Why it says what it says

Swolver suggests weights, reps, changes and check-ins. Here is every rule behind those suggestions, why we chose it, and what it rests on, including the places where the honest answer is that the evidence is thin.

Two things that are true of all of it

It only ever compares you with yourself. Every number below is read off your own logged sets. Nothing here compares you to a population, a standard, or anybody else, and nothing here is personalized by a model: these are plain rules, run on your own history, and the same history always produces the same answer.

It is not medical advice. Swolver can work around pain and can tell you what your own numbers did. It cannot tell you what is causing anything, and it never tries to.

1. How it decides to add weight

What it does. An ordinary progression jump is a share of the weight you are already working with, not a fixed plate. The share comes from your Experience setting: New to lifting is 8% of the working weight, A year or two in is 5%, and Experienced is 2.5%. A squat, hinge or lunge multiplies that share by 1.25, so new to lifting on a squat is 10%. The result is then rounded to something your bar or your rack can actually make, and never to a jump smaller than the smallest one that equipment allows.

What happens before you have said anything. If you have never set Experience and a lift has fewer than 3 logged sessions, the app uses the flat jump it always used: 5 lb or 2.5 kg on a bar, 10 lb or 5 kg for a squat, hinge or lunge, 5 lb or 2 kg for dumbbells, 10 lb or 4 kg for kettlebells, and nothing at all for bodyweight or band work, where it asks for a rep instead. If you have set Experience but the lift is that new, the band is used on its own. Once a lift has 3 or more sessions, the log joins in, and with no setting at all the middle band is the starting point.

How the log can shrink it. With 3 or more sessions on a lift, two signals shrink the jump: no heavier weight across the last 3 sessions, or a third or more of the last 4 sessions coming in under what was prescribed. Either one cuts the jump to 50% of the band, so a 5% band becomes 2.5%. Nothing in the log can push the jump above the band you chose. On a lift with its own range in a routine (section 2), a run at one weight in which a session added reps does not count as stalling, and a session is a miss only when a set fell short of the bottom of the range, because holding the weight while the reps climb is the rule working, not a lift struggling.

Why a share rather than a plate. 5 lb is 5% of a 95 lb press and 1.6% of a 315 lb squat. One plate, two completely different demands. A share keeps the demand steady as the bar gets heavier, which is the thing the flat number could never do.

Why it can shrink but never grow. The setting is a claim; the log is evidence. Evidence that you are struggling is worth acting on straight away. Evidence that you could take more is much weaker, because a run of made sessions is exactly what a correctly sized jump also looks like. The asymmetry is deliberate: being too slow costs you a week, and being too fast costs you a missed session or worse.

What it rests on. Expressing progression as roughly 2 to 10% of the working weight, and classifying lifters by how long adaptation takes, are both well supported and long standing: they are the published progression guidance (Progression Models in Resistance Training for Healthy Adults, the American College of Sports Medicine's position stand) and the standard textbook model (the National Strength and Conditioning Association's Essentials of Strength Training and Conditioning). The three band numbers are ours, not a finding. They were chosen to sit inside that published range and to keep the middle band, at normal training weights, close to the flat table the app used before, so the change reads as a refinement rather than a reversal. The 1.25 multiplier is ours too, chosen so that the largest band on a lower-body lift lands exactly at the top of the published range and not past it. No study we know of assigns a particular percentage to a particular training age.

2. What each goal means in reps and sets

Get stronger. On a big multi-joint lift, work settles at 5 to 6 reps. If you are currently above that, each session trades one rep for a step of load until you reach 6, so 150 for 10 becomes 170 for 6 over about five sessions instead of in one jarring jump. On a smaller lift, and on any lift whose movement pattern we could not identify, a strength goal still works in 8 to 12 reps.

Build muscle. 8 to 12 reps, by double progression: one more rep at the same weight each session until every set reaches 12, then the weight goes up and the reps start again at 8.

