What is in the weekly check-in?

Trend weight and its change against your target rate, average calories and protein per day, days logged, sessions completed, total volume against last week, new personal records, maintenance and how it moved, the surplus you set against the surplus you actually averaged, where that surplus can physically have gone, and sleep and recovery averages.

Does Base tell me what to change?

Yes. It applies a rule table comparing your actual rate of change against your target rate and recommends holding, raising or lowering the surplus. Being told you are 22% over your target gain rate is often enough on its own, without asking anyone.

Why can I copy the check-in as text?

Because the most useful thing to do with a week of training data is sometimes to hand it to someone — a coach, a training partner, or a language model — and ask what they make of it. Plain text pastes anywhere and needs no integration on either end.

How often should I change my calorie target?

Weekly at most, and usually less. Adaptive maintenance runs on a fourteen-day window, so a change made on a single week's data is a change made on half a window. Three consecutive weeks pointing the same direction is a signal; one week is weather.

What if I missed days?

The check-in reports how many days were logged and excludes blank days from averages rather than counting them as zero. If fewer than five days were logged it reports nothing for intake rather than an average built on three days that would read as a crash diet.

The Weekly Check-In: A Generated Packet, Not a Form

Why the review is weekly

Because that is the resolution the underlying signals actually have.

Trend weight is an exponentially weighted average designed to damp daily noise; reading it daily means reading noise. Adaptive maintenance runs on a fourteen-day window, so a daily check reads the same window with one day rotated. Recovery score is meaningful daily but only as a decision input for that day, not as a trend.

A weekly cadence matches the data. It is also the cadence at which changing something is sane: adjust a calorie target daily and you are chasing water weight, and every adjustment invalidates the window the next reading depends on.

What the packet contains

BASE WEEKLY CHECK-IN — Week of Aug 11–17, 2026

BODY
  Trend weight:    182.4 lb  (+0.61 lb this week, target +0.50)
  Raw range:       181.2 – 184.0  (6 weigh-ins)
  Waist:           32.1 in  (+0.05)

NUTRITION
  Avg calories:    3,042 / day   (target 3,010)
  Avg protein:     198 g/day     (target 190)
  Days logged:     7 / 7
  Adherence:       within +/-100 kcal on 6 of 7 days

ENERGY
  Maintenance:     2,817  (was 2,790 - trending up)
  Surplus set:     +250 / day  (target 3,067)
  Surplus actual:  +225 / day
  Where it goes:   179 cal of this can go to muscle - that is the ceiling. The
                   other 46 has nowhere to go but fat, about 0.09 lb a week.

TRAINING
  Sessions:        4 / 4
  Total volume:    68,420 lb  (+3.1% vs last week)
  New PRs:         Bench 195x6 (e1RM 234, +4), Row 165x10

ENDURANCE
  Minutes:         248  (ramp 1.14 - steady)
  Sessions:        3 / 3   Graded: 2 nailed, 1 over (Tue easy run)

RECOVERY
  Avg sleep score: 78   Avg recovery: 64
  Avg HRV:         48 ms (baseline 45)   Avg RHR: 54 (baseline 56)

Five lines in there do more work than the rest combined.

"Surplus set" against "surplus actual." You set +250. You averaged +225. Those are different numbers and the second one is the one that determines what happens to your body. A check-in that only echoed your intention would be useless.

"Where it goes." A pound of lean tissue costs roughly 2,500 kcal, so a 0.5 lb/week ceiling absorbs about 179 kcal a day. Anything above that has nowhere to go but fat. Stating it in pounds per week makes the cost of an over-large surplus concrete instead of theoretical.

"Maintenance: 2,817 (was 2,790 — trending up)." Maintenance rising during a surplus is what is supposed to happen; more mass costs more energy. Seeing it rise is confirmation, not a problem.

The endurance grade line. "1 over (Tue easy run)" is the single most useful sentence in the packet for a hybrid athlete. An easy run graded too hard, three weeks running, is the most common reason a training block stops working, and it is completely invisible without the comparison.

"Days logged: 7/7." Every other number's credibility is downstream of this one. Blank days are excluded and counted, never averaged as zero — a day you forgot to log is not a fasting day, and treating it as one corrupts the intake average catastrophically and always in the same direction.

The app's own recommendation

Before you ask anyone, Base applies a rule table: your actual rate of change against your target rate, producing hold, raise or cut.

It is a simple rule table on purpose. The underlying signal — a surplus of a couple of hundred calories against a maintenance figure with its own error bar — does not support anything more sophisticated, and a confident-looking recommendation from a model that cannot resolve the signal is worse than a plain one.

"You are 22% over your target gain rate" is usually enough on its own.

Why it copies as plain text

Copy Check-In Summary puts the whole packet on the clipboard.

That exists because the highest-value thing to do with a week of structured training data is sometimes to hand it to something that can reason about it — a coach, a training partner, or a language model — and ask what they make of it. Plain text pastes anywhere, requires no integration on either end, and cannot break when an API changes.

Whatever comes back gets written into the check-in's notes field, so the history tells the story rather than just the numbers. Six months later the useful question is not "what was my maintenance in August" but "why did I drop the surplus in August", and only the note answers that.

Reading it without over-reacting

One week is weather. Three consecutive weeks pointing the same direction is a signal.

The specific trap is a two-week plateau read as a stalled metabolism. Fourteen days is exactly one maintenance window. A plateau across one window is well inside normal variation for water, glycogen and gut content; across three it means something.

Pattern	Reading
One week off target	Noise. Do nothing
Two weeks same direction	Watch it
Three weeks same direction	Act
Trend flat, waist up	Recomposition is going the wrong way regardless of the scale
Trend up, strength flat, recovery down	Surplus is too large or endurance load is too high

That last row is the specifically hybrid failure, and it is why the packet puts endurance minutes and ramp rate next to volume and PRs. A rising scale with a flat bar and a falling recovery score is not a bulk. It is an overreach with extra calories on it.

What to do next

Maintenance is where the energy figures in this packet come from, and measuring progress as a hybrid athlete covers which signals to trust when two of them disagree.