User guide

1. Getting started & onboarding

You don't need an account, sign-up or password — your profile, logs and history live on your device (what the AI Coach is sent, and when, is set out in the privacy policy and in the app under Privacy & your data). First-run setup builds your plan around you:

1. Download and open Strathlon on your iPhone.
2. Tell it about you — your body details, your goal, your sport (pick from across every category), and your weekly schedule. Strathlon is for ages 16 and up (18+ recommended); if you're 16 or 17 it focuses on strength, fitness and performance and never sets a weight-loss diet, keeping your calories at a healthy maintenance level.
3. Answer the quick readiness & food check. A short set of yes/no questions you answer before you can continue — a readiness check like a trainer would ask before you start, plus two questions about your relationship with food. If anything stands out, Strathlon gently recommends getting medical clearance first, or keeps things at a gentle maintenance. It's a readiness check, not medical advice. Your individual answers stay on your device; your coach is told only that something was flagged, so it can keep its advice conservative.
4. Set any health and safety details — pregnancy or breastfeeding, ongoing conditions, allergies and foods or supplement ingredients to avoid. Your meal plans and the coach treat allergies as hard, never-suggest exclusions. All of this is editable any time in More → Profile & Settings (allergies and foods to avoid under Food preferences; health & safety details under the Health section).
5. Choose what the AI Coach can see. You'll be asked once whether to share your Apple Health figures with the coach for more tailored advice. It's off by default — you can change it any time in More → Profile & Settings → App settings → Privacy & your data. Note that this switch covers Apple Health measurements only: the health & safety details you entered yourself (allergies, pregnancy or breastfeeding, conditions, medications, injuries) are always shared with your coach so its advice is safe for you. The full list is in the app under Privacy & your data → "What your AI coach can see".
6. Finish setup and you'll land in the app with your plan ready. A short welcome tour points out the key spots.

Reinstalling, or moving to a new iPhone? If Strathlon finds a backup in your private iCloud, the very first screen offers "Welcome back to Strathlon" with two choices. Restore my data skips onboarding and brings back your profile, plan progress, logged weights and daily totals, saved meal plans, your schedule and holiday breaks — and re-applies your iCloud photo-sync and training-backup choices. Start fresh runs normal onboarding, restores nothing, and won't ask again (your iCloud copy stays put in case you reinstall later). Restores only ever fill in what's empty — nothing you've entered since is overwritten. Sleep, Apple Watch workout history and cycle history aren't part of the backup; they rebuild themselves from Apple Health over the first few minutes. Your health & safety details — allergies, injuries, body composition, and any pregnancy, health-condition or medication details — are NOT backed up unless you switch that on (App settings → Privacy & your data → Back up health & safety details, off by default). If they weren't backed up, Strathlon tells you so before you restore and keeps a reminder at the top of your Profile until you re-enter them — until you do, your meals and plan can't take them into account.

2. Biological sex & hormone therapy

Why we ask for biological sex. It's a maths input, not a label. The equations Strathlon uses to work out your Basal Metabolic Rate — the calories your body burns just staying alive — were derived separately for male and female bodies, and the two differ by a meaningful amount at the same height, weight and age. Without it, every calorie number in the app would be a guess. It's a required field with no default: nothing is pre-selected and setup won't continue until you choose.

The optional hormone-therapy question. Right after it, Strathlon asks — of everyone, not just some people — whether you're on hormone therapy. There are three answers: Not on hormone therapy / prefer not to say (the default), Testosterone (masculinising), or Estrogen (feminising). You can skip it — "Not on hormone therapy / prefer not to say" is a complete answer and changes nothing at all about your targets. You can change it any time in More → Profile & Settings → Body & stats → Hormone therapy.