Your own range, in a routine. Any lift in a routine can carry its own range, or one exact number, set in the routine editor. It belongs to that lift in that routine only, so the same lift can be 5 to 8 on a heavy day and 8 to 12 on a light one. A lift without one keeps its goal's range above. The editor offers the common ranges, 3 to 5, 5 to 8, 6 to 10, 8 to 12, 10 to 15 and 12 to 20, in one tap, or the common exact numbers, 1, 3, 5, 8, 10 and 12, and anything from 1 to 30 with its steppers.

Inside a range, every set together. Every set keeps its weight and goes for one more rep, never below the bottom and never past the top, until every set reaches the top in the same session. Then every set goes up one jump, sized as in section 1, and starts back at the bottom. One set at the top on its own is not enough: at 5 to 8, sets of 8, 8 and 7 hold the weight on all three. A lift with nothing to load climbs to the top and stays there.

Each routine's own history. For a lift with a range in a routine, a session of that routine reads that routine's own sessions: their weight, their reps, their misses and the size of the next jump. "Last time", the free suggestion and Do it again from one of those sessions follow the same sessions. So the same lift can be heavy on one day and light on another, each going on from its own last session. A lift without a range reads all of its sessions, as it always has. So does a lift with a range in a routine that has no session of its own yet, which includes a routine's first session after this update, because sessions logged before it do not say which routine they came from.

An exact number is linear progression. Make it on every set and the weight goes up one jump next time, for the same number. Miss it on any set and the weight holds while every set goes for the number again. A second miss running still holds, and the third running steps back by about 10%, the same streak as any lift in section 3.

Never past the top. No session the coach writes for a lift with a range asks for more than its top: not a stall's change or the check-back plan that follows it, not a watchlist hold, not the way back from a layoff, not a lighter week. Where a stall's change, a check-back plan, a watchlist hold or a diet hold would have gone past it, the sets stop at the top and the coach's line says that no set goes past it. A step back after a stall is written at the top to begin with, and its line names the top as its reps; the way back from a layoff is written no higher than the top from the start. The free suggestion under a lift follows the same rule inside a range and is held to the top the same way.

A check-back plan inside a range. The plan that follows a stall's change is laid out inside the range the lift has in the next routine due that holds it. The lift's page and the weekly review show it that way, and when that routine is the one due, Home's card shows the very same session. A session done in another routine is held to that routine's own range when it starts. Every session is judged against what it asked for, so one that reached the top it was asked for is made, not missed, and the plan does not stretch for it. What the test at the end has to beat does not change with a range: on a strength goal it is your best as an estimated max, which a heavier set inside the range can beat.

What a range does not change. What counts as progress. A stall is still 4 weeks without progress, judged exactly as section 5 judges any lift, so a range changes what the coach asks for, never whether a lift is moving. It needs no rule of its own there, because reps earned inside a range already count: on a strength goal more reps at the same weight on the bar raise the estimated max, up to its rep cap in section 7, and on a muscle goal they raise your hard reps.

What it does not fix. A lift with nothing to load and no range still adds a rep every session with no ceiling, as it always has; setting a range is how to give it one. And on Lose weight a range does not start a climb: the lift holds, as below, and never past the top.

Lose weight. Nothing is suggested to go up. The app writes last session's numbers again and says that holding steady is the win, because on a deficit it is.

Sets. Swolver does not prescribe how many sets to do. It writes as many working sets as your routine has, or as many as you did last time on that lift.

Why. Sets of five on a curl are hard on the joints and add little, which is why a small lift keeps the higher range even on a strength goal; a lift we cannot identify is treated as the small one, because guessing the other way lets an unknown lift pile on load at any rep count. Double progression exists because one more rep forever never gets heavier, and work that never gets heavier stops asking for anything.

