The Workout Screen: Confirm or Bump, One Tap Per Set

Confirm or bump

Pre-filling from history is not a convenience feature. It is the difference between logging for years and logging for three weeks.

Data entry at the gym competes with the session. Every field you have to think about is a moment you are not resting, and the cost compounds across twenty sets, four days a week, for months. An app that costs ninety seconds of typing per session costs six hours a year, and the habit does not survive it.

The ghost values also do something subtler: they show you what you did last time at the moment you need it. You are not remembering, and you are not scrolling to a history view. The comparison is the input field.

Reps in reserve, and why it is not optional

Every working set records RIR alongside weight and reps. That single extra field is what makes the progression rule work.

Consider two identical-looking log entries:

Without RIR those are the same row, and a rep-only progression rule will treat both as "hit the top of the range, add 5 lb". For the second case that is months of slow-walking through weights you could already handle.

RIR is also your clearest fatigue signal at a fixed load. If a weight you handled at 2 RIR three weeks ago now comes out at 0, your fitness has not fallen — accumulated fatigue has started masking it. That drift is one of the four signals that trigger a deload, and it is only available if the number was captured at the moment the set ended. Four hours later it is a guess.

The progression rule

Per exercise, applied automatically:

every set at top of rep range AND RIR <= 1  ->  add load, reset to bottom of range
inside the rep range                        ->  hold load, add one rep
below bottom of range, or RIR > 4           ->  hold; twice in a row, drop 10%

This is autoregulated double progression, which the load and volume autoregulation meta-analysis supports over fixed percentage progression for trained lifters. Load progression and rep progression produce equivalent hypertrophy over eight weeks — roughly 6.5% versus 7.2% quadriceps growth — so the choice between them is about adherence rather than physiology.

The RIR clause is the part that makes it autoregulated rather than merely sequential.

The readiness offset

Under real fatigue, the same bar is further from failure than it feels. A set you would normally take to 2 RIR becomes a missed rep, and a missed rep on a compound is disproportionate systemic fatigue for zero extra stimulus.

So compromised readiness adds one rep to today's RIR target — stop further from failure, keep the session.

The offset is never negative. No recovery score is good enough to justify prescribing work closer to failure than the protocol band. That asymmetry is deliberate: the downside of one over-aggressive session under fatigue is much larger than the upside of one extra-hard session when fresh.

It also does not cancel the session. Skipping is almost always the wrong response to a moderately low score — training slightly further from failure preserves the stimulus, preserves the habit, and costs almost nothing. How readiness is computed.

Rest timers and the target band

Rest is prescribed rather than left to feel: two minutes or more on compounds, one to two on isolation. The Bayesian meta-analysis on inter-set rest finds that ninety seconds captures nearly all the benefit and that under sixty is clearly worse.

Rep and RIR targets differ by movement type, and this is where a hybrid athlete's programme diverges from a pure lifter's:

Compounds stop further from failure because failure there costs disproportionate systemic fatigue — and if you are also running four times a week, that fatigue has a second claimant. Isolation work goes closer because it is cheap to recover from and the last reps are where the stimulus lives.

Personal records

The one place the app is deliberately loud. A PR fires a confetti burst from the set row, changes the haptic to a success notification, flashes the row and adds a badge.

Everything else in the interface is quiet on purpose. The PR is not, because it is the thing you were training for and a log that treats it identically to every other set is a log that has forgotten what it is for.

Estimated 1RM uses Epley — weight × (1 + reps/30) — and only for sets of twelve reps or fewer, because the estimate degrades badly above that. Its value is the trend across a block, not the number. The calculator.

What the screen does not do

No auto-generated session. You pick the session; the app sets its parameters. Session selection depends on your schedule, your event and what your training partner is doing — none of which software knows. Session parameters depend on things it can measure.

No social feed. There is no sharing, no kudos and no leaderboard.

No cardiovascular strain estimate for lifting. Heart rate misreads resistance training in both directions: a heavy triple barely moves it and costs two days, a metabolic circuit spikes it and costs nothing. Volume, load and RIR are measured directly instead.

What to do next

The exercise logger is the detail view behind each movement, and the workout summary is what the session produces when you finish it.