What happens every morning in Liftor?

Three things, in order, before the day’s plan is shown. A check-in: six questions — mood, motivation, energy, stress, hours of sleep, soreness by muscle group — answered with taps and sliders in about a minute. A readiness score: those answers, plus sleep, heart-rate variability and resting heart rate read from Apple Health if you allow it, each compared against your own baseline and weighed into one number. A rewrite: today’s workout, today’s food and today’s rest are adjusted to that number, by a little, in the places that matter, with a note saying what moved and why.

So the plan you see at breakfast is not the plan written the night before. It is that plan, corrected for the night you actually had. The rest of this page is the arithmetic behind those three steps, in the order they run.

What is in the morning check-in?

Six fields, none of them typed. Mood, motivation, energy and stress are each a slider; hours of sleep is a number; soreness is a tap on each muscle group that hurts. Together they take about a minute, which is the point — a question that takes a minute is answered every day, and one that takes five is answered on Sundays. The app asks only what it cannot read: anything Apple Health already holds — sleep, resting heart rate, HRV as SDNN — is read rather than asked, with your permission and never without it.

Nothing is required. Without a watch or a ring the check-in carries the readiness score by itself, and a term the app has no reading for is left out of the weighting rather than guessed. With a device, the extra terms join at their fixed weights below.

How is the readiness score worked out?

Eight terms with fixed weights, floored at 30. Sleep is 25%, graded against your own median hours and quality. The check-in is 25%. Heart-rate variability against your own baseline is 15%; the last 48 hours of training, 15%; resting heart rate, 10%; yesterday’s nutrition against target, 7%. Two terms subtract: alcohol the night before takes 7% on its own, and an unusually heavy day coming up takes 3%. The floor exists because a score of 8 would read as a broken app rather than a bad night; the worst morning reads as “low”, and the plan bends accordingly.

Every comparison is against you. Until seven days of your own readings exist the app uses a population median for that metric — 50 ms for SDNN, 42 ms for RMSSD — and then switches to your own baseline. The longer version, with the evidence for weighting a one-minute check-in as heavily as sleep, is in the guide to the readiness score.

What does the rewrite change?

Three things, and never all of them by much. The session: a good morning keeps the planned sets and may add load; a poor one drops a set, holds the weights, or swaps the day. The food: the calorie target moves by −100, 0 or +100 kcal from the seven-day weight trend, and by up to 100 more either way from the steps Apple Health counted. The rest: the timer between sets adds fifteen seconds when the load is at or above 85% of your best, thirty for a low-rep strength set, and takes fifteen off on a deload day; on a very quiet day the step goal drops to 90% and the ask is a walk after lunch.

Under the number is a note in plain words — “HRV down against your baseline”, “trend flat for seven days” — so you can disagree with it on the facts. And when a week of mornings stacks up, the rewrite becomes a proposal: two of four signals — two muscle groups sore four days running, four or more hard sessions in seven days, a seven-day readiness average under 60, three days of heavy digestion — and the app proposes a lighter week, always on a Monday, cutting about 40% of the volume and none of the movements.

How does Liftor write the plan in the first place?

From four answers. What you want — bulk, cut, hold, or come back from a break. How many days you have, where you train and what is there. What you eat and who cooks it. From those it writes the first block and the year it sits in: foundation, ramp, push, deload, maintenance for the stretches when life has other plans, and two kinds of dated block — an event peak with its taper, and a birthday, which the app treats as a date worth peaking for. A dated block is pinned; the others stretch and compress around it, so a bad week moves the sessions and never the date.

Inside a session the rules are stated. Progressive overload is double progression: the weight rises only when the top set finished with at least two reps in reserve, and then by the smallest step the equipment allows. The rest timer starts itself at 120 seconds after a heavy compound lift, 90 after a lighter one, 60 after isolation work, 45 between conditioning intervals, 20 in warm-ups, and prints the reason for its length under the number.

How does Liftor write the food?

