Core · Balance · Longevity

An opinionated program. Build functional strength slowly.
Love your joints and your body.

Four to six days a week, one working set per exercise. Fifteen minutes for the short version, thirty for the full one. A short daily workout that fits round your life rather than the other way round.

Logging is automatic. You never keep track of anything yourself. You tap how the set felt, and that is the entire input — the weights, the streaks, when to go up, when to back off, when a deload is due are all the app's job. No setup step, no questionnaire, no numbers to remember between sessions.

Start free How it works

4–6days a week
1set per exercise
15–30minutes a session
7exercises on a busy day
0things to keep track of

Barbell Squat

Last: 100 kg × 12, felt easy

A · 1/7

Two easy sessions — try 105 kg.

105 kg × 12

▂ EASY ✓ IN ZONE ▆ HARD ✕ STOP

Tap how it felt. The app writes everything else down.

CBL is not a slogan bolted onto a template. Each letter names something the program does on purpose, in every single session, and you can read all three straight off the exercise list.

Core Trained under load every session, and never the first thing dropped when you are short on time. Not crunches — holding your spine still while it is being twisted, arched and pulled sideways.
Balance Balanced coverage, not wobble boards. Every pattern trained, both sides loaded separately, nothing quietly missing.
Longevity Submaximal on purpose, prehab in every session, deloads counted for you. A program you can still be running in five years.

Core — trained under load in every session, never optional

Most of the trunk work here is not labelled as trunk work. It is built into lifts you would file under something else entirely, because an offset load has to be paid for somewhere and that somewhere is your midsection.

Both alternating dumbbell lifts hold the non-working arm locked out at the top, so one side presses while your obliques stop you folding toward the other. The Bulgarian split squat carries its bell in the opposite hand for the same reason. The suitcase deadlift is a heavy weight in one hand and nothing in the other — it exists to be resisted sideways. Overhead pressing is done standing, so the torso is the limiter rather than the shoulder. Deadlifts are reset before every rep, so you brace twelve times instead of once. None of those is a core exercise on paper. All of them are.

On top of that, exercise #7 in both workouts is dedicated trunk work — hanging windshield wipers in Workout A, the ab wheel rollout in Workout B — placed early enough that it survives a rushed day. On the days you only have fifteen minutes and walk out after seven, you have still trained your core. That is exactly why it sits there rather than at the end.

And it is trained as three distinct jobs rather than one vague one. The trunk’s real work is resisting movement in three different planes, so three different exercises do it.

Anti-rotation

Hanging Windshield Wipers, Workout A #7 — "loaded rotation and anti-lateral-flexion". You hang from the bar and control the swing of your own legs across the midline. Progression is leverage: knees tucked → bent → ½ straight → straight → straight with a three-second eccentric → straight with ankle weights.
Anti-extension

Ab Wheel Rollout, Workout B #7. The job is refusing to let the lower back arch as the wheel travels away from you. Its ladder runs knees short → knees full → knees deficit → standing eccentric only → standing full.
Anti-lateral-flexion

Suitcase Deadlift, Workout B #4, twelve reps a side. One bell, shoulders square, obliques stopping you folding sideways — a loaded carry pattern trained as a lift. Straps optional, because grip is a training target here rather than something to work around.

All three are trained under load, which is what separates this from adding a plank at the end. None of them is a rep count you chase — they progress on leverage, and the leverage is logged exactly the way a weight is. Moving from a bent-knee wiper to a half-straight one is a real step forward in precisely the way 100 kg to 105 kg is, and the app records the rung and works out when the next one is due.

Add it up and the trunk is under load through most of the session rather than for one exercise of it. That is the difference between a program that trains a midsection and one that bolts a plank onto the end.

Balance — balanced coverage, not balance training

Balance here means balanced coverage — not proprioception drills, not wobble boards, not standing on one leg on a foam pad. The word is ambiguous, so: this is the sense that is meant. Every movement pattern gets trained, on a schedule, and nothing is quietly neglected because it was not fun.

