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.
85-100 — nothing's flagged.
70-84 — a couple of things are down.
55-69 — several things are down.
Below 55 — worth taking the day.
These aren't grades. 78 isn't a C — it's relative to your own recent average, so a 78 for one person means something different than a 78 for another.
A day with nothing pulling it either way sits at 88. It starts there rather than at 100 so a genuinely good day has somewhere to go, and rather than at 50 because most days aren't halfway to anything. Modifiers move it up or down from there, and the ledger shows every one.
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.
Patterns in your log over time — load by week, which session types show up most — once there's enough history logged for a pattern to mean anything.
A short set of readings on recovery, sleep, and what the research actually supports. Free — reachable from Settings, and one tap from today's read when there's something relevant to it.
The recovery library tags each entry by how much research actually backs it.
Strong means multiple good studies point the same way. Reasonable means it's sensible and supported, but the evidence is thinner. Weak means studies looked and didn't find much. Worth knowing means it's something to be aware of rather than something to do — sometimes because the research says the opposite of what most people assume.
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.
What you're taking, logged for your own record. Pick from a default list in Settings or add your own — the app doesn't score any of it and has no opinion about what it's for.
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.
Near your limit, nothing left in the tank. The heaviest weighting in the app.
Also called: 1RM work, singles, testing, maxing out.
Training for strength — heavy weight for you, at a rep count low enough that the weight is the limit rather than the fatigue. Commonly 3 to 6 reps, but that's a description of what most people do, not a boundary. Ten heavy reps is still a heavy day.
Also called: powerlifting, strength work, top sets.
Training for muscle size — moderate weight, sets that get hard near the end. Commonly 8 to 15 reps. The most common kind of gym training.
Also called: bodybuilding, muscle building, accessory work. Bodyweight work (calisthenics) usually belongs here too.
Fast and powerful work — Olympic lifts (cleans, snatches, jerks), jumps and plyometrics, sprints. Trained for speed and power rather than time under tension, and demanding on your nervous system even though the sessions are short.
Also called: oly, snatch, clean, plyos, power.
Loaded circuit work — barbells, dumbbells or heavy carries strung together with little rest.
Weighted higher than plain conditioning because a barbell circuit costs more than a bike interval, and lower than heavy lifting because the weight is moderate. It counts as demanding without counting as a hard neural session — which is the distinction this app is built on.
Also called: metcon, WOD, AMRAP, EMOM.
Hard cardiovascular work — intervals, hard cardio, anything that leaves you breathing hard. Unloaded or lightly loaded: bike, rower, running intervals. Loaded circuit work is its own category — see Circuits.
Also called: HIIT, intervals, erg work.
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.
Also called: zone 2, LISS, steady state.
Light technical practice — drilling a movement, grooving a lift, working on form at a weight that isn't the point. You're learning the movement rather than loading it.
Costs more than stretching and less than a steady cardio hour. If it starts getting genuinely heavy or leaves you breathing hard, it isn't this any more.
Also called: technique work, drilling, practice.
Anything that isn't a gym session but still costs you — climbing, martial arts, team sport, racket sport.
This is the widest category in the app, and the number behind it is a middle estimate rather than a good fit for any particular sport. A casual hit-around and a hard sparring round are nothing alike. Rating the effort honestly is what makes the difference, more than for any other category here.
Also called: climbing, bouldering, BJJ, martial arts, team sport.
Stretching, joint work, easy movement. Costs almost nothing and counts as activity rather than training.
Also called: yoga, foam rolling, active recovery.
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 doesn't need to know your numbers to do its job.
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.