Gyms: training in more than one place

Adding your second gym

Until you add one, none of this exists. There's no gym picker, no chip, no extra row on any sheet, and nothing new is stored. The app you already use is the one-gym case, and it stays exactly as plain as it was.

Settings, then Gyms, then Add a Gym. A name is all it needs. You can pick an icon and say what kind of place it is, which is worth ten seconds because it feeds the fit check later, but a name is enough to finish.

The moment a second gym exists, the first one needs a name too, so the add screen asks for it in the same breath. Until now it was just your gym; now it's My Gym unless you say otherwise. Everything you have logged, saved and measured stays where it is and becomes that gym's. Nothing is moved, copied or reset.

One chip says where you are

Once there are two, a chip appears wherever the numbers could differ: on the Set Up sheet, on a session preview before you start, and above the plate calculator in Settings. It shows the gym you're at. Tap it and a short list drops down; tap a name and you're there. Each name carries what that gym keeps different, and when you last trained there.

That's the whole interaction. There's no location permission, no check-in and nothing to remember at the door, because a swap that guesses wrong silently is worse than one you make yourself in a second.

Where you are is part of your account rather than part of your phone, so it follows you across devices like the rest of your settings.

Each gym carries a note if you give it one: which rack, where the chalk is, the door code. The note is printed in the switcher under the gym's name, and the switcher is the one screen you open at the door, which is where a note like that is any use.

During a workout the chip steps out of the way. A session belongs to the gym it started at, so the Set Up sheet stops offering the switch mid-set; finish or discard the workout and it's back.

What follows you, and what stays put

A gym is described as a difference from your main one, not as a blank room to furnish. That single decision is why adding one takes ten seconds instead of an evening.

Standardised iron carries over. Bars, plates and dumbbells at a new gym read through to your main gym's until you say otherwise, so a 20 kg bar and a rack of 2.5s don't need describing twice. Change something at the new gym and only that thing is stored as a difference; correct your main gym's plate inventory later and every gym that never overrode it follows along.

The bar a particular lift uses works the same way. Pin the EZ bar to curls once and curls load an EZ bar wherever you train, because an EZ bar weighs the same across the street. Nothing else moves: the bench press still loads the standard bar, because the pin was set on the exercise rather than on the gym. A gym that has no EZ bar can say so. Open the bar row there and pick its own, or hand the lift back to the house bar for that gym alone; your other gyms keep the pin.

Machine positions do not carry over. A pin hole, a seat notch, a J-hook number and a stack step mean nothing across the street, so each gym remembers its own. Where your main gym has a number saved, a new gym shows it dimmed as a starting guess with the gym it came from named next to it. It's a hint, not a value: it never becomes what's saved, and it never counts as a setup that's been dialled in until you tap it in for real.

The Smith carriage is the one thing that never inherits at all. Counterbalanced carriages range from almost nothing to a full bar, and being confidently wrong there moves every Smith number you log. A new gym's carriage starts unset, with your main gym's weight shown only as a reference.

Weights you can actually build here

Suggested weights, warm-up ramps and plate drawings are all rounded to what the gym you're at can physically make. A home rack that jumps in 2.5 kg is told to jump in 2.5 kg; a gym with a full plate inventory gets the fine steps back.

If you've described a dumbbell rack, dumbbell targets snap to a bell that's on it instead of a number that isn't. Leave the rack undescribed and nothing changes, which is what every existing install does. A second gym can also say the opposite: clear its rack to empty and that gym stops borrowing your main gym's dumbbells, and its targets are left alone.

This rounds what you're told to build, never what your training is judged on. Progression rules, targets and the weights you log are untouched by which gym you're at, so a lighter jump at home doesn't quietly become a smaller programme.

When the gym is missing something

Say what kind of place a gym is when you add it, and starting a session there is checked against it. If today's session needs a cable stack and you're in a hotel with dumbbells and a treadmill, the app says so before you start rather than at the third exercise. Repeating a past workout from History goes through the same check, because the room it's repeated in isn't always the room it happened in.

The fix is offered on the spot: swap the exercise for something the gym has. Take the swap and it's remembered for that gym, so the same session next month comes up already swapped. It's remembered per gym and per exercise, not written into your routine, so your programme at your main gym is exactly as you left it.

A gym with no type set and nothing to flag draws no sheet at all, and neither does a single-gym install.

Records that know where you set them

Every workout is stamped with the gym you were at. Open a session and the venue is on it, next to the date, and tappable if you got it wrong. The list itself gains filter chips once your history spans more than one venue, so a month at one gym can be read on its own.

Personal records gain a second class. A lift can be your best ever, or your best at this gym, and the two are said differently and never confused: an all-time record is an all-time record wherever it happened, and a gym record is only claimed when there's a real previous best at that gym to beat. Your first session somewhere new is a baseline, not a clean sweep of records, which is what would happen if the app counted an empty history as one to beat.

The gym's name is added to what history already tells you, never in place of it. Where a line is too tight to carry both, on a share card for instance, the venue is what drops. The date and the lift always stay.

Charts and comparisons, one gym at a time

An exercise's charts carry the same chips. Filter to one gym and the line, the session count and the summary underneath all narrow to sessions logged there, which is the honest way to look at a lift you do heavy at one place and light at another. Comparing two exercises has chips of its own, so a side-by-side can be read at one venue too.

The record marker on a chart stays all-time whatever the filter says. It marks the day you set your best estimated one-rep max, and recomputing that inside a filter would quietly redefine it as your best here while it still reads as your record.

On the dashboard, a Gyms card appears by itself once you've trained at more than one place recently, with your sessions split by venue and a switcher on it. Tap a gym on the card and History opens already filtered to that venue.

Making old history honest

Everything you logged before you added a second gym belongs to your main one, which is right for most of it and wrong for the fortnight you were away.

Settings, then Gyms, then Assign Past Workouts. Pick a date range and a gym and the workouts inside it are re-stamped in one go. You can run it as many times as you need, and it only ever changes which gym a session says it was at.