Phases advance on sessions completed, not weeks. Train more and you move faster.
Three strength sessions, one machine setup each, rotating A, B, C. Every fourth slot is the rower: intervals first time round, threshold the second. Eight slots, then it repeats with heavier weights.
Slot four is high intensity intervals. It progresses on its own ladder, independent of the weights.
| Phase | Sets | Legs, pulls, arms, core | Pressing and shoulder |
|---|---|---|---|
| Learn | 2 | 4 to 5 reps left | 4 to 5 reps left |
| Build | 3 | 2 reps left | 2 reps left |
| Push | 3 | 1 rep left on the last set | 2 reps left, always |
| Peak | 4 | Last set to clean failure | 2 reps left, always |
| Deload | 2 | 4 reps left, same weight | 4 reps left |
Pressing never goes to failure at any phase. Failing a squat means standing up. Failing a press with your shoulder history means a torn something. That column stays capped on purpose.
Every eighth strength session from Push onward is a deload. Same weights, two sets, stop well short. The app inserts it and tells you. Skipping it is how an aggressive ramp turns into a stall or an injury.
| You rated it | Next session |
|---|---|
| Easy | +1 step |
| Right | +1 step |
| Hard | hold |
| Too hard | −1 step |
A step is one BL1 position, about ten percent of your body weight, or the next dumbbell. When the next dumbbell is more than a twenty-five percent jump the app holds the weight and adds reps instead.
| Gap | What the app does |
|---|---|
| 0–4 days | Nothing. Normal session. |
| 5–13 days | Two sets, no load increase, one session only. |
| 14+ days | Learn rules and one step lighter, for two sessions. |
| Extra activity yesterday | Loads hold. |
| Under 7 sessions in 21 days | Conditioning drops out. Strength only. |
| Shoulder flagged twice in four | Pressing pulled, hip work substituted, three clean sessions to clear. |
The app does not ask where you are, it asks what you have. A hotel gym can mean two dumbbells and a treadmill or a full functional trainer, so the venue tells you almost nothing. Tick what is actually in the room and every movement resolves down a fixed ladder until it finds something you can do.
Squats go dumbbell, then leg press, then rear-foot-elevated split squat, then tempo bodyweight. Pressing goes machine, dumbbell, band, incline push-up, push-up. Rowing goes cable, dumbbell, band, and finally a row under a sturdy table. Nothing ever resolves to nothing.
Away sessions do not touch your home loads. A hotel dumbbell and your BL1 are not comparable, so recording one against the other would corrupt the progression. Away sessions advance the queue and count toward your phase, and when you get home your loads are exactly where you left them.
The Diamondback covers two different jobs, and it is worth keeping them separate.
One reason not to replace all three walks: cycling is not weight-bearing, so it does not load the skeleton the way walking does. Swap two of the three and keep one on foot. Your lifting is now the larger bone stimulus anyway, so this is a minor point, but it costs nothing to get right.
Fitness+ and channels like Juice & Toya are good at what they are good at, and it is not the same job as this app. A follow-along class cannot know that you pressed BL1 level five for three sets of ten last Wednesday, so it cannot progress you. Progressive overload requires a log, and the log is what this app is.
It is a web page, not an App Store app, so it never appears in your app list on its own. Two minutes of setup makes it behave like one.
Three numbers matter: the load on each lift, the seven-day average body weight, and whether you completed the week. Everything else is decoration.
Apple Fitness, a class, a hike, a game of anything. It counts toward the streak and shows on the calendar. It does not move the A, B, C queue, so the session you missed is still waiting for you.
The voices are recorded, not built by your phone. A male coach reads the work. A female voice reads everything around it.
If something looks wrong after an update, check this against the build I sent you. A mismatch means the browser is still serving an old copy: force-quit the app, reopen, and if it still shows the old build, open the site once in Safari with ?fresh=1 on the end of the address.
Your history lives in this browser on this device only. There is no server copy. Copy it somewhere safe every few weeks, and always before you change phones.
Lacto-ovo vegetarian, eggs and dairy in, no meat analogs. This is harder than an omnivore diet in exactly one way, and that way happens to be the way that matters most.
Maintenance is a Mifflin-St Jeor estimate for your height, weight, age, and activity, not a measurement. Treat it as a starting hypothesis and let the seven-day weight average tell you whether it was right.
| Occasion | Example | Protein |
|---|---|---|
| Morning | Masala omelette, two whole eggs plus three whites, with a cup of plain Greek yogurt | ~40 g |
| Midday | Rajma or chana with a cup of Greek yogurt as raita, one cupped handful of rice | ~37 g |
| Afternoon | Whey isolate in milk, or a cup of low-fat cottage cheese | ~33 g |
| Evening | Tex-Mex bowl: black beans, shredded cheese, Greek yogurt as crema, salsa, one tortilla | ~35 g |
Paneer tikka or bhurji, dal with a side of curd, chana or rajma, egg bhurji, plain Greek yogurt in place of regular curd everywhere. Swap regular curd for Greek yogurt as a blanket rule and you gain roughly ten grams of protein per cup for free.
Ricotta is the quiet winner here at roughly twenty-eight grams a cup. Baked ziti or stuffed shells built on ricotta and part-skim mozzarella, eggs in a frittata, parmesan on everything. Keep the pasta portion to one cupped handful and let the cheese do the work.
Black beans and pinto beans, queso fresco, eggs for migas, Greek yogurt standing in for sour cream. Bowls beat burritos, because the tortilla is where the calories hide without adding protein.
Hitting 140 grams on lacto-ovo vegetarian without a protein powder is possible but genuinely tedious. With one it is easy. Whey and casein are dairy, not meat substitutes, so they sit inside your constraint. If you would rather not, plan on eggs, Greek yogurt, and cottage cheese appearing daily and without much variety.
Every link below was opened and checked. Where the source shows different equipment than you own, the caveat says so rather than pretending the match is exact. Three of these movements have no institutional video anywhere, and that is stated too.
Sources verified August 2026. ACE library pages routinely show different equipment than their titles imply, so each was opened individually rather than trusted by name.