The Strength story: the full history of one lift
A chart of the weight on the bar can make a good program look like a failure. Run 5/3/1 and the bar drops at the start of every cycle, so months of real progress come out as a sawtooth that goes nowhere. Chart your estimated 1RM instead and the line climbs, but it's a calculated number, and on its own it's hard to trust.
The Strength story draws both at once, and adds three things a normal chart doesn't have: what the progression engine decided each session, the records you set, and the programs you ran marked out along the timeline. This page explains how to read it.
Last reviewed 2026-09-06 · matches app v1.0.0.85
Where it lives
Open any exercise's detail page (Training, then Exercises, or tap the exercise's name almost anywhere it appears) and find the Estimated 1RM card. Once the lift has more than one session logged, the card's header gets an expand glyph. Tap it and the story fills the screen.
You get a story for lifts with weight on the bar. Cardio, duration-only and reps-only exercises chart their own metrics on their detail pages instead, since there's no single-rep max to estimate for a plank.
- Go to Training → Exercises and open a lift, say your bench press.
- Find the Estimated 1RM card in the detail page.
- Tap the expand glyph in the card's header. The Strength story opens fullscreen.
- Drag anywhere across the chart to read individual sessions in the dock below.
The four layers
The line is your estimated 1RM: what the weight and reps you did that session are worth as a single rep. Underneath it, a faint scatter in the same muted shade every time is the 'bar weight' the legend names — the actual weight you had loaded that session, no matter what the engine decided about it. You want both: the scatter shows what the program told you to lift, the line shows whether it's working.
The small marker sitting on the line itself, one per session, is coloured by what the progression engine decided that day. Green ('the bar went up') is a session that earned an increment or a training-max bump. Red ('missed / deload') is one that missed or triggered a backoff. A session that held, or that progressed some other way such as climbing a rep range without the weight itself changing, carries no special colour and just matches the line. Grey means no rule judged the session at all: training outside a program, or anything logged before the lift came under a program.
A marker above the line flags each new estimated-1RM record. Your first session never gets one, because a first lift is only the baseline and a record has to beat something.
Under the axis, a coloured rail splits the timeline into program eras, and the chapter list below names each one: the program, how many sessions it got, how many deloads it took, and the weight it took the lift from and to. Time outside any program shows as a dim grey 'Outside a program'. If you ran the same program twice with a gap in between, you get two chapters. A lift you've only ever trained outside a program, never once inside one, skips the rail and chapter list entirely — there's nothing to chart eras out of.
Drag to read a session
Touch the chart and a dock fills in underneath. Its top line is the session's date, the program and week it belonged to, and the gym if you use more than one. Below that sit the three numbers the chart itself cannot say: the estimated 1RM with how far it moved against the session before, the top set with its reps, and the total volume with the number of working sets behind it.
Then the working sets themselves, as chips (weight × reps, with a + on an AMRAP set). The heaviest one is picked out, because that is the set the dot on the chart is drawn from. Warm-ups are left out, since they don't affect the verdict.
The last line is what the engine decided that day, written out. 'Moved up to 102.5 kg for next session.' 'Deload to 130 kg, the misses added up.' 'Training max up to 60 kg.' When no rule judged the session, the dock says what the session did instead: your best estimated 1RM yet, the first entry on record, or how far it moved up or down on the one before it.
A session that set an all-time estimated-1RM record is marked Record. The chapter's colour runs down the left edge of the dock, matching the rail under the axis, so you can see at a glance which era you are reading. Open Session takes you straight to that workout in History, and Back brings you here.
Slide your finger and the dock moves session by session, so you can go to any jump or dip in the line and find out what caused it. A dip is often a deload after two missed sessions; a jump is often the AMRAP set that earned a double increment.
Every chart gets a screen
The same expand glyph sits on every chart on an exercise's detail page, volume and reps included, and on the Weight, Body Fat and Lean Mass charts in Body Metrics. The small cards thin out long histories to stay readable at card size, while the fullscreen view redraws with far more of your sessions in frame.
On a phone there's a Rotate button in the corner that flips the view to landscape, which helps with really long histories. It's hidden during a live workout, because the app keeps the screen in portrait so the logger can't rotate out from under you mid-set.
Common questions
Why are some of my dots grey?
Grey means no progression rule judged that session. It was training outside a program, or it happened before the lift was part of a program. The chart only colours a session the engine actually ruled on, rather than inventing a verdict after the fact. The dock still has something to tell you about a grey session: drag to it and it reports whether the session was a record, your first on that lift, or up or down on the one before.
I lifted heavier than ever, why no record marker?
The markers flag estimated-1RM records, not records for the weight on the bar. A heavy single at low reps can work out to a lower e1RM than a lighter set of eight. And your first session never gets a marker, because it's the baseline every later record is measured against.
Why do the dots go down while the line goes up?
That's a wave program doing its job. Programs like 5/3/1 drop the bar weight at the start of each cycle while your rep quality climbs. The dots show the plan and the line shows the progress, so when they disagree, go with the line.
Can I get from the chart to the workout itself?
Yes. Drag to the session you want and tap Open Session in the dock. That closes the chart and opens the full workout in History, with every exercise and set you logged that day. Back returns you to the lift you came from.
Where's the Rotate button?
Top corner of the fullscreen view, in the mobile apps. It hides during a live workout, because the logger keeps your screen in portrait so an accidental tilt can't rearrange the session you're logging.
Put it into practice
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