What it rests on. Heavier loads for fewer reps favoring strength, and a wide moderate range working well for size, is the uncontroversial part of the same position stand cited above. The exact boundaries are ours. Nothing published draws a hard line at 6 reps or at 12; the useful ranges overlap heavily and are wide. We picked two ranges that are easy to act on and applied them consistently, which is a different and smaller claim than saying they are optimal. Double progression inside a range is common coaching practice rather than a tested protocol, and moving every set together is our choice, so one good set cannot pull the rest up. The number of sets is the one thing we deliberately refuse to prescribe from the literature at all: see where the evidence is thin.

3. Making a session, and missing one

What counts as a make. A set makes it when it reaches the reps that were actually prescribed for it. Prescribed means the number carried forward from the session before, never a number worked back out of what you did. If 5, 5, 5 was asked for and 4, 4, 4 was logged, that reads as three missed sets, not as a new target of 4 that every set happens to meet. A miss keeps its number: the next session at the same weight is asked for the same reps again, not for what the miss made, until they are made or the weight changes.

On a lift with a range. A session is missed only when a set fell short of the bottom of the range, or short of the number on an exact one, so a lift working inside its range at a steady weight never counts toward the hold or the step back below. The weight still goes up only when every set reaches the top. The coach's line then names the bottom a set fell short of, rather than saying reps were missed, because those sessions may have been logged before the range was set.

Two misses in a row. The weight holds, and every set goes for the prescribed reps again.

Three misses in a row. The weight steps back by about 10%, rounded to plates you have and never below the bar. The streak only counts sessions at the same top weight, inside the last six weeks, so a different weight, a made session, or a long gap all end it rather than extending it. On a barbell lift already close to the bar, where a 10% cut can land a whole plate size lower than intended, the step-back is limited to the ordinary flat step instead.

Why. A target you rewrite from your own results is not a target, and a coach who quietly lowers the bar to whatever you just did is not coaching. Holding first and only then unloading means one bad night does not cost you a month of progress, while a lift that genuinely cannot make the reps stops being asked to.

What it rests on. Around 10% is where the published novice programs converge for a repeated miss: it is the reset in StrongLifts 5x5 and in GZCLP, and Wendler's training-max reset lands in the same neighborhood. We take that as coaching convergence, not as a tested number. We know of no trial comparing a 10% back-off against 5% or 15%. The two-miss hold before it is ours.

4. Coming back after time off

What it does. When 28 days or more pass without a session of a lift, that lift is treated as coming back rather than carrying on. Its next three sessions are written at 60%, then 80%, then 100% of the weight it was last working at, for the reps it was last making. After the third it goes back to ordinary progression. A fresh gap restarts the ramp.

With a range in a routine. Whether a lift is coming back is still judged on all of its sessions, so a routine done once a month does not ramp a lift you train every week in another. But the way back starts from that routine's own weight and reps before the gap, and its steps count that routine's own sessions since. If that routine has no session before the gap, the way back starts from the lift's last session before it instead.

What it does not override. A diagnosed stall and a watchlist hold both come first. Those are specific findings with evidence behind them, and a general gap rule has no business overruling either.

Why. The failure this fixes is real and was in our own code: after a long break the miss streak had aged out of its window, so the lift read as fresh and every set was asked to go up. Asking for more than the last thing you did, after a month away, is simply the wrong question. 28 days rather than 21 because three weeks without one particular lift is ordinary rotation, not a layoff.

What it rests on. This one is entirely ours. Strength is known to fall off over weeks away from training, but we know of no study that establishes a ramp back, and we are not going to imply one. 60, 80 and 100 is the same ramp the app uses coming back from a sore joint, kept the same on purpose so there is one way back rather than two.

5. How a stall is spotted, and what it prescribes

Before it says anything. A lift is only judged with at least 6 sessions spread over at least 6 weeks, with at least 3 of them in the last 8 weeks. Below that there is nothing to read, and the app says nothing rather than guessing.

The clock. A lift is stalled after 4 weeks without progress. The clock starts at the earliest session that came within 1% of your best, not at the session that set the record: a lift that peaked and then repeated that same near-peak for months has been stalled since the first time it got there, and matching the best again never resets the clock. Repeating your top set is the plateau, not a recovery from it.