Read the first seven of either workout downwards. Workout A covers the squat, both horizontal patterns and single-leg work. Workout B covers the hinge, both vertical patterns and a loaded carry. Alternate them four to six days a week and every pattern lands in front of you two to three times in seven days.

The first seven of each workout, by pattern Read down either column: the pattern changes on every row.
#	Workout A	Workout B
1	Squat	Hinge — deadlift or power clean
2	Horizontal push	Vertical push
3	Horizontal pull	Vertical pull
4	Single-leg, anti-rotation	Loaded carry, anti-lateral-flexion
5	Horizontal push	Vertical push
6	Horizontal pull	Vertical pull
7	Loaded core, anti-extension	Loaded core, anti-extension

Both sides, separately loaded

Bilateral lifts let a strong side carry a weak one for years without either of you noticing. So nine items in the program are unilateral and heavy — not finishers, not burnouts, but working sets with a bell or a stack behind them.

BSS with a contralateral hold — 12/leg
Suitcase deadlift — 12/side
Single-leg leg press — 12/leg
Alternating DB bench — 12/arm
Alternating gorilla rows — 12/arm
Alternating DB overhead press — 12/arm
Alternating single-arm lat pulldown — 12/arm
One-legged hamstring curl — 12/leg
Single-leg calf raises — one leg at a time, off a step

Left and right cannot hide behind each other when each one has to produce twelve reps on its own. The side that is behind shows up in the log as a different weight, and it gets its own progression from there.

One set per exercise, counted properly

"One set" sounds thin until you count the way volume is actually recommended — per muscle, per week, rather than per exercise. Here is the six-day arithmetic.

Hard sets per muscle per week, at six days Frequency is what buys the volume: each pattern comes round two to three times in seven days.
Muscle	Where the sets come from	Sets a week
Glutes	Squat, BSS, single-leg leg press, deadlift or power clean, suitcase deadlift	~15
Back	Barbell rows, alternating gorilla rows, pull-ups, single-arm lat pulldown	~12
Hamstrings & posterior chain	Deadlift or power clean, two-legged curl, one-legged curl, plus hip extension in the BSS and single-leg leg press	~9 direct, more from the single-leg work
Quads	Barbell squat, BSS, single-leg leg press	~9
Shoulders	Standing barbell OHP, alternating DB OHP, lateral raises	~9
Chest	Bench press and alternating DB bench, plus the upper chest in both overhead presses	~6, or ~9 on the DB + push-ups option
Biceps	Curls direct, plus every row, pull-up and pulldown	~3 direct, ~12 more from pulling
Triceps	Pushdowns direct, plus every bench and overhead press	~3 direct, ~12 more from pressing

That is squarely inside the range usually recommended for growth, not scraping the bottom of it — and the unilateral rows in that table are per leg or per arm. The sets accumulate across the week instead of being crammed into one brutal session, which is why none of it wrecks the next day. At four days a week the totals drop by roughly a third, which is worth looking at directly.

The table counts working sets only, so it undercounts in one direction on purpose. Every alternating lift holds the non-working side locked out while the other side works, so that side is loaded for the whole set rather than half of it, and hanging from the bar for the windshield wipers puts the lats, shoulders and grip under a long isometric load. None of that is counted above. What the wipers are not is chest work — they are a grip, lat and trunk exercise, and counting them as anything else would be flattering the numbers.

Why a session fits in fifteen to thirty minutes

The ordering has a second consequence, and it is the one you feel. No two consecutive exercises train the same muscle group. The tissue you have just used is recovering while you do the next thing — you are rowing while your chest recovers, then pressing again while your back recovers. So there is almost no rest to take: you rest when you want to rather than when a timer says so, and nothing has to be hurried to keep the session short.

That is where the two numbers come from. Fifteen minutes buys the seven items above the cut line, which the plan calls a complete session in its own right. Thirty buys the arms, calves, hamstring curls and prehab on the end. Six long sessions is three hours a week; four short ones is one hour. Either way it is less gym time than a conventional four-day split of hour-plus sessions.