What we actually do with it. Hormone therapy gradually shifts the balance of muscle and fat, and that changes how many calories your body burns at rest. So:

1. If you've given us a measured body-fat % or lean mass, we use it and estimate nothing. A real measurement always wins — from a smart scale, calipers, a DEXA scan or Apple Health. Your BMR comes straight from your lean mass (the Katch-McArdle equation). This is the accurate route, and it's worth taking: the field is in More → Profile & Settings → Body & stats.
2. If you haven't, your BMR still comes from Strathlon's standard weight-based formula — we just adjust it. We estimate your body composition from your height, weight and age, then shift that estimate half of the way toward the profile your therapy tends to produce (testosterone → leaner; estrogen → higher body fat), capped so it can never go further than a typical body of the other sex. We convert the resulting change in lean mass into a small calorie adjustment and add it to your usual weight-based BMR — the formula itself is never swapped out. If your therapy pushes the same way your biological sex already sits — a biological male on testosterone, or a biological female on estrogen — the shift is capped out completely and the adjustment is exactly zero: your calories come out byte-identical to what they'd be without answering the question.
3. If you're not on hormone therapy, nothing changes. You get exactly the weight-based calculation Strathlon has always used.

It's a half-shift on purpose. Hormone therapy changes body composition gradually and only partly, and a conservative estimate is safer than an optimistic one — it errs toward giving you a little less rope, not more.

You can always see which one is running. More → Profile & Settings → Your targets has a "BMR formula" row that reads Katch-McArdle, Weight-based (hormone-adjusted) or Weight-based, and the ⓘ next to Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) on the same screen explains your own situation in plain English.

Your calorie floor never moves. Strathlon has an absolute minimum daily calorie backstop — 1,200 for a biological-female profile, 1,500 for a biological-male one. It stays keyed to biological sex, and hormone therapy never lowers it.

Cycle features and testosterone. If your profile is biologically female and you tell us you're on testosterone, Strathlon turns its cycle-aware features off by default — periods commonly stop or become irregular on masculinising therapy, and we'd rather not assume. If you do still menstruate, switch them back on with the "I still menstruate" toggle at the top of More → Profile & Settings → Cycle-aware insights. Everything then works exactly as it does for anyone else. Nothing is assumed about you in either direction, and the toggle is always there — the setting is never hidden from you.

Where it's stored, and who sees it. It lives on your device, in your profile. It's treated as sensitive health data, so it's left out of your iCloud backup unless you switch on the separate, off-by-default "Back up health & safety details". It reaches the AI Coach only if you've turned on "Share Health data with AI coaching" (More → Profile & Settings → App settings → Privacy & your data), which is off by default; when it is on, the coach is told your therapy status so it reasons from your actual logged data rather than a sex-typical baseline, and it is instructed never to give medical, hormonal or dosing advice and never to raise the topic unprompted. Biological sex itself is always shared with the coach, alongside your name and age, because your calorie baseline can't be explained without it. Setting hormone therapy back to None removes it everywhere.

3. Your training plan & running a session

Your plan is periodised — it moves through structured phases that get harder as you progress, and it adapts your week around match days, practice and season. The Plan tab opens on the phase you're actually in, and future phases stay locked until you earn them by training (on by default).

How far through the block you are. Under the phase strip, a card shows the block you're in, how far through it you are — "4 of 8 sessions · 7 of 14 days" — and one line telling you what's still outstanding. The tile for the phase you're training carries the same count; a finished block reads Done, a locked one Locked, Maintenance Ongoing, and "Done · 5d" means you've finished the sessions but the block still has days left to run. A session counts when you finish everything the plan put in front of you that day — sport-only days, the HIIT finisher and warm-ups don't count toward it — and days you've marked as a break are left out of the day count. Your phases still move on the plan week, exactly as they always have: the block progress is there to show you where you stand, not to speed you up or hold you back.

Which day your week starts on. The Plan tab's THIS WEEK strip and your sport calendar both begin on Sunday by default. Change it in More → Profile & Settings → Body & stats → "Week starts on" (Sun or Mon) — both move together. Your weekly reviews and your training streaks keep running Monday to Sunday whichever you pick, so switching never relabels a week you've already trained, and no past review changes. Your AI coach reads the week the same way round as your Plan tab does.