What progress means depends on your goal. On a strength goal it is the estimated max. On a muscle goal it is your weekly hard reps and sets, so a lift with no load on it is diagnosable too. On a weight-loss goal the whole test is inverted: flat is the win, so the app reports a fall instead, meaning 5% below what you were holding, held for 3 weeks, measured against your best in the 8 weeks before you started losing weight. Reading progress this way is load-aware: a session counts as progress when it beats your estimated max, or when it beats every earlier session's reps at the same or a heavier top weight, so a weight step that resets your reps at the start of a new double-progression cycle is never misread as a drop. Where a session's reps were asked for, whether a routine's own range or what the coach's rule wrote once a weight last went up, a heavier top set only counts as progress once it makes that ask.

When it stays quiet. If your recent work sits below 90% of your all-time best, the lift is not reported as stalled at that best. You changed what you were doing. Telling someone who now trains at two thirds of an old peak that they have been stalled for three years is true and useless.

The causes. One cause is named, never several. The rules run in a fixed order against the stall window compared with the equal-length window right before it, and the first that fires wins. Four of them ask about inputs and are shared across every goal: you're training it less often (sessions per week below 70% of the window before), your weekly work dropped (below 80%), your pulling dropped off (supporting sets below 60% of a prior window that carried at least 2 a week, and only for presses, which is the one support relationship with a plain mechanism), and it has been flat a long time, with nothing in the inputs to explain it (12 weeks or more). The rest read the thing being measured, and there the goals genuinely disagree. On a strength goal: you went heavier and dropped sets and the same top set keeps repeating (4 or more sessions in a row at exactly the same top weight and reps, unless sets were climbing underneath). On a muscle goal: you went heavier and the reps fell, you added sets and your hard reps fell, and the same weight and reps keep repeating. On a weight-loss goal, when no input explains it, your log doesn't explain the drop, because the cause is on the plate and we cannot see the plate.

When nothing fits. The verdict is that no one change explains it, there is no remedy, and the app shows the absence rather than filling it in. A rate cause whose prior window the log does not fully cover is dropped for the same reason: a partial window would deflate its own rates and invent a finding.

What each remedy does. You're training it less often: put the missing sessions back, at the rate the prior window ran at, holding the weight you have been lifting. Your weekly work dropped: restore the weekly sets that lift was getting when it moved. You went heavier and dropped sets, or heavier and the reps fell: back the top set off to the working set you were on before the creep, which is the heaviest set in the prior window at the reps that window usually worked in, and put the sets or reps back. You added sets and your hard reps fell: take the weekly sets back down to what you were growing on, and nothing is added alongside, deliberately, because handing more exercises to someone who cannot recover from what they already do is the opposite of the fix. The same top set keeps repeating: add the smallest jump you can make, or a rep. The same weight and reps keep repeating: add a rep before you add weight, because a rep is free and a plate is not. Your pulling dropped off: put it back at the prior window's weekly sets, with two pulls named. It has been flat a long time: swap it for a variation for 4 weeks, then come back to it. Your log doesn't explain the drop, on a deficit: keep touching the heavy weight and let the extra volume go first, which is the only thing that can be protected when the cause is the deficit.

And then it checks, and it can say it was wrong. Every prescribed change is written down with the number your lift has to beat and the date to check by: 4 weeks for the rate remedies, 3 weeks for adding a rep or a jump, 5 weeks for putting pulling back, and 6 weeks for a variation block, of which the first 4 are spent off the lift. If you beat the number, you are told as soon as it happens rather than waiting for the date. If the date arrives and you did not, the app says the diagnosis was probably wrong, in those terms. If you logged nothing for that lift at all, it says untested rather than pretending to a result. Being able to return a wrong answer is the point; a check that can only ever confirm itself is decoration.