Longevity — built to be repeated for years, not weeks

The whole design is submaximal on purpose. One working set per exercise, stopped a rep or two short of failure, is not a compromise with laziness — it is the dose a movement can absorb when it is coming back round in two or three days. Nothing here is ever taken to the floor, because tomorrow is a training day too.

One set, stopped short of failure

The target is a hard set that still had a couple of reps in it. That is not a watered-down version of training to failure — it is the dose a movement can absorb when it comes round again in two or three days. A set taken to the floor on Monday is still being paid for on Wednesday, and Wednesday is another session.
Prehab in every session, never taken hard

Workout A finishes with wall tibialis raises, Poliquin / Petersen step-ups, a lying back extension and band finger extensions. Workout B finishes with face pulls, the same back extension and the same finger extensions. Ankles, knees, shoulders, spine and hands, every session, at an effort that costs you nothing.
Range of motion, trained under load

There is no separate mobility block, because the lifts do it. Squats are taken deep, so the hips, knees and ankles keep the range instead of slowly surrendering it. The alternating overhead press parks one arm locked out overhead while the other works, which is a long loaded hold in the position most desks quietly take away. Gorilla rows start from the floor, so every rep begins at full stretch under a hinge. Single-arm pulldowns are done with a D-handle for the lat stretch, single-leg calf raises off a step for the Achilles, and the split squat puts the trailing hip through real extension. Range you own under load is range you keep — and unlike stretching at the end, none of it is the first thing dropped when you are short on time.
The lying back extension, newly added

Both sessions spend real effort resisting extension — wipers in A, the ab wheel in B — on top of a day spent sitting in flexion. Nothing took the spine the other way under control, so a 10–15 rep lying back extension is now in both sessions’ prehab: face down, lift the chest slowly, lower it slowly. It is the counterbalance to all that anti-extension work, and it is never taken hard.
Two sessions up, three sessions down

Two easy sessions in a row and the load goes up; it takes three sessions with nothing left in the tank before it comes back about 10%. The asymmetry is deliberate. Being under the target wastes a session, so correct it fast. A hard set is the top of the range rather than an error — as the plan puts it, being at 8 is allowed, living at 8 is not.
Deloads you do not have to remember

A light week at about 80% across the board, prehab kept in, and no option to cut the session short. It is counted in sessions rather than weeks — thirty — so a travel week never burns deload credit. Fatigue signals outrank the calendar: two aborted sets inside a fortnight, or three different lifts backing off at once, calls one early.
Tripwires the program builds in

Grip is loaded every session with no scheduled rest, so medial elbow pain is the named risk and two notes about the same elbow in a fortnight is a signal to act on rather than train through. If the lateral elbow starts talking, loaded wrist extensions go in and reverse curls come out until it settles. Squats are named as the likeliest recovery bottleneck. You do not have to watch for any of it — the app counts the notes, the fortnight windows and the cut-line frequency, and tells you.

Every one of those rules is a comparison between this session and the last: two easy sessions, three hard ones, warmup weights creeping, two elbow notes inside a fortnight, cuts piling up. Across two dozen exercises and four to six sessions a week, none of it is visible from memory — which is exactly why the app keeps all of it and you keep none of it. You tap how the set felt. That is your entire share of the work.

Why power cleans are in a program like this

They look out of place. Everything else here is a controlled set of twelve taken a couple of reps short of failure; the clean is three sets of three moved as fast as you can. That contrast is the reason it is in the program rather than an argument against it.

Strength and power are not the same quality, and they do not decline together. How much force you can produce is one thing; how fast you can produce it is another, and the second falls away considerably earlier and faster than the first. A squat trains the ability to generate a lot of force slowly. Nothing else in these two workouts trains the ability to generate force quickly — and that is the quality behind catching yourself when you trip, getting off the floor, or carrying something awkward up a flight of stairs at sixty. For a program whose whole pitch is still being useful in twenty years, leaving it out would be the strange choice.

It is also remarkably cheap. Three triples at around seventy per cent is a small amount of total work, it is never taken near failure, and it stops on bar speed rather than on grinding — so it recruits the fast motor units that heavy slow lifting reaches only at brutal loads, without the recovery bill. In a program that trains four to six days a week, an exercise that buys a distinct quality for very little fatigue is exactly what you want.

