In this paper, a practical adaptive TuCM scheme is proposed, and its adaptive method is described. With some hardware considerations, a suboptimal optimization algorithm which shows that the number of fading regions is variable is put forward. The proposed adaptive TuCM comes within 3 dB of fading channel capacity, exhibits about 3 dB power gain over conventional adaptive TCM, and is easy to realize by hardware. Considering delay and channel estimation error, the BER performance of adaptive TuCM is analyzed and simulated. In the performance analysis, the method of data fitting is applied to obtain the BER expression for TuCM, and a fitting mathematical model is proposed. Results show that adaptive TuCM is very sensitive to delay and channel estimation error. To alleviate these problems, we proposed an improved power adaptation that can make adaptive TuCM practical.