The watchlist, before any of that. A lift is read for the watchlist once it has at least 4 sessions spread over at least 3 weeks, with at least 2 of them in the last 3 weeks. Every sign below counts sessions or weeks, whichever comes first, so a lift you train more often reads sooner. Short of reps: 2 of the last 3 sessions at one weight come in short of what was asked. Under your best, or fewer reps at a weight you have done: no new best for 3 sessions or 2 weeks, whichever comes first, and at least 7 days since the last one, with the last two sessions both at least 3% under your best. Flat: no new best for 4 sessions or 3 weeks, whichever comes first, and at least 10 days since the last one. Getting harder: at one weight, over 3 answered sessions within 6 weeks, reps plus reps left never rises and falls by 2 or more; an answer of 4 or more, and a session you did not answer, count toward none of it, which is also why a lift you train once a week needs three weeks of answers before this sign can fire at all. Your notes say it is hard: effort said in your own notes on 3 of the last 5 sessions. Once a sign stops firing, it stays for 2 more sessions and comes off at the 3rd, and any sign clears the moment a new best lands. Making every rep once does not clear missed reps: a new best does, or 3 sessions without a miss. When 3 or more of your readable lifts, and 60% or more of them, show a drop sign or missed reps together, that is a tired week rather than any one lift's problem, and the drop signs and missed reps stand down; flat, getting harder and your notes stay. A lift the app has already diagnosed as stalled leaves the watchlist for its own card. On Lose weight, under your best and flat are off; missed reps, getting harder and your notes stay on. Missed reps, under your best and getting harder hold the weight in your next written session, asking for the same reps again; flat keeps the ordinary progression. None of it is stored anywhere: the watchlist is worked out on your phone from your own sessions, every time the app opens. A set you mark as a drop set is left out of every rule on this page, from the ordinary progression to a stall's diagnosis to the watchlist, though it still counts toward the week's sets in your log.

What it rests on. Almost none of this is published, and we are not going to imply otherwise. There is no agreed definition of a plateau, no established number of weeks after which a lift counts as stalled, and no validated method for attributing a stall to a cause. Four weeks is our line. The window comparisons, the thresholds, the ordering of the rules and the check-back lengths are all ours, chosen to be conservative and applied consistently. What is not a judgment call is the arithmetic: every number in a verdict is computed from your own sessions and shown to you, so you can disagree with the rule and still check the sum.

6. When a lighter week is suggested

What triggers it. Three conditions have to hold at once. At least 3 lifts, and at least half of the lifts you have trained in the last three weeks, came in under their own recent best in both of their last two sessions, by at least 3% each time. And either your weekly hard sets over the last three weeks were at least 25% above the six weeks before, or it has been at least 8 weeks since a week that was noticeably lighter. And you have not just taken one: a lighter week you started in the app in the last four weeks, or a noticeably lighter week visible anywhere in the log in the last three, answers the question by itself.

What it changes. Seven days. The same lifts. The first half of each lift's sets, rounded up. 90% of the written weight, rounded down to a plate you actually have, with the same reps. Nothing changes unless you start it, and the card names the percentage each lift actually lands at rather than the 90% the rounding started from, because flooring to a real plate can land a little under.

Why. One lift slipping is that lift. Several lifts slipping in the same fortnight, after a stretch of harder training, points at recovery instead, and no single-lift remedy addresses that.

What it rests on. Backing off periodically is close to universal coaching practice, and what coaches actually do has been surveyed (Deloading Practices in Strength and Physique Sports: A Cross-sectional Survey). That is a description of practice, not evidence that any interval works. The familiar "deload every 4 to 8 weeks" is coaching convention; we know of no trial that establishes it. Our own answer is deliberately not a calendar rule at all: it needs several of your own lifts to actually be slipping before it says anything. The 8-week figure, the 3-lift floor, the 25% and the 3% are all ours.