The load is impulsive, which the rest of the program never is. Rapid loading is a different signal to tendon and bone than smooth loading, and slow lifting does not substitute for it. Add the coordination demand — ankles, knees and hips extending together, then catching and stabilising a moving weight — and you get a whole-body motor skill rather than another muscle-group exercise.

Bar speed is a better sensor than feel, not a worse one. A slow, ugly clean can feel easy, so the effort rating everything else runs on genuinely does not apply here. What replaces it is more objective, not less: if set three is visibly slower than set one, that was the last set. A two-by-three day is a correct outcome rather than a failure, and the app records it as one.

And they are optional. If you do not clean, or your gym objects to the noise, pin the slot to the deadlift or work down the documented fallbacks — hang power cleans, dumbbell cleans or a single-arm snatch, trap bar jumps, kettlebell swings. The first three keep most of the speed stimulus. It is worth having something explosive in the week; it does not have to be a barbell clean.

Who this is for

This is an intermediate lifter’s program. It assumes you already know from the inside what a hard set feels like, because judging your own effort is the one skill the whole method depends on. That single fact settles most of the question below.

Who this suits

Anyone who knows what a hard set feels like from the inside — the difference between two reps left and none. That judgement is the one skill the method runs on, and it is the only thing assumed here.
Anyone who can get to a gym most days but cannot spare ninety minutes on any of them.
People whose training keeps getting interrupted: travel, small children, shift work. Missing a day costs you a day here, not the block.
Anyone who wants size, general strength and joints that still work in twenty years, and who is tired of restarting a new program every eight weeks.
People who would rather train than administrate. There is nothing to keep track of, because the app keeps it.

Who should use something else

Anyone brand new to the lifts. The loop runs on rating your own effort, and that read is genuinely hard before you have felt a set go all the way. A simpler program with more practice reps per lift will do more, faster, and will tell you plainly when you have stalled.
Anyone peaking for a one-rep max. Wrong loads, wrong rep range, no peak, no taper.
Anyone who can only train two or three days a week. Per-pattern frequency collapses to once and the weekly totals stop adding up.
Anyone whose priority right now is maximum hypertrophy on a handful of lifts. This spreads its volume wide on purpose.
Anyone with a live medial elbow problem, until it has settled. Grip gets loaded every single session.
Anyone training somewhere without a barbell, dumbbells and something to hang from. A couple of cable or machine stations cover most of the rest, and the power cleans have documented fallbacks, but those three are load-bearing.

You never keep track of anything

Logging is automatic. One tap says how the set felt; everything else — the weights, the streaks, the deload clock, the tripwires — is the app’s job, and it is the only job the app has. There is no grid to maintain and no spreadsheet to keep up with.

Nothing to remember

Which workout is next, what you lifted last time, what the warmups were, whether that mark makes two easy sessions or three hard ones. None of it lives in your head or in a spreadsheet. You walk in and the day is already laid out.
No setup step, ever

You are never asked to describe your gym, and you are never asked your bodyweight. The app learns how big a step is on each lift from the weights you actually log — dumbbells running 20, 22, 24 is a step of 2; a leg press jumping 20 is a step of 20. Before there is any history it guesses from the size of the load, and you correct it once by typing what you really used.
The arithmetic, all of it

Streaks on every exercise, when to add load and when to pull it back, whether the reps should move instead of the weight, how often you have stopped a session early this fortnight, when a deload is due, whether the same elbow has been mentioned twice. That is the whole job the app has.

The app is bookkeeping, not the method — the program came first and still works in a notebook. Here is how to run the whole thing with a pen →

What it does badly

Every program is a set of trades, and a page that only lists advantages is not telling you about a program — it is selling you one. Several of these are raised by the plan against itself, which is a point in its favour and does not make them go away.

Judging your own effort is a skill, and everything runs on it.

