In this work, we consider rank-one adaptations Xnew = X + ab T of a given matrix X ∈ R n×p with known matrix factorization X = U W , where U ∈ R n×p is column-orthogonal, i.e. U T U = I. Arguably the most important methods that produce such factorizations are the singular value decomposition (SVD), where X = U W = U ΣV T , and the QR-decomposition, where X = U W = QR. An elementary approach to produce a column-orthogonal matrix Unew, whose columns span the same subspace as the columns of the rank-one modified Xnew = X + ab T is via applying a suitable coordinate change such that in the new coordinates, the update affects a single column and subsequently performing a Gram-Schmidt step for reorthogonalization. This may be interpreted as a rank-one adaptation of the U -factor in the SVD or a rank-one adaptation of the Q-factor in the QR-decomposition, respectively, and leads to a decomposition for the adapted matrix Xnew = UnewWnew. By using a geometric approach, we show that this operation is equivalent to traveling from the subspace S = ran(X) to the subspace Snew = ran(Xnew) on a geodesic line on the Grassmann manifold and we derive a closed-form expression for this geodesic. In addition, this allows us to determine the subspace distance between the subspaces S and Snew without additional computational effort. Both Unew and Wnew are obtained via elementary rank-one matrix updates in O(np) time for n p. Possible fields of applications include subspace estimation in computer vision, signal processing, update problems in data science and adaptive model reduction.