Workouts

A week of training you can argue with, and a hand on the day. Pepper writes the plan around your goals and the places you actually train, shows you the whole week, and walks you through a session while you're doing it — hands full, one set at a time.

Say "help me get training", "what am I doing today?", or "plan my week at the gym", and it opens as an app in the web chat. See Apps for how apps work generally.

Setting it up

Start with what you're after. Six goal shapes — getting stronger, going further, going faster, moving better, losing weight, or holding on to what you've got — plus Other, where you write it in your own words ("keep up with my kid", "stop my back hurting"). Your sentence goes to the planner as your sentence, not as a category.

Or don't have a plan at all. One of the choices is "just track what I do", and it's a first-class way to use this, not a stripped-down one. Picking it drops the plan and every question that only exists to serve a plan — you don't have to describe your gym to keep a log. What did you do, how did it go, and the shape of the last month.

Or don't set up anything. You don't have to answer the setup screen at all to start. Open Workouts with nothing on it yet and it offers the same two things directly: log something you already did, or add one day that repeats every week — "just add me a Tuesday run" starts a plan with just that day in it. Drafting a whole week from your goals and places is still there when you want it, just not the only door in.

Where you train is a place, not a checklist. You start with home, because everyone has somewhere they already are. Add a gym, a park, wherever else. For each one: a sentence about what's there and the hours it's realistic for you to be there — 6am and 6pm are different questions.

Point your camera at the room and Pepper reads the equipment out of the photo into that sentence for you. Faster than typing it, and you can edit what it wrote.

Say what to work around. An injury, a knee, a shoulder, a thing you don't do — it plans around it rather than making you skip days.

The week

The week is the front door: seven rows, with your streak above them.

A day opens where it sits. Tap it and the row unfolds into the whole session — every movement with its sets, its load, its rest, what it's for, and a link to someone demonstrating it. Today's row is already open when you arrive. "What am I doing Thursday" and "tick that set off" are the same gesture on the same row, rather than two screens apart.

You can argue with the plan. Sliders for days a week, session length, and how long the plan runs — moving one doesn't rewrite anything. It builds up a sentence at the foot of the page that you can send: "make it four days, forty minutes." You leave with a better-informed request than you'd have typed cold. Underneath the week, Pepper explains why it's shaped the way it is.

Ask for changes in plain language too:

• "Make Wednesday shorter."
• "My shoulder's bad this week — work around it."
• "Swap the runs for the bike."
• "I want another lifting day."
• "Move my run to Wednesday" — swaps that day with whatever's on Wednesday, content and all, with no redraft.
• "Add a Friday mobility day" or "drop Sundays" — adds or removes a single day directly, whether or not a plan already exists.

Doing a session

Walk me through it takes the day one set at a time: one movement, one set, one Next, with the number at arm's length. Everything else stays on screen so you can jump around when a rack is busy.

• Next always moves forward and says what forward means from here — which is also how you skip a rest you don't need. Back a set sits next to it.
• Tap a set on a timed movement and its clock opens right there; the tap is you starting the set.
• A timed set has two honest endings. Let the clock land and the set ticks itself off, or press Next — before it lands or after. A set you actually did is never un-tickable because a clock disagrees.
• Resting takes the whole screen, because while it's running that's what you're doing.
• Run days get the same walkthrough with an open clock, a lap button and splits. There's no separate screen for running.

Skipping isn't a quiet kind of done. A skipped set is recorded as skipped, and the day's mark stays honest about it.

From an Apple Watch

The same walkthrough runs on the watch, under Walkthroughs → Workouts — which is the point of it, since the phone is usually in a bag by the time you're at the rack. It's thinner than the phone's on purpose: names, sets and rests, nothing you'd want to read sitting down. You can also send today's session there straight from this page — press Walk through on Apple Watch. See The Apple Watch app.

• It lists this week — today first, then the rest of the week. A day the plan hasn't written down yet is still there; the first set you tick is what writes it down.
• Rest days and run days aren't on it. A rest day has nothing to walk through, and a run wants a lap button and a distance, neither of which is on the watch yet — both stay on the phone.
• A tick is a tick. Sets you mark on the watch are the same ones the week screen and the streak read, so a session done on your wrist needs nothing repeating afterwards. Swipe back to a set you marked by mistake and it offers to undo it.
• Rest is its own screen, with a timer you start. Nothing starts itself — the seconds after a set go on racking a bar, not on a clock that jumped the gun. Once started it survives the app closing and taps your wrist when it's up, which is the normal case: the wrist is down for most of a rest.
• For it to tap you when the app is closed, allow notifications for Pepper: iPhone → Watch app → My Watch → Notifications → Pepper. If you haven't, the timer still counts down on screen and the watch says so rather than letting you find out by missing one.
• Signing in is the iPhone's job. The watch has no sign-in of its own; sign in on the phone and the watch follows.