The whole feedback loop rests on one judgement: how close was that set to failure? People are measurably worse at it the further they are from failure, the higher the reps, and on lower-body lifts — and a set of twelve squats stopped two reps short is all three at once. Someone with a couple of hard years behind them reads it well enough for the rules to work, which is exactly who this is written for. Someone who has never met a genuine limit is guessing, and the machinery runs happily on a guess: rate too easy and you chase weights that grind, rate too hard and you sit for months on a load that stopped doing anything. Two sessions up and three sessions down filters out noise; it does nothing about a consistent bias.

Grip is loaded every session with no scheduled rest.

Pull-ups, gorilla rows, hanging wipers, the suitcase deadlift, every dumbbell in both workouts. Grip gets no scheduled rest anywhere in the week, and it is the one tissue that two exercises in a row can end up competing for. The counterweights are real and prescribed — band finger extensions every session, reverse curls in the arm rotation, a lateral-elbow protocol on standby — and CBL watches your elbow notes for you. Straps are the other lever, and using them is a normal adjustment rather than a failure: the suitcase deadlift is run strapless by default because grip is a training target there, but on a day when your trunk is what you want to load, strap it and get on with it. Even so, this is the likeliest place for the program to hurt you.

Four days a week is about a third less of everything.

The weekly set counts above are six-day numbers. Train four days and every pattern comes round twice instead of three times, which puts the back nearer eight sets a week, quads and shoulders nearer six, chest nearer four. That is enough for an intermediate to keep progressing and comfortably enough to hold what you have — but if maximum size is your priority this year, it is light, and the fix is more days rather than more sets. Below four days a week this is the wrong program: per-pattern frequency collapses to once, and one set per exercise once a week does not add up to anything.

Twelve-rep squats and deadlifts are a real cost.

These are the most systemically taxing lifts here, and twelve is the rep count where breathing and trunk fatigue usually end the set before the legs do. Spinal loading accumulates across three sessions a week whether or not any single set felt hard, and the plan names squats as its likeliest recovery bottleneck itself. Turning the clean rotation off to deadlift every B session stacks 12-rep deadlifts on top of that. Resetting the bar before every rep is a genuine mitigation — twelve first reps rather than one rep and eleven worse ones — but if your lower back is the thing that limits you, this is the part of the program to watch.

It builds size and general strength, not a one-rep max — and it never changes shape.

Twelve reps stopped short of failure is around two-thirds of a maximum: a fine place to build muscle and a poor place to build a competition total. There is no heavy specific practice, no low-rep work outside the cleans, and no peak. If you have a meet in twelve weeks, this is the wrong program. And apart from deloads, nothing about it varies — same exercises, same rep target, indefinitely. That is a feature if you like showing up and doing the thing, and a genuine limitation if you need novelty to stay interested.

Short sessions still mean more trips to the gym.

Fifteen to thirty minutes is time in the gym. It is not the commute, the changing room, or the negotiation with your household about being out again, and the arithmetic quietly assumes a gym you can reach in minutes. The saving is uneven, too: one working set on a machine really does take one set’s worth of time, while one working set on a heavy squat still needs three or four warmup sets in front of it.

The two workouts

A, then B, then A again — four to six days a week, continuing from whatever you did last. Reps default to 12, with exceptions marked. A dash means no rep target: naturally loaded movements have their intensity set by leverage and position, so the progression variable is the variation, the lever length or the tempo.

Workout A — Squat, horizontal push/pull, lower prehab Cut line after #7. P rows are prehab, never taken hard.
#	Exercise	Reps	Notes
1	Barbell Squat	12	Heaviest axial item in the week.
2	Barbell Bench Press or DB Bench, then Push-Ups	12	Your choice of variant, switchable any time.
3	Barbell Rows	12
4	BSS (Contralateral Hold)	12/leg	DB in opposite hand, tight fist for balance.
5	Alternating DB Bench	12/arm	Non-working arm holds locked out at the top.
6	Alternating Gorilla Rows	12/arm	Keep the non-working bell glued to the floor.
7	Hanging Windshield Wipers	—	Loaded rotation and anti-lateral-flexion.
Cut line — stopping here is a complete session
8	Two-Legged Hamstring Curl	12	Bilateral — quick, low fatigue cost.
9	Triceps Pushdowns	12
10	Single-Leg Leg Press	12/leg	Safe quad pump.
P	Poliquin / Petersen Step-Ups	—	Knee-friendly terminal-range work. Light or bodyweight.
P	Wall Tibialis Raises	—	Easy pump.
P	Lying Back Extension	—	Face down, lift the chest slowly and lower it slowly. Take it as hard as you like.
P	Band Finger Extensions	~30 s	Both hands, ~30 s. Counterbalance to daily grip flexion.

