reckoner
Before your first set, on your watch or on Today, Reckoner asks how you are and offers three answers: Rough, Steady and Primed. Steady is the honest answer most days and changes nothing. Rough is for the days you slept badly, are still sore from the last session, or are running on empty.
What changes today
Every prescribed weight in the session comes down about ten per cent, landed on the nearest weight your own gym can make rather than on the arithmetic. The warm-up sets come down with it. The sets and the reps stay as they were, so the session keeps its shape and asks a little less of you.
What does not change
A rough day costs you nothing next week. The session is carried forward exactly as it was written, so next week's version of that day is the one you would have had anyway. The lighter weights are never banked as your new starting point, and the day is left out of everything the engine reads to make its decisions: it cannot count toward a stall, and it cannot help set off a back off for working too hard.
Why ease the day instead of pushing or skipping it
Because a bad day is real, and it is not permanent. Sleep is the clearest case: a review of 69 studies found that a night of six hours or less lowered performance across every kind of exercise it looked at, strength included1. Stress counts too. In one study of students who lifted, those under more stress in their lives recovered their strength more slowly over the four days after a hard session2.
Pushing the full weights on a day like that makes it likelier you fall short of your reps, and the reps are what next week is built from. Skipping costs you the practice. A lighter session keeps both: you turn up, you train the movement, and the record stays honest.
Adjusting to the day does not cost you anything over time, either. When studies compared trained lifters who set their loads by how each session felt against lifters on fixed percentages, both ended up about as strong3.
When to answer Rough, and when not to
- Answer Rough for a short night, a heavy week, leftover soreness, or a day you feel flat before you start.
- Not for pain. A pain in a joint or a muscle that is sharp or getting worse is a different signal. On the watch, choose Something hurts for that lift. On your phone, write it in the log's note. Either way that day is held for it.
- Not every day. A rough day is carried forward rather than progressed, so if most of your days are Rough, nothing moves. That is worth noticing, and worth a look at your sleep and your week before your program.
Primed is the other end. It is always recorded, and it adds weight only if you have switched on letting a good day add load in your setup. With that off, Primed changes nothing.
Say how you are. The plan meets you there today, and it is exactly where it was next week.