As a plan, not a target. The starting number is Mifflin–St Jeor for your resting rate, times an activity multiplier from 1.2 to 1.9, then −15% to cut or +10% to gain; from there it moves by 100 kcal a day from the seven-day trend and never falls below your resting rate plus 100. Protein is 1.8 g per kilogram of bodyweight, or 2.2 when the goal is to gain. The calculator on the calorie guide runs the same constants.

Around the number the app writes a day of meals with recipes, and a shopping list for today, the week or thirty days, in grams, rounded up, because under-buying is a second trip. Food is logged by photographing the plate — the estimate comes back with how sure it is — or by voice from the lock screen without opening the phone. If the plan suggests supplements, every dose is capped at the published upper limit — 350 mg of supplemental magnesium, 40 mg of zinc, 45 mg of iron, 2,500 mg of calcium — and the day’s doses are summed across products before the check. The day’s food exports as one page for whoever cooks, one of four documents the app writes for people who do not have it.

Where does the Strength Score fit?

It is the one number the training side keeps. Every logged set gives an estimated one-rep max by the Epley formula, weight × (1 + reps ÷ 30), discounted past twelve reps and smoothed across sessions. Each lift’s estimate is divided by bodyweight to the 0.67 power, anchored at 80 kg, so a 60 kg lifter and a 100 kg lifter read on one axis; then by that lift’s own “advanced” standard, so a bench press is not drowned out by a deadlift; then the lifts are averaged and multiplied by a coverage factor from 0.8 for one lift to 1.0 for all five. The score is provisional until five workouts are logged, and the scale has no top.

The free tool on this site runs one set through the same arithmetic and shows the bracket the app would open with. The standards it judges against are printed, per lift and per sex, on the strength standards page, and every term of the formula is worked on the formula page.

What does Liftor do when two people train together?

It writes one session for both and keeps every number separate. Blend looks at what two plans can share on a given day, writes one list of lifts in one order, and prescribes each lift twice — your weight, reps in reserve and rest from your history, your partner’s from theirs. Afterwards the session is folded back into both plans as if each of you had trained alone, so neither progression notices. What a partner sees is volume by default — how much work you did, not the loads — and there is no feed to post it to.

What does Liftor not do?

Count your steps — it reads the total from Apple Health. Run a feed. Hand out badges; the only confetti is for a personal record. Sell your data; the privacy page is long because it is specific, not because there is much to hide. Pretend to be a doctor; it is a coach, and if something hurts a doctor is the right app. It has no Apple Watch app of its own, though it reads whatever your watch writes to Apple Health, and it is not on Android yet — there is an Android list for the day it is.

What does Liftor cost, and where do you get it?

It is free to download from the App Store. The app shows its plans and their prices in your currency before you pay anything, and every plan is the whole app — no tier withholds the coach. It runs on any iPhone on iOS 15.1 or later, weighs about 130 MB, and signs in with Apple, Google or email. The download page has the code to point a camera at, and the questions people ask before they tap.

Sources

Liftor’s check-in: mood, motivation, energy, stress, hours of sleep, soreness by muscle group (app/checkin.tsx in the app’s source)
Liftor’s readiness model: the eight weights, the floor of 30, the seven-day baseline (services/readiness.ts)
Liftor’s deload detector: four signals, the two-of-four rule, the Monday timing (services/deloadEngine.ts)
Liftor’s progression engine: double progression and the two-reps-in-reserve gate (utils/progressiveOverload.ts); the rest timer’s bases and modifiers (utils/smartRestTimer.ts)
Liftor’s calorie rule and floor (utils/calorieAdjustment.ts, utils/calorieFloor.ts); the activity multipliers and protein targets (utils/energyMath.ts, utils/onboardingMath.ts)
Liftor’s Strength Score, v2: the allometric term, the standards table, the coverage factor and the five-workout gate (utils/strengthScore.ts)
Liftor’s phase model: the eight block types (types/phasing.ts); the shared-session engine (utils/sharedSessionOverload.ts); the supplement clamp (utils/supplementSafety.ts)
Apple’s record of the app: Liftor - Workout & Meal Plans, App Store, read 8 September 2026