Workout A in full →

Workout B — Hinge, vertical push/pull, upper prehab Cut line after #7. P rows are prehab, never taken hard.
#	Exercise	Reps	Notes
1	Deadlift or Power Clean	12 or 3 × 3	Alternates session to session.
2	Barbell OHP	12	Standing. Squeeze glutes and ribs down — the torso is the limiter.
3	Pull-Ups	8–12 strict	Add load at 15+ bodyweight reps; assist under 8.
4	Suitcase Deadlift	12/side	Straps optional — grip is a training target, so going without is the default. Keep shoulders square.
5	Alternating DB OHP	12/arm	Standing. Non-working arm holds locked out at the top.
6	Alt. Single-Arm Lat Pulldown	12/arm	D-handle lat stretch.
7	Ab Wheel Rollout	—	Anti-extension.
Cut line — stopping here is a complete session
8	DB Lateral Raises	15–20
9	Bicep Curls or Reverse Curls	12	Alternates session to session.
10	One-Legged Hamstring Curl	12/leg
11	Single-Leg Calf Raises	—	Deep Achilles stretch, minimal footwear.
P	Face Pulls	15–20	High-rep external rotation.
P	Lying Back Extension	—	Face down, lift the chest slowly and lower it slowly. Take it as hard as you like.
P	Band Finger Extensions	~30 s	Both hands, ~30 s. Counterbalance to daily grip flexion.

Workout B in full →

Four marks, and what each one starts

A mark is one tap, and it is the only thing you have to judge all session. You say how the set felt; the app works out what that means, what to do about it, and when.

The mark control Up and down are deliberately asymmetric — two sessions to go up, three to come down.
Mark	What it means	What it triggers
EASY	You had more than a couple of reps left. Under-dosed — below the range, not the bottom of it.	Two in a row → add load
IN ZONE	A hard set that stopped a rep or two short of failure. Nothing to report.	—
HARD	The last rep was the last one you had. The top of the range, not an error.	Three in a row → drop ~10%
STOP	The set was going to fail, so you racked it. Usually the session gets cut short too.	Two of these a fortnight → pull the block back

A hard set is allowed. Every set being a hard set is not.

— the plan, on why a single hard session is fine and three in a row is not.

Questions

How long does a session actually take?

About fifteen minutes for the first seven exercises and about thirty for the whole thing, warmups included — the author’s own measured times running this program, so expect to be slower while you are learning the lifts or sharing a squat rack. The reason it is that quick is the exercise order: no two consecutive exercises train the same thing, so the muscle you just used recovers while you do the next item and you rest by feel rather than by clock. The one exception is power clean day, where the three sets of three want two to three minutes between them on purpose.

Why the order lets you skip the rest timer →

Is one set really enough?

For an intermediate, yes — count it per muscle across a week rather than per exercise. At six days a week the back gets about twelve hard sets from rows, gorilla rows, pull-ups and single-arm pulldowns; quads about nine from the squat, the BSS and the single-leg press; shoulders about nine from standing overhead press, alternating DB press and lateral raises; hamstrings and posterior chain about nine; chest about six. Arms get about three direct sets each, which undersells them badly — biceps are in every row, pull-up and pulldown, and triceps in every bench and overhead press, so both land nearer fifteen working sets a week once you count honestly. That is squarely inside the range usually recommended for growth. Frequency is what buys it: every pattern comes round two to three times in seven days, so the sets accumulate across the week instead of being crammed into one brutal session. Train four days instead of six and those totals drop by roughly a third — still enough to progress steadily, genuinely light if maximum size is the priority this year.

