Candito 6 Week Strength in Durata: six weeks to drive progress on your main lifts

Finding the program

A fresh install opens on the first-run funnel: import an old log, build a profile, find a program, connect Health, or skip straight to logging. This run takes the program route.

The finder takes goal, experience and days a week and returns a shortlist. Candito 6 Week Strength comes back near the top for an intermediate lifter chasing strength, and it is a genuinely different answer to the same question most of the catalogue is answering.

The program page is where the difference shows. There is no increment and no deload rule to read, because the schedule does all of it: six weeks, each with its own character, running from high-volume conditioning work through to a single-rep test. What you are agreeing to is the shape of the block rather than a rule that will be applied to you.

One number per lift, and then no more decisions

Setup asks for a current max on each of the three lifts the program prescribes by percentage: the squat, the bench press and the deadlift. This run entered 150 kg, 100 kg and 200 kg. That is the last decision anybody makes about weight for six weeks.

Every set of the first five weeks is then resolved from those numbers. Week one runs in the seventies and eighties, week three moves to the mid eighties, week five reaches ninety-seven and a half percent. None of it depends on how the previous week went, which is unusual enough to be worth saying plainly: this program does not react to you. Week six is the exception, and the only one: the test day prescribes no weight, because the whole block exists to find a number the entered max does not already contain.

A start date puts the whole finite block on the calendar in one move. Six weeks, twelve main sessions, and then it stops. There is no cycle two waiting on the other side of it.

Weeks one and two: volume, and nothing near a limit

The first phase is conditioning work, and it is deliberately unimpressive. The squat runs four sets of six at eighty percent on the first day of the week and four sets of eight at seventy percent on the second, which puts 105 kg on the bar against a 150 kg max. Two squat days a week, high reps, no rep-outs, nothing that could go wrong.

The deadlift runs off its own entered max on the same percentage schedule, so the heavy pulling and the heavy squatting climb together rather than competing. The upper-body days carry the bench press and the assistance work, which is where most of the week's remaining volume lives.

This is the phase people skip, and skipping it is why the later weeks stop working. The percentages in week five assume six weeks of accumulated work underneath them; run them cold and the schedule is just a heavy day with no base.

Weeks three and four: the reps drop, the bar climbs

The second phase is where the program starts asking questions. The reps come down into the four-to-six range, the bar goes to eighty-five percent, and the last set is taken for as many as you have. On this run that is 127.5 kg on the squat, and the app resolves it without being told, because it is simply a percentage of the number entered in week zero.

Week four splits the difference between the two phases: one heavier day and one lighter one, the bar reaching 140 kg by the end of the week. The rep-outs from here on are what tell you whether the entered max was honest, which is the only feedback loop the program has.

The strip below is every squat appearance across the block. It is not a ladder that was built one session at a time. It is a curve that existed in full before the first session was logged, and the drive simply walked it.

Week five, then the day the block was built for

Week five is a single working set at ninety-seven and a half percent, repped out. It is 147.5 kg here, and it is the last information the block gives you before the test. The estimate the app takes off that set is 167.2 kg, well above the 150 kg entered six weeks earlier, which is the program telling you the entered number was conservative.

Week six is one rep, and Durata leaves the weight field empty. That is deliberate: a test pinned to a percentage of the max you entered six weeks ago could only ever hand it straight back, so the last session of the block is the one where the app prescribes nothing and you work up. There is no assistance work stacked behind it and no volume to grind out afterwards. This run took it to 160 kg, ten kilos over the entry and a little under what the week-five rep-out had estimated — which is the usual shape of a test day against an estimate.

Then the block ends. Durata marks it complete rather than rolling it into a second cycle, because a peaking block that repeats is no longer a peaking block. You retest, enter the number the test gave you, and the next six weeks resolve off that instead.

What the block leaves behind

The History calendar holds all twelve main sessions across the six weeks, and the shape of them is visible from the calendar alone: dense early, sparse and heavy at the end.

The strength view is the useful one. It carries an estimated max per lift, and on a peaking block that estimate does what the program does: it undulates through the volume weeks, where heavy sets of eight say little about a single, and then rises sharply into the test. The deadlift finishes at 221 kg, the squat at 167.2 kg and the bench at 110.5 kg, all of them above the numbers entered at setup.

The workload view shows the other half of the argument. Weekly volume is front-loaded into the conditioning phase and falls away as the intensity climbs, which is the trade every peaking block makes and the reason the block has to end. You cannot hold that shape indefinitely; you run it, test, and start again from the new number.

The payoff: 150 kg in, 160 kg out

Two screenshots of the same squat six weeks apart. The first is the second conditioning day of week one, four sets of eight at 105 kg. The second is the test, one rep at 160 kg. Nothing between them was decided by a rule reacting to performance — the whole curve was resolved from a single number before the block began, and then the last session handed the decision back to the lifter.

The Strength tab tells the same story from the other side. The estimated max went 150 at setup, 153 off the week-three rep-out, then 167.2 off the repped-out single in week five. The stored training max never moved because Candito never asks it to — the block is finished, not rolled over. The 160 kg you actually made on the test is the number you enter when you run it again.

Week 1

105 kg → 160 kg

105 kg to 160 kg

105 kg to 160 kg in six weeks. Every step up to week five was a percentage of the same entered max rather than a reaction to the session before, and the test day that closes the block prescribes nothing at all.

Week 6