Rule one
The morning read
Four questions each morning — sleep, soreness, energy, stress — become one 0 to 100 readiness score. The weights below are the whole formula.
Sleep carries the largest weight in the morning check-in.
Because it earns it. Nothing predicts a training day like the night before it.
Soreness and energy weigh equally.
How the body feels and what it has to give — read side by side.
Stress completes the score.
A heavy day outside the gym is training data too.
When a wearable and your check-in both report, they fuse — wearable weighted at 60%, your own report at 40%.
The machine measures; you confirm. Neither is ignored.
Rule two
The day's call
The readiness score lands in one of three bands, and the band decides the day. The score and the bands are the same for every member, every morning. The load adjustment underneath them runs on an active membership — without one, a green day is unchanged either way and the other two are held at the plan as written.
Green — push. You train loads as written, and the door to more is open.
A green day is not a gift. It is a reading.
Hold. You train at 95% of the prescribed load and no PR is chased.
Holding is a decision, not a default.
Recover. Loads drop to 80% of the prescribed load with 1 rep off each set.
The house will not spend what you do not have.
Rule three
How the weight moves
Your reps earn the next step; a PUSH day applies it. On HOLD, RECOVER or a deload, the step waits. The one question below decides where a lift the house has never seen you take begins.
The step is earned when your last 2 sessions on a lift ran back to back at the same weight and every one of them averaged the bottom of the rep range or better.
Counted back from your latest session and stopped by the first one that breaks either half — a different weight, or reps under the range. The average across a session decides it, not the top of the range and not every set. Those reps bank one kit increment. It is applied only on a PUSH day; HOLD, RECOVER, the early-session ceiling and a deload leave it banked.
A session older than 6 weeks stops counting among the sessions the house reasons from when it writes your next set. Where a lift has nothing newer, that last session still gives you today's weight and reps — held, never built on.
Held is the whole of it: the house repeats the number it last saw, tells you how long ago it saw it, and marks the suggestion at its lowest confidence. Today's readiness can still ease that number down; nothing takes it up, and no step up is reachable from history that old however much of it there is. 6 weeks clears a lift on a monthly rotation and a missed cycle on top of it, so a movement you never abandoned is never treated as old.
Inside your first 12 completed sessions, a green day is CALLED a hold rather than a push.
The reps can still earn the step, but the house keeps it banked until it calls a PUSH day. That is how the early-session ceiling stays real at the prescription, not just in the label.
On a lift the house has no numbers for, it asks one question — what you could take for about 5 reps with one or two left in you — and converts that answer to the reps you were actually given.
A 5-rep weight is not a 10-rep weight. Answer 100 lb and a 3x10 slot opens at 85 lb — the conversion is the whole of the walk-back, and it happens before any of the dials below.
That conversion carries 3 reps in reserve wherever the same load comes back on a later set — the 2 the question asked you to keep, and 1 more because the last set is not performed as fresh as the first. A slot of one set carries the bare 2.
The extra rep is taken once, off the opening — never once per set, and never as a ladder down the sets, because one exercise should be one number to load. It is the difference between a 3x5 slot opening on the 5-rep weight you just named and opening under it.
Foundation — from the first session.
Building the base — clean reps and showing up are the whole job.
Builder — from 12 sessions.
Enough on the record to read. A green day is called a push now, and the loads keep climbing where you earn them.
Steadfast — from 48 sessions.
Consistency is your identity. The plan bends around you, not the reverse.
Veteran — from 150 sessions.
A body of work. Few people ever log this much intentional training.
Rule four
The deload triggers
A deload is not a feeling. Three conditions call one, and each is written to your ledger with its reason the day it fires.
6 weeks of accumulation and a deload is called on its own — nothing else has to corroborate it.
Adaptation happens in the week you back off. The house schedules it before your joints do. The count runs from your last deload, or from the start of your season if you have not taken one.
Estimated strength sliding more than 3% against the weeks before it, while recent effort averages RPE 9 or higher — deload now.
Fatigue outrunning recovery is not pushed through. It is answered.
4 or more weeks of accumulation with recent effort averaging RPE 9.3 or higher brings the deload forward.
Grinding is a signal, not a virtue.
During a deload week, working sets are cut to 50% — rounded to whole sets, and never below one.
You still train. You just stop digging.
Rule five
The stall breaker
When a lift stops moving, the engine does not guess why — it reads which signal failed and prescribes the matching fix. The signature and both prescriptions, in full:
A stall needs 3 consecutive exposures at the SAME load with the reps never climbing — and then either signal failing: reps short of the target (or falling outright), or effort climbing across the run, or RPE 9+ on 2 of them.
The reps are enough. Logging your effort sharpens the call, but the brake never waits for an RPE you did not log.
Reps failing: the load waves down 7% with 2 extra reps.
A short step back, taken on purpose, beats a long plateau endured. The lighter session is a call for that session — from there your own logged numbers lead again, and the step back up is earned the same way every other step is.
Effort failing: one session 10% lighter.
One honest breath. A load already coming down is left alone rather than cut again, so a step back cannot become a slide.
Why publish this
Because the decisions these rules make — the day's call, a deload, a stall break — are written to your ledger, with their reason, the moment they happen. Rules you can read are rules you can hold us to.
Train under them