The library came first. The app came second.
Momentum Training is built by a working personal trainer, on the programming system he already used with his own clients. That order matters, and it is most of what this page is about: the engine is not a product team's guess at how coaches periodize, it is one coach's spreadsheet that got tired of being a spreadsheet.
Why it exists
Every coaching platform on the market lets you type workouts into weeks. None of them models a block. Phases are a view, not a structure; %1RM is a note you write in the exercise name; tempo is free text; nothing recomputes when an athlete's max moves. If you actually program in blocks, the tool fights you, and you end up back in a spreadsheet with the app as a delivery mechanism.
So the spreadsheet became the engine. A macrocycle is a real structure here — phases with names and intents, weeks that ramp, %1RM that resolves against the client's own maxes into schemes the matrix says are legal, tempo that computes tonnage and session time. The client app came next, because a program nobody logs is a document.
It is early access on purpose. Five founding coaches, free while we work together, in exchange for honest feedback on real clients — the app is being shaped against other people's coaching, not just mine.
Where the library actually comes from
"Built on a real programming library" is the kind of claim every platform makes, so here is the provenance, line by line. Every number below is one you can go and check inside the demo.
| What ships | Where it came from |
|---|---|
| The %1RM matrix | My own programming library — the intensity-to-rep-scheme table I coach from. It is the reason the builder can refuse a scheme: pick 87% and it offers what 87% actually supports, not whatever you type. |
| 132 phase-library rows | The matrix, entered as structured rows: scheme, intensity band, principle. The planner reads these; it does not invent schemes and it never rounds one into existence. |
| 396 exercises | My exercise catalogue, seeded from the same sheets, with coaching cues, equipment, patterns and alternates attached — not a scraped name list. |
| 11 KILO macrocycles | The archived KILO Strength Society catalogue, transcribed block by block and mapped onto the matrix. KILO publish schemes but no intensities: where the matrix has an exact row it was used, and the rest are the band centres the matrix itself defines. Which rows are exact and which are derived is written down in the repo rather than smoothed over. |
| Volume bands | The published hypertrophy and strength literature, read and summarised into the bands the generator builds to and the weekly volume audit measures against — so "too much" and "not enough" mean something specific per muscle group. |
| 14 block templates | Assembled from the above. Assigning one clones the whole macrocycle onto a client and re-resolves every load against their maxes. |
What it refuses to do
A coaching app produces numbers a real person trains and eats by. The expensive failure is not a crash — it is a plausible wrong number that nobody questions. So some things are deliberately not on the feature list.
- It does not invent rep schemes. If a scheme is not in the library, the planner says so and stops. An intensity with no legal scheme is a bug to fix in the library, not a gap to fill with something that looks about right.
- The model drafts; the coach approves. Importing a PDF or a spreadsheet produces a draft you review before it is filed. Nothing a model writes reaches a client without a coach saying yes.
- It reports, it does not diagnose. Body composition, bloods and nutrition stay inside a trainer's scope of practice, and the parts that belong to a GP are handed to a GP with the questions worth asking.
- A missing number is shown as missing. "No data yet" and "we could not load this" are different sentences, and the app is built so they never get confused — a client who did nothing and a read that failed must never look alike.
What the founding coaches say
Nothing yet — the design-partner round is running now. These five slots stay empty until there are real quotes from real coaches to put in them, because a made-up testimonial on a page about provenance would rather undo the page.
See it with real programming in it
The demo is the actual product with fictional clients — the same engine, the same library, no signup and no card.