. They are deliberate. Each one is a short, actionable instruction rather than a generic encouragement. The CRITICAL lines, including "Skip training. Your body needs rest today.", are rare: they appear only after a very poor night, and they are suggestions you can take or leave, not changes to your training plan.
Above the three sectors, the card carries a single composite label that summarises the day. It is a weighted average of the three sector scores, compressed into a five-word ladder.
The composite is the line most users glance at first. It is the answer to "what kind of day is today". The three sectors underneath tell you why, and the failure modes (when they fire) tell you what specifically the engine is adjusting for.
Underneath the sectors, the card carries a small failure-mode panel with three rows. Each row is either Clear or Triggered. A triggered row is a caution, not a diagnosis: the engine reads last night's sleep as a sign your body may cope less well today, and pairs it with a specific adjustment it offers to apply.
| Mode | What triggers it | What the engine does |
|---|---|---|
| Insulin Resistance | Total sleep below your personal floor, or sleep efficiency below about 82 percent. (85 percent or more is the target; 80 to 84 percent is the caution band, below 80 the alarm band.) | No carb cut and no fat shift: your carbs stay where your training set them. An easier training day may be suggested, and the plan offers to rebuild the day around recovery. |
| Anabolic Resistance | Deep sleep below the alarm floor, or resting heart rate elevated more than 5 percent above your 30-day baseline. | No percentage protein boost. Pre-bed protein feed (about 40 g of slow protein) on training days. Post-workout leucine emphasis. Offers to rebuild the day around recovery. |
| Cognitive Impairment | Severe REM loss combined with deep-sleep fragmentation, or extreme total sleep deficit. | A lighter training day suggested; your training plan itself is not changed. Technical work de-prioritised. Acute creatine option surfaced if relevant. |
Three notes on these rows.
The thresholds are personalised. Your floor for total sleep is not 6 hours flat. It is a fraction of your own 14-day target (covered in How to Calculate Your Personal Sleep Need). The same applies to deep-sleep alarms and the RHR baseline. The flags fire against your numbers, not against a generic population threshold.
The adjustments are small. No caution cuts your carbs, shifts your fat or raises your protein target by a percentage. After a poor night the plan may add a pre-bed protein feed, may suggest an easier training day, and offers to rebuild the day around recovery. The trials behind the cautions [1,2,3] describe what a short night does to the body; they do not show that trimming carbs or adding protein the next day fixes it, and adherence collapses when daily macros swing wildly.
The modes are independent. Two can fire on the same day. Three is rare and usually points at a sleep problem worth addressing at the source. When all three triggered states appear on a card, the composite label usually reads DRAINED or EXHAUSTED, and the Fuel sector will direct you to rest and recover rather than try to eat your way out.
When the Fuel sector drops to ADJUSTED or below, the card surfaces a Rebuild button. The default heading reads "Fuel plan needs updating. Rebuild to recalculate macros." Tap it, and the engine regenerates the rest of the day's meals around recovery. Once the rebuild completes, the heading flips to "Fuel plan updated. Sleep adjustments applied."
Rebuild is opt-in by design. The engine has the math ready, but it does not silently rewrite your day. The choice to apply the adjustment is yours, because some users have a meeting at noon and a sandwich already planned. The button puts the decision in front of you rather than around you.
One thing to watch. Rebuild changes the plan for the rest of the day, not the kitchen. If you have already cooked breakfast for the day, the rebuild applies to the remaining meals. The app will not ask you to throw away a meal you already ate.
One concrete day to make the headings tangible. This is a typical short-sleep card after a single bad night, captured the morning after.
Reading the card top to bottom: composite is TIRED at 62, so today is not a peak day but it is not a write-off either. Performance sits in REDUCED, so the plan suggests an easier day: no max-effort work, but training can still go ahead. Repair is also REDUCED. Fuel is ADJUSTED and offers the Rebuild button. Only one caution fired: Insulin Resistance (a caution that your body may handle carbohydrate less well today, not a diagnosis), because sleep efficiency, at 78 percent, fell into the alarm band below 80 percent. The other two stayed Clear. Tapping Rebuild reissues the rest of the day's meals around recovery. The carbs stay where the training set them; the easier-day suggestion is the main change.
This is a normal short-sleep day. Most users see at least one of these per week. The headings are precise so the action is precise.
The cautions are designed to be read in 10 seconds. Composite first, sector statuses second, failure-mode rows third. The directive under each sector tells you what to do. The Rebuild button does the rest.
What the cautions are not. They are not a verdict on your day. They are not a reason to skip training as a default; the Performance directive will tell you when to scale back. They are not a substitute for sleeping. When the engine flags Cognitive Impairment two days in a row, the answer is not a third creatine bolus. The answer is in What to Eat After Poor Sleep: past a point, changing the macros helps less and sleep is the fix.
Sector status thresholds (≥85, 65 to 84, 45 to 64, <45) and the composite ladder breakpoints (PEAK at ≥85, READY 70 to 84, TIRED 55 to 69, DRAINED 40 to 54, EXHAUSTED <40) are KEXBI implementation values. Failure-mode triggers (the 40 g pre-bed protein feed, sleep-efficiency bands of 85 percent target, 80 to 84 percent caution and below 80 percent alarm, RHR alarm at +5 percent above 30-day baseline) are also KEXBI calibrations, set against the trial literature cited above. Performance and Repair directives quoted in Chapter 01 are strings the iOS app surfaces today; they may evolve as the engine iterates.