The streak, and how days are marked

Each day is a ring that fills by however much of it you did, and the streak counts days you started, not days you finished. Most sessions end early — the phone rang, the rack was busy, the knee spoke up — and a mark that can only say "done" or "missed" has to call all of that a miss, which is both wrong and discouraging.

• A finished day is a filled disc. A part-day is a part-filled ring.
• An empty ring means you were meant to train and didn't. A rest day gets no ring at all — a rest day is not a failure, and it isn't drawn like one.
• The window is the last seven days ending today, not Monday-to-Sunday, so a streak reads as continuity rather than resetting every week.

If you're tracking only, there's no plan for a day to be partial against — a day you logged is whole, and a day you didn't is a rest day. Nobody can say you missed a session that was never planned.

Logging what you actually did

Any day can be ticked and walked through, including one you did differently or on a day off. Ticking a day that has no session yet creates one from the plan. Pepper doesn't police when you trained — refusing to record it wouldn't make the session not have happened, it would just fail to write it down.

You can also just tell it: "did 5k this morning", "squatted 3×5 at 80."

Coming back later with a second workout doesn't overwrite the first. Log the lifting in the morning, tell Pepper about the swim at lunch, and you get both on the day rather than one turning into the other — as long as the second one is named as what it was: "swam 1,500m" after "did legs" logs a swim. The name is what tells them apart. The ring and the streak still count the day once, though: training twice is one day of training.

If you say "log it again" with nothing to tell the two apart, Pepper corrects the day's session — right while there's only one. Once the day holds two it asks which you mean and names them both, rather than guessing and rewriting the wrong one. Either way it tells you which session it wrote, so you can see it landed where you meant.

Telling Pepper about both in one breath works the same way. "A 20-minute walk with the dog, then 30 minutes on the treadmill" is two workouts, so it's recorded as two sessions — the same two you'd get by mentioning them an hour apart. How you happened to phrase it doesn't change what lands on the log. One workout described at length is still one session, though: "squats and then bench, upper body day" is a single session with both movements in it.

Correcting a day replaces what you name and keeps the rest. Say what changed — "actually it was 35 minutes" — and the title, the note and the exercises you didn't mention stay as they are. Naming exercises replaces that day's; to take them back entirely, say so outright ("I didn't actually do any of those") or use Clear exercises on the day itself. That takes two presses, because a log you can rewrite by accident isn't worth much — and it takes only the exercises: the session, its name and its note stay on the log.

Renaming a session is its own kind of correction. "Actually call it Morning run" changes the name in place — everything else on it stays — rather than logging a second, near-empty session under the new name. If the day already has another session by that name, the rename is refused rather than merging the two into one.

Demonstrations

Every movement links out to someone showing you how it's done — a link, not a video embedded in the page. Where a person has actually watched and picked a demonstration, that's what you get; otherwise the link takes you to a search for that movement scoped to a coach worth watching. Pepper won't guess at a video it hasn't checked, because a bad link with its name on it is worse than a search.

Where it shows up

In chat, a card for today — what you're doing, its movements and loads, and your streak. It's about today rather than a list of recent days, so it never quietly presents last Thursday's session as an instruction. The card is a read: you tick sets off in the app or the walkthrough, while you're doing them.

On your calendar, the day's session sits on its day alongside your meals and the tasks that run for you — what you're doing and how long, or a rest day named as a rest day. It's a quiet line rather than a commitment: it doesn't take up time, doesn't make a day look busy, and tapping it opens the Workouts app. If you want a session to be a real calendar event that holds an hour, ask Pepper to put it there like any other event (see Calendar).

In your morning brief, one line saying where you stand: today's session, a rest day, or that a plan is written and waiting for you to read it. A day with no plan and nothing logged says so rather than going silent.

Good to know

• Voice works where your hands are busy — mid-set and mid-run. It's deliberately not offered during setup, where a photo answers "what have you got" faster than talking does.
• Nothing here is shared. Your plan, your log and your places are yours alone.
• Over text message, WhatsApp or email you get the written answer rather than the screen — you can still ask what's on today, log a session, and hear how the week is going. See Ways to reach Pepper.

Things to try

• Keep up with your kid. Training can be about your life rather than the gym: "help me get training to keep up with my kid" gets a plan for the week and today's session walked through set by set.
  Try it: "Help me get training to keep up with my kid"
• The hotel gym. Travelling with a workout to do? Send a photo of the hotel gym and Pepper reads the equipment and fits the session to what's there.
• Work around an injury. A bad week for your body doesn't have to end the plan: "my shoulder's bad this week, work around it" keeps the training going without it.
  Try it: "My shoulder's bad this week, work around it"
• Log it the way you'd say it. Log workouts the way you'd say them — "did 5k this morning", "squatted 3 by 5 at 80" — and your streak keeps count.
  Try it: "Did 5k this morning"