Every term the app uses, in plain language. No jargon used to explain jargon, and no claims about anyone's body. If a term is contested in the literature, it says so. The same definitions are tappable inside the app, wherever the word appears.
From taper, to deliberately back off, and -trophy, from Greek trophē, growth. Growth that comes from backing off — same root as hypertrophy and atrophy.
The number on the Today screen. It's this app's estimate of how ready you are to train hard, based on what you've logged. It isn't a grade and it isn't a measurement — it's what your own log adds up to today.
Your normal. The app compares today against your own recent history rather than against other people. It takes about 28 logged days to fill in, which is why the number gets more useful the longer you use it.
The list under the read showing what moved the number and by how much. Every line is arithmetic you can check. Nothing is hidden.
The app's estimate of what a session cost you. It's your session length multiplied by how hard it felt, then weighted by the type of training. A heavy single and a set of curls take the same minute but don't cost the same, and this is the app's attempt to account for that.
The unit neural load is measured in. It has no real-world meaning — 400 AU isn't 400 of anything. It only means something compared to your own other days, which is why the app tries to show it as "more than usual" rather than a bare number.
How hard a session felt, 1 to 10. 10 means you had nothing left. 8 means you could have done about two more reps. It's subjective by design — it's your read on your own effort.
If you're newer to lifting, RPE is hard to judge accurately and most people undershoot it for the first year or two. The app has a plain-language version you can use instead, and it feeds the model exactly the same way.
How many reps you had left. RIR 2 means you could have done two more. It's the same idea as RPE from the other direction — RIR 2 is roughly RPE 8.
Sets at or near your limit. Singles, doubles, anything above about 90% of your best. Costs the most per minute of any training you do.
How much work you did — sets, reps, weight, or time. Not the same as intensity. A long easy session is high volume and low intensity.
How hard the work was relative to your maximum, not how tired you felt.
Training for muscle size. Usually 8 to 15 reps at moderate weight. The most common kind of gym training.
Training for strength. Usually 3 to 6 reps at heavier weight.
Fast, explosive work. Olympic lifts, jumps, throws, sprints. Short sets, maximum speed rather than maximum weight.
Jump training. Box jumps, bounds, depth jumps. Explosive and demanding on your nervous system even though the sessions are short.
Hard cardiovascular work. Intervals, circuits, HIIT, anything that leaves you breathing hard.
Easy steady cardio at a pace you could hold a conversation at. Long, slow, and much less costly than it feels like it should be.
Stretching, joint work, easy movement. Costs almost nothing and counts as activity rather than training.
Deliberately reducing training volume, usually before a competition or after a hard block. The app is named after it. Cutting volume while keeping intensity is well supported for improving performance.
A lighter week, planned in advance, to let accumulated fatigue clear. Same idea as a taper but used routinely rather than before an event.
Note: "deload" also gets used to mean a diet break. In this app it always means training.
Training harder than you can currently recover from. Short-term overreaching is normal and often intentional — performance dips for a week or two, then rebounds higher. If the dip lasts three or four weeks with no rebound, that's the version worth paying attention to.
A prolonged state that takes months to recover from. Worth knowing: reviews of strength sports have found minimal evidence it actually occurs in lifters. If you lift, the realistic worst case is a rough few weeks, not a ruined year.
Your recent training (last 7 days) compared to your longer-term average (last 28 days). A rough measure of whether you've ramped up quickly.
Worth knowing: this metric is disputed. Researchers have argued its statistical properties make it unreliable and that it shouldn't be used to predict injury. This app uses it as a rough indicator of a workload spike, nothing more, and doesn't show it at all until there's enough history for it to mean anything.
Session length multiplied by how hard it felt. A simple, well-established way to estimate training load. It's the starting point for this app's neural load, before the session-type weighting is applied.
A term lifters use for the wrung-out feeling after heavy or explosive training — different from sore muscles.
Worth knowing: it's contested. Research suggests most fatigue from resistance training happens in the muscle rather than the brain, and that the central contribution is small and usually clears within a day or two. The idea that heavy training costs more than light training is well supported. The specific mechanism people mean by "CNS fatigue" is not.
This app doesn't measure your nervous system and doesn't claim to. It weights harder training as costing more, which is the part the evidence supports.
Fatigue in the muscle itself. What most post-training tiredness actually is.
Fatigue in the signal from your brain to your muscles. Real, but smaller and shorter-lived in lifting than gym folklore suggests.
The soreness that shows up a day or two after training, especially after something new. Soreness isn't a measure of how good a session was, and its absence doesn't mean you didn't work.
A spreadsheet file. Opens in Google Sheets, Numbers, or Excel. Good for looking at your own data.
A complete copy of your log, in the exact form the app stores it. It isn't meant to be read — it's meant to be kept. If you lose your phone or reinstall the app, this is the file that puts everything back.
Think of it as the code that rebuilds your log.
Loading a JSON backup back into the app. Everything returns: your history, your baseline, your patterns.
A fingerprint of your data written into the export file. When you import, the app recalculates it and checks it matches. If a file got corrupted or edited somewhere along the way, the app can tell.
Your best single lift. Useful for programming, but this app doesn't track it — it isn't a training log and doesn't need to know your numbers.
Gradually increasing training demand over time. Fundamental to getting stronger, and entirely up to you. This app doesn't program anything.
Protein, carbs and fat as tracked amounts. This app doesn't count them and doesn't track calories. Food is logged as a rough tag only, because eating badly for several days is a real signal and precise numbers aren't needed to notice it.