7. The estimated max

What it does. The estimated one-rep max of a set is Epley's formula: the weight multiplied by 1 plus the reps divided by 30. Reps are capped at 12, so a set of 20 is scored as a set of 12. A true single is reported as itself, not run through the formula, which would otherwise inflate a tested max by 3.3%.

What it is for. One thing: comparing you with yourself over time, so that 100 for 5 and 105 for 3 can be ranked. It is never offered as a weight to attempt, and nothing in the app asks you to test a max.

How wrong it can be. Meaningfully. These formulas are fitted to groups, and the number of reps a given person gets at a given percentage of their true max varies a lot between people and between lifts. Two lifters with the same real max can produce estimates several percent apart, and the error grows as the rep count rises, which is exactly why reps are capped rather than trusted. Sets stopped well short of failure understate the estimate; sets taken to failure flatter it. Treat a change of a few percent as noise.

What it rests on. That these equations are usable for low rep counts and degrade above roughly 10 reps is well supported and was stated by the authors themselves (Strength Testing: Predicting a One-Rep Max from Reps-to-Fatigue), and comparisons of the competing equations found the same limitation (The Accuracy of Prediction Equations for Estimating 1-RM Performance in the Bench Press, Squat, and Deadlift). The cap of 12 rather than 10 is ours: it is a deliberate, small stretch past the supported range so that a common set of 12 still scores, and it is the reason the app treats the estimate as a trend line and not a number.

8. Training around pain

The screen comes first. Before a plan is offered for a sore joint, six yes or no questions ask about signs that mean get this looked at rather than work around it: whether it is sharp or severe rather than an ache, whether there is numbness, tingling or weakness, whether it hurts at rest or wakes you at night, whether the joint locks, gives way or popped with a sudden loss of strength, whether the area is hot, red or swollen, and whether it started with a fall or a hit. One yes is enough, and the app says only this: worth getting checked before training around it. The answers are not scored or added up, they are never stored anywhere, and nothing about them is sent to your account.

The plan. Two weeks of swaps for the lifts that load that region, each swap shown with the reason it spares it. Where nothing honestly spares it, that lift is rested for the block instead of being given an invented substitute.

Swaps are chosen for all your lifts that load that region at once, in the order you train them. Each lift takes the first swap on its own list that spares the region, keeps the lift's main muscle, is not a lift you already do, and is not already taken. Only a lift whose list runs out shares a swap, and a session does a shared swap once. Where nothing honestly spares it, that lift is rested for the block, with the reason.

The check-in. Each session asks how it is, and asks for a number from 0 to 10. Better starts the way back. Same, worse, pain on a returning set, or a number above 4, each hold the swaps for another 7 days. If you have not trained anything the plan touches for 14 days, it asks on the home screen instead of waiting.

The way back. Three sessions at 60%, then 80%, then 100% of what that lift was doing before the plan started, rounded down to a weight you can load. Pain on the way back puts the swaps back on.

The one thing that overrides every answer. Two patterns in the numbers you have already given stop the plan and say to get it looked at, whatever direction you picked: a number that is the same or higher the next morning, and a number higher than the one six to eight days earlier. Neither is a cutoff; both are about the shape of the trend.

What the app will not do. It will not name a condition, tell you what is wrong, tell you that anything is safe, or claim to treat or rehabilitate anything. It will not offer a swap where none honestly spares the region. It is not medical advice, and it cannot tell you what is causing your pain.

What it rests on. The two temporal rules are the well supported part of an established pain-monitoring model: symptoms should settle by the next morning, and nothing should escalate week over week (A Comprehensive Treatment Approach for Patellofemoral Pain Syndrome in Young Women, and Continued Sports Activity, Using a Pain-Monitoring Model, during Rehabilitation in Patients with Achilles Tendinopathy). Those two papers are cited for their pain rules only; the people they studied are not a claim about you. The 0-to-10 threshold is ours. No pain-monitoring protocol settles on one number: the published thresholds run from about 3 to 5 out of 10 depending on the protocol, so we start at the cautious end of that range and show you the number rather than hiding it inside a rule. The load reductions are ours too, and no reputable source publishes any load-reduction percentage. The screening questions are asked as product safety questions, not as clinical findings.