What a day contains, and why. Your session is balanced across the whole day you're actually served, sport work included: no two exercises train the same movement pattern, a day that presses also carries a row and a pulldown or chin, and pulling sets reach at least 80% of pressing sets. Where your equipment or the day genuinely can't supply a missing move the rule stands down and leaves the exercise you already had — you're never given a shorter session just to satisfy a rule. A dedicated Push day balances against its paired Pull day rather than within itself, because that's what a push/pull split is for, and your first exercise of the day never changes, because that's the lift your progress is tracked on. Where a sport accessory collides with a gym move, it's the sport move that changes. Phase 1 is Reactivation, so it's deliberately capped at eight exercises — counted across your lifts, your sport work and your core finisher together, which works out at roughly 24 working sets. Your sport work and your core finisher are never what gets cut; only the main lifts are trimmed, and the trim keeps your press, row, pulldown and leg work in preference to isolation. Phases 2 and 3 aren't capped.

Reading a phase you're not training. The filled tile is always the phase you're on, not the one you last tapped, so opening another phase to read it never switches you into it. Any phase that isn't the one you're training opens read-only, and the header tells you which of three situations you're in: locked (with when it unlocks), already finished, or unlocked but not started yet. It is fully readable — tap any exercise to expand it for sets, reps, tempo and coaching notes, watch its demo video, or ask the coach about it. Only starting it is locked: there's no Start button, no mark-done and no weight logging until you've earned the phase. A small "Phase unlocked" note appears when you get there. Anything you've earned never locks again, even after a fresh cut or a break, and Maintenance is always available. Prefer free access to every phase? Turn off "Lock future phases until earned" in More → Profile & Settings → Training.

1. Open the Plan tab to see today's session and the week ahead.
2. Start your session. The workout screen is split into tidy fold-out sections — warm-up, your main workout, and a HIIT finisher. Warm-up and HIIT start folded so there's less to scroll; your workout stays open.
3. Use the live timers. Warm-up, rest and HIIT countdowns keep running on your Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island, with spoken coaching cues — so you can put the phone down between sets. Your voice coach calls each exercise and set, including the rep target.
4. A live session follows you around the app. While a warm-up, workout or HIIT session is running and its screen isn't open, a slim colour-coded bar sits just above the tab bar on every tab — amber for warm-up, green for your workout, red for HIIT — with "Tap to return". Tap it to jump straight back in, exactly where you left off. Closing a sheet only hides a session (the warm-up keeps counting and narrating); re-opening resumes the same run.
5. Ending a workout is always explicit. The warm-up sheet's End, the red End control on the set panel, the "End workout" bar between exercises, and HIIT's End all ask to confirm, then stop the timers, clear the Lock Screen and wrist, and save the watch recording to Apple Health. Starting a different session while one is live asks "End current workout and switch?" first — so you can never end up with two running at once. Buttons are also resume-aware: a live warm-up's button reads "Resume warm-up", a live HIIT's reads "Resume HIIT — in progress".
6. Wondering what tempo "3-0-1" means? Tap the Tempo tile on any expanded exercise card (it has a small ⓘ), or the tempo label on the live set panel mid-workout — both open the Training Glossary, with Tempo explained first (lower-pause-lift, in seconds). The ⓘ Glossary button above the exercise list is still there too.
7. Log your working weights. Type them in, or snap a photo of the dumbbell, plate or machine display and Strathlon reads the number for you (Premium). Weights auto-fill next time, so you just confirm or nudge them. Bodyweight moves can be saved with a weight of 0.
8. Set supersets per group. Where the plan pairs exercises into groups, each group header has its own switch — leave it on to run that group back-to-back as a superset/tri-set, or turn it off to do those exercises one at a time as straight sets. Strathlon remembers your choice per pairing, so a combination that never works at your gym stays as straight sets.
9. Training at home? Your workouts adapt to your kit and stay varied. Tell Strathlon what you have at home in More → Profile & Settings → Training (Dumbbells, Resistance Bands, Pull-Up Bar and more). Your home days then show only moves you can actually do — with nothing selected you still get a full, complete bodyweight session — and the exercises rotate from week to week so training stays fresh. Moves that need a bought item are tagged with it (the Pull-Up needs a Pull-Up Bar, so it is only offered if you have ticked one), while moves that use ordinary furniture — inverted rows under a table, chair triceps dips — count as bodyweight and are always available. Every home category always keeps at least six pure-bodyweight options, and any advanced move sits alongside an easier version. Your gym plan is unaffected.
10. Trained away from the app? Tap Mark this session done so it still counts toward your progress. Tapped it by mistake? Tap again to undo. (Sessions logged automatically — from a guided session or your Apple Watch — stay locked, so real training is never removed by accident.)
11. Going away? Use the "On a break or catching up?" button (beach-umbrella icon on the Plan tab) to set break dates (your plan pauses where it is, nothing lost) or to tick off training you did while away.