The weekly set count, muscle by muscle →

Do I have to keep track of anything?

No. Logging is automatic — you never keep track of anything yourself. You tap how the set felt, and the app owns every piece of bookkeeping after that: what you lifted last time, whether that makes two easy sessions or three hard ones, what to try today, whether the reps should move instead of the weight, how often you have stopped early this fortnight, when a deload is due. There is no grid to maintain, no spreadsheet, and no numbers to remember between sessions.

Why the log is the mechanism →

Do I have to train six days a week?

No. Four, five and six all work, and the A/B alternation is driven by what you did last rather than by a calendar — a shorter week shifts the sequence along instead of breaking it, so nothing is owed and nothing needs making up. Be clear about the trade: at four days a week every pattern gets trained twice rather than three times, which is about a third less weekly volume. Below four days this is the wrong program.

What if I miss a day?

Nothing breaks. Every rule compares one session of a workout to the previous session of the same workout, never to a date, so the sequence picks up where it left off. Deloads are counted in sessions rather than weeks, so a travel week does not burn deload credit. After a long enough gap the app treats old streaks as stale, and after a longer one it recalibrates the load rather than pretending week-old evidence is current.

Do I need to set my gym up in the app first?

No — there is no setup step at all, and you are never asked your bodyweight. The app works out how big a step is on each lift from the weights you actually log: if your dumbbells run 20, 22, 24 it sees a step of 2; if the leg press jumps 20 it sees 20. Before there is any history it guesses from the size of the load, and you correct it once by typing the weight you really used. The honest cost is that the first suggestion on a brand-new lift can be a weight your gym cannot make — you overwrite it, and it learns.

Why there is no setup step →

What if my gym’s weights jump too far?

Reps and load are treated as one ladder. The written target is 12, but reps are allowed to float in a band — 8 to 16 by default — to absorb coarse equipment. A leg press stepping 20 kg has no weight that gives you twelve honest reps once twelve at the lower plate has gone easy, so you add reps where you are, then take the jump at fewer reps and climb back toward 12. Where the equipment is fine-grained, like a loaded barbell, nothing ever deviates from 12.

The rep and load ladder →

Do I need a full gym?

A barbell, dumbbells, a pull-up bar, an ab wheel and a couple of cable or machine stations cover the whole program. Power cleans have a documented fallback ladder for gyms that object to them: hang power cleans, dumbbell cleans or single-arm snatch, trap bar jumps, kettlebell swings. You can also turn the clean rotation off entirely and deadlift every B session — a legitimate choice, though not a free one.

Can I use pounds?

Yes. Kilograms or pounds is a setting, and the arithmetic follows it. Loads are stored canonically in kilograms underneath, so switching units — or logging a session in a second gym on the other side of the world — leaves your history and your charts intact.

What does it cost?

Free for a month, then $20 a year, and there is no card to start. Your training log stays readable and exportable whether or not you ever pay — a lapsed subscription stops new sessions going in, it does not lock the door on what is already there.

Do I need the app to run this?

No. The program came first and works fine in a notebook: two grids, four marks, two footer rows. The app exists because the bookkeeping is relentless rather than hard, and relentless is the part that quietly stops happening.

Run the whole thing with a pen →

What happens to my data?

It is yours, and it is local first. Every set you log is written to your device immediately and syncs to your own private account. Nothing is shared, sold, or used to rank you against strangers, and you can export the whole log whenever you like.

Start logging today.

No setup, no questionnaire, nothing to keep track of. Log your first session and let the day report back — fifteen to thirty minutes in the gym, one tap per set in the app, and it works with the signal off.

Start your free month See Workout A

Free for a month, then $20 a year. No card to start. Your training log stays readable and exportable whether or not you ever pay — a lapsed subscription stops new sessions going in, it does not lock the door on what is already there.

An opinionated program. Build functional strength slowly.Love your joints and your body.