9. The built-in programs

What they are. 30 programs, taken from their public descriptions. What we carry is structure only: the days, the lifts, the sets, the reps, the percentages and how the weight goes up. The written summaries are ours, not any author's words.

Every one links to its original. Each program's page in the app carries a link to the published source it came from, so you can read the author rather than our paraphrase. Several come from the r/fitness wiki routine pages; the rest link to the author or publisher directly, or, where the author's own page has since gone offline, to another site's write-up of it (the program's own page says so when that is the case).

Where ours differs, it says so. When our version knowingly departs from what was published, a plain sentence on that program's own page says how. 12 of the 30 carry such a note today. Two examples: GZCLP's published reset uses two to three rest days and a fresh five-rep max at 85%, which we cannot schedule, so we estimate 85% of your last logged weight instead; and our 5/3/1 fourth week follows the deload from the original book, which later editions replace with a different protocol.

We are not affiliated with any of these authors, and the app says so on the program pages.

10. Plates

What it does. Every barbell weight the app writes is rounded down to a weight your bar and your plates can actually be loaded to, exactly, and never below the bar itself. The standard rig is a 45 lb bar with 45, 35, 25, 10, 5 and 2.5 lb plates, or a 20 kg bar with 25 down to 1.25 kg, and you can tell it what your gym really has. Plates are shown heaviest first, the way a bar is actually loaded, rather than as the fewest plates. Where a weight cannot be made exactly, it says what the closest loadable weight is instead of pretending.

Why. A coach who asks for 182.5 lb in a gym stocked with 45s, 25s and 10s has given you arithmetic homework in the middle of a set. It also keeps every other rule honest: a 2.5% jump on a light bar is not a suggestion unless the bar can be loaded to it.

What it rests on. Arithmetic. The only judgment in it is rounding down rather than up, so a written weight is never heavier than the rule asked for.

Where the evidence is thin

Rest between sets. Swolver does not prescribe a rest interval at all. It gives you a timer and some common lengths, and the length is yours. That is deliberate. The figure most often repeated, 30 to 90 seconds between sets for muscle growth, comes from older textbook tables rather than from trials comparing rest lengths for growth; when later work did compare them directly, longer rests of around three minutes produced more strength and at least as much size (Longer Interset Rest Periods Enhance Muscle Strength and Hypertrophy in Resistance-Trained Men, and the review in Effects of Rest Interval Duration in Resistance Training on Measures of Muscular Strength: A Systematic Review). Prescribing the old table would have been easy and wrong.

Weekly sets per muscle. Swolver never tells you a weekly set target, and that too is deliberate. The widely repeated "10 or more sets per muscle per week" traces back to one meta-analysis (Dose-response relationship between weekly resistance training volume and increases in muscle mass: A systematic review and meta-analysis) whose comparison between volume categories did not reach statistical significance, and whose highest category rested on very few studies, almost none of them above about 12 sets. That is thin ground for a universal prescription. So when the app asks you to restore volume, the number it names is the weekly sets your own log shows this lift was getting when it was still moving, never a number from a paper.

Deloading on a schedule. There is no tested interval. "Every 4 to 8 weeks" is coaching practice, and the surveys of that practice describe what coaches do rather than what works. Our lighter week is triggered by your lifts slipping, not by the calendar, and the one calendar number in it is ours.

Double progression. Adding reps at one weight until you reach the top of a range, then adding weight, is common coaching practice and how the app runs a muscle goal. We know of no trial that compares it with adding weight every session, or that says where a range should start and end; the position stand cited in section 1 supports heavier loads for fewer reps favoring strength and a wide moderate range for size, not any particular range. So the ranges the editor offers are common choices, not findings, and waiting for every set to reach the top before the weight moves is ours.