4. Logging food (manual & photo)

Your nutrition targets flex with the type of day you're having — training, rest, match or sport — with an automatic calorie bonus based on the sport, session length and how hard you actually play.

1. Open the Nutrition tab to see today's targets and what you've logged.
2. Log a meal by photo (Premium). Tap the camera in the AI Coach chat bar and snap a picture of your plate; the AI estimates calories, protein, carbs and fat and shows you what it read. Adjust the portion if needed, then tap to add it to your Tracker for the right day and meal slot.
3. Or just describe it. Tell the AI Coach what you ate in plain words and it does the same estimate.
4. Pick the day and meal slot before saving — you can log to any day, not just today. Meal slots are Breakfast, Mid-Morning Snack, Lunch, Afternoon Snack, Dinner and Evening Snack.
5. Nothing is logged automatically — you always review and confirm before it's added.
6. Logged something under the wrong meal? Tap the … next to any item in your Tracker's food log — today or a past day — to move it to a different meal slot.

5. Using the AI Coach

The coach already knows your full plan, today's exercises and your logged macros — so you can skip the background and get straight to the question.

1. Open the AI Coach and ask in plain language — for example, "give me a high-protein dinner that fits what's left of today's macros" or "build me a three-day training-week meal plan".
2. Answer its questions. The coach asks before it guesses, so a quick reply gets you a sharper answer.
3. Log foods from the chat. Mention or photograph a meal and it offers to add it straight to your Tracker.
4. Add meal plans to your week when it builds one for you.
5. Analyse your strength. Open your per-exercise strength history (tap See full strength history next to the free Strength progress card in a weekly review or in Your Trends), pick a lift, then tap Analyse my strength (it appears once that lift has at least two logged weeks — below that there is no line to read, so the chart, its legend, its scrolling note and the button are all replaced by the single figure you logged). The coach reads that lift’s progress from your logged numbers only — for a weighted lift, the heaviest single set you logged in each week, plus any personal record and any plateau; for a bodyweight movement, your reps and total volume — and if there isn’t enough history yet it asks you to log a few more sessions rather than guessing. Your paid weekly review also adds a short strength paragraph when you’ve logged weighted sets. There is no estimated one-rep max anywhere in Strathlon (build 210 removed it, from the charts and from what the coach is given): every figure you see is a weight you actually lifted, and a personal record means you lifted more weight than you ever had, not that a formula produced a bigger number. The exercise picker puts the lifts with enough history to draw a line at the top, each marked with a dot; a lift you have logged only once shows that figure and tells you what unlocks its trend line, and a week in which you logged no weighted set for a movement is simply absent from the chart rather than plotted as zero.
6. Share Health data for sharper advice (optional). Turn it on in More → Profile & Settings → App settings → Privacy & your data; leave it off and the coach works from what you type and your in-app profile.

The AI Coach (chat, meal plans and photo logging) is the premium tier.

6. The Tracker & your weight

The Tracker is your single view of calories and weight over time.