And in general. The app can prescribe something without claiming it is proven. Most of what a lifting coach does sits in the gap between what has been tested and what has to be decided anyway, and where we have had to decide, this page says so.

What is ours rather than published

Collected in one place, so it is not scattered through the argument. Ours: the three experience bands and the 1.25 lower-body multiplier; the 50% shrink and the two log signals that trigger it; the 8 to 12 and 5 to 6 rep boundaries; the routine editor's common ranges and exact numbers, its 1 to 30 bound, and waiting for every set to reach the top before the weight moves; each routine's own history for a lift with a range; a check-back plan laid out inside the range of the next routine due that holds the lift, with each session judged against its own routine's range; the two-miss hold; the 28-day layoff and its 60, 80, 100 ramp, and counting its steps on a routine's own sessions; the 4-week stall line and every threshold, ordering and window in the cause rules; all four check-back lengths; the watchlist's own gate and every one of its signs' numbers, and reading a session's asked reps from a routine's own range or from the coach's rule after a weight goes up; every number in the lighter week, including the 7 days and the 90%; the 12-rep cap on the estimated max; the six screening questions, the 0-to-10 default of 4, the 14-day swap block, the 7-day hold and the 60, 80, 100 way back. Published and well supported: progression expressed as roughly 2 to 10% of the working weight; estimated-max formulas being usable only to about 10 reps; that reps-left answers are usually within about one rep, and closer near failure; and, for pain, the temporal rules that symptoms should settle by the next morning and should not escalate week over week.

Sources

Progression Models in Resistance Training for Healthy Adults, American College of Sports Medicine position stand, Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, 2009. Progression as a percentage of the working load, and the novice, intermediate and advanced framing.

National Strength and Conditioning Association, Essentials of Strength Training and Conditioning, 4th edition (Haff and Triplett, editors). The same 2 to 10% guidance in textbook form. A book rather than a link, which is worth saying plainly.

Strength Testing: Predicting a One-Rep Max from Reps-to-Fatigue, Brzycki, 1993, and The Accuracy of Prediction Equations for Estimating 1-RM Performance in the Bench Press, Squat, and Deadlift, LeSuer and colleagues, 1997. Why an estimated max is only usable for low rep counts.

Accuracy in Predicting Repetitions to Task Failure in Resistance Exercise: A Scoping Review and Exploratory Meta-Analysis, Halperin and colleagues, 2022, and Accuracy of Intraset Repetitions in Reserve to Predict Proximity to Task Failure, Refalo and colleagues, 2024. Why a reps-left answer usually lands within about one rep, and lands closer the nearer a set is to failure.

A Comprehensive Treatment Approach for Patellofemoral Pain Syndrome in Young Women, Thomee, 1997, and Continued Sports Activity, Using a Pain-Monitoring Model, during Rehabilitation in Patients with Achilles Tendinopathy, Silbernagel and colleagues, 2007. The pain-monitoring model the temporal rules come from.

Longer Interset Rest Periods Enhance Muscle Strength and Hypertrophy in Resistance-Trained Men, Schoenfeld and colleagues, 2016, and Effects of Rest Interval Duration in Resistance Training on Measures of Muscular Strength: A Systematic Review, Grgic and colleagues, 2017. Why we do not prescribe a rest interval.

Dose-response relationship between weekly resistance training volume and increases in muscle mass: A systematic review and meta-analysis, Schoenfeld, Ogborn and Krieger, 2016. The source of the "10 or more sets" figure, and of our reasons for not using it.

Deloading Practices in Strength and Physique Sports: A Cross-sectional Survey, 2024. What coaches actually do about deloading, which is not the same as what has been tested.

StrongLifts 5x5 and the r/fitness wiki routines. Two of the published programs Swolver carries, and where the roughly 10% back-off comes from. Every built-in program links its own source on its own page.

If a claim on this page and the app disagree, the app is not the thing to leave alone: tell us at support@swolver.com. The rules themselves live in the open, and nothing you log leaves your account for any of this to work.