1. Check today at a glance. The top row shows four tiles — Target, Burned, Consumed and your Deficit, Surplus or Balance figure (whichever matches your goal) — and the target updates live as your day changes.
2. Log your weight — or let it flow in. If you use a scale that syncs to Apple Health, your weigh-ins are now adopted automatically — there's no "update your weight?" step to confirm. What you see across the Tracker, Coach and Nutrition is your latest reading; what sets your plan — your calorie and protein targets, and your BMR/TDEE — is a smoothed, roughly 7-day trend of your weight, so one heavy or light day doesn't jerk your targets around. Type a weight in yourself and that entry wins for that day. This all happens on your device, using your Apple Health read permission — which is separate from Share Health data with AI coaching. Leave that switch off and your weight and body figures stay on the phone; turn it on and your coach can see them.
3. Read your weight chart. It shows your actual weight as a solid line and your predicted weight (from your tracked calorie deficit or surplus) as a dashed line. Tap the ⤢ button — or rotate to landscape — for a full-screen view with pinch-zoom and a drag crosshair.
4. Understand the prediction. Real weight often drops faster at first (water and glycogen), then the prediction can run ahead as your body adapts — that's expected.
5. Explain a gap (Premium). When predicted and actual weight drift apart, tap to open a conversation with the coach with your numbers loaded; it usually asks a question or two before explaining.
6. Browse and export history. Tracker → History lists your days newest-first; use Import / Export there for a CSV round-trip of your daily log.

7. Apple Watch setup

Live heart rate with any Apple Watch is free. The one-time setup takes about a minute.

1. Open the Strathlon watch app once on your Apple Watch. After that you can leave it closed.
2. Allow Health access when prompted — this is what streams your heart rate to your phone.
3. Start sessions on your phone as normal. Strathlon starts the recording on your watch for you (even if the watch app is closed) and your live heart rate appears straight away — red at or above target, amber below.
4. Don't also start Apple's own Workout app. Running both at once double-counts your calories. Let Strathlon drive — it records each block to Apple's Workout app with the right type, calories and duration on its own.
5. No watch? You still get a live heart rate from Apple Health where recent data is available.

If your phone drops out mid-workout (out of range, airplane mode, battery died), the watch says so honestly: a small “Reconnecting…” note appears first, then “Phone unavailable — still recording” — and your heart rate and calories keep recording throughout. If a rest countdown ends while disconnected, the watch holds at zero and asks you to continue on your phone rather than guessing — so the two can never drift apart. Everything resyncs by itself the moment the phone is back. And if the watch stays disconnected for a full hour mid-session, it asks “Still training?” — answer Yes to keep going, or No to end; either way (even if you never answer) the workout is saved to Apple Health. The one thing that is not saved is an empty block — if a recording ends with almost no time on it and no calories collected, there is nothing real to record, so it is discarded rather than written to Apple Health as a zero-length entry.

Your gym session is one workout in Apple Fitness. Checking the AI Coach or another tab between exercises doesn't split the recording — the whole gym block is saved as a single strength workout (warm-up and HIIT are saved as their own correctly-typed blocks), and it keeps recording until you end it, it completes, or the watch's own safety checks end and save it.

Running the whole workout hands-free from your wrist — set-by-set, with a Done button — is the premium add-on. With it, every watch screen also carries an ending control — End on the warm-up and the main workout, Stop on HIIT (either one ends the session on the phone too and saves the recording), the set screen shows superset context ("SUPERSET A · 1 OF 2" — a group you've switched to straight sets shows as plain sets, matching the phone), and the set and next-up screens show the last weight you logged for that exercise — the same value the phone pre-fills. Every wrist button waits for your phone before it lets go: after a tap it shows a spinner until the phone has received the command, run it and acknowledged it, so a tap that hasn't landed looks like a tap that hasn't landed instead of tempting you into a second one that advances you twice. End and HIIT Stop are the deliberate exceptions — they stay tappable at all times, so you can always stop a session. The app works fully on its own without a watch.

8. Progress photos

Track your body progress with photos, not just the scale. Your gallery is private and stays on your device: your photos are never uploaded to a Strathlon server, never sent to the AI and never included in any export, unless you turn on the optional AI physique insight. The one thing that can move them off the phone is the off-by-default Sync progress photos to iCloud switch — and that copies them only to your own private iCloud.

1. Open More → Progress Photos.
2. Add a photo — take a new one or pick from your library. Library photos keep their real date and are tagged with that day's weight, so older shots land correctly on your timeline.
3. Compare two photos. Tap Compare to see your oldest and newest side by side, with the days between and your weight change. Tap either date to swap in any other photo.
4. Delete a photo straight from the Compare view if you want — tap a date and choose Delete.

9. Adding a walk or activity

Add extra activity to any day to see how much it frees up in your calorie allowance — handy for planning ahead.

1. Tap + Add activity from your Plan, choosing the type and duration. Tap Add activity and pick a quick activity (walk, run, cycle, swim), a gym class (search 35+), or a gym or home workout from the Gym & home tile — Push / Pull / Leg / Upper day, a full-body / circuit, home bodyweight or home dumbbell session, or a custom one. Search by the name you use ("PPL", "leg day", "calisthenics"), tweak the duration, and the bonus is estimated for you — or turn on Override to enter your own from a watch.
2. See what it frees up — Strathlon shows how the day's calorie allowance adjusts. A gentle note reminds you that a gym/home workout is for the extra or unplanned work: your planned gym session is already counted, so it's never double-counted.
3. Two numbers, and a simple way to picture it. Your watch or phone counts the calories you burn automatically — like a fuel gauge that updates on its own and moves your daily balance. You don't log anything for that side. Adding an activity here is the other side: it's you telling the app "I did something extra, so I can eat a little more today," which raises your eating allowance. Tip: record the same session in Apple Health too (an Apple Watch workout, or typing it in) and its active energy counts toward what you've burned — the two sides are meant to offset each other, not add together.
4. A quick example. You do a 1-hour spin class. Your watch already recorded the burn. If you also tap Add activity and pick Spin, Strathlon gives you back some eating room for it (a couple of hundred calories, scaled to your weight). The two are never added together — one is what you burned, the other is how much more you're allowed to eat.
5. Already wear an Apple Watch? You still add a session here when you want that extra eating room, or to plan ahead. Strathlon recognises an activity your watch already recorded, so your burn is never double-counted.

10. Adjusting your goal & maintenance

Strathlon makes the finish line a choice, not a dead end.

1. When you hit your target weight, Strathlon celebrates and asks what's next — right when it happens, whether that's at the end of a plan or partway through.
2. Pick your next step: lock it in with Maintenance (a structured maintenance phase with a gradual reverse diet), set a new goal, or keep going.
3. When your plan's weeks run out, the finish screen reads how you actually did — celebrating and pointing to Maintenance if you hit your goal, offering a fresh block sized to what's left if you're close, or honestly offering to extend and tighten (or ask your coach) if you've stalled.

Changing your goal weight. Your target weight is editable on its own, without touching anything else: More → Profile & Settings → "Goal & plan" → GOAL WEIGHT. It uses the same stepper, the same warnings and the same rules as the last screen of setup, and underneath it tells you what the target means in practice — how far you have to go, how many training weeks are left in your plan, and what weekly rate that works out to. If the pace is faster than a steady one it says so and still lets you save; the only thing that blocks Save is a target that contradicts your goal, such as a fat-loss target above your current weight. Changing it updates your goal progress everywhere but doesn't rebuild your plan, and it doesn't reset where your journey started — the distance you've already covered is kept.

Changing the goal itself. Your goal (fat loss, muscle gain and so on) and your experience level are a different matter: they're read-only wherever they're shown, because they reshape the whole plan — to change them you redo onboarding. There are two ways in and they run the identical flow: More → Profile & Settings → "Goal & plan" → "Change goal or experience" → "Redo onboarding" (the one most people find, since that's where your goal is displayed), or More → Profile & Settings → Reset & Data → "Restart and redo onboarding". Either way your tracking history is kept and a backup is made automatically first.

11. Requesting features

Have an idea for what Strathlon should do next?

1. Submit it in the app, or on the website at strathlon.com/feature-request.
2. Vote on the roadmap. Browse what others have suggested and vote the best ideas up at strathlon.com/roadmap.