Starting weights
Nobody knows what
you can lift.
Including you.
Ask anyone to name the right weight for fourteen different exercises and you'll get fourteen shrugs. Hone works it out from a few things you do know, then spends your first workouts replacing the guesswork with what you actually lift.
The hard part
Almost all of the guesswork
is about one thing
Working out your weight for an exercise means answering a few questions in a row. Most of them are easy. One of them really isn't.
A dumbbell is roughly 40% of the equivalent barbell load whether you're a beginner or a national champion. Four sets is harder than one set by about the same amount for everyone. Those are properties of the exercise, not of you, and they're close to settled.
How strong you are is the genuine unknown, and it's where most of the uncertainty lives. It's also the number that sets the weight for around fourteen different exercises at once, so it's where Hone puts all of its effort.
Where it starts
Your own training
comes first
A max you've tested
Enter it and it's used exactly as given. We never argue with something you've measured yourself.
A set you've logged
If you've trained a lift in Hone, we read your best set back and fill it in. Your own 80 kg × 5 beats anything we could estimate.
Anything else
Worked out from your bodyweight, adjusted for age, sex, and how experienced you are.
The best answer to "how much can you bench" is usually sitting in your own training log, so that's the first place Hone looks. You'll see 80 kg × 5 rather than "estimated max 93 kg", because the first is something you can recognise and correct at a glance.
There's a fifth reference lift most people don't expect: pull-ups. Hanging from a bar has almost nothing to do with how much you can deadlift, so Hone asks how many you can do and uses that for every pulldown and vertical pull in the app.
When it's guessing, it aims low. Anything worked out from your bodyweight comes down by 10% on purpose. A guess sits in the middle of a wide range, and aiming at the middle means about half of those first sessions land too heavy. The discount comes off once your real training has settled the number.
Real plates
An Olympic bar weighs 20 kg
no matter what the maths says
The calculation produces something like 26.53 kg. It then rounds down, in whatever increment the equipment actually moves in, and never below the lightest load that equipment can make.
Down rather than to the nearest, because a first session should never be heavier than you can manage, and a weight that's slightly light gets bumped up within a couple of workouts anyway.
| What you're using | Goes up in | Lightest possible |
|---|---|---|
| Barbell | 2 kg | 20 kg |
| EZ-bar | 2 kg | 10 kg |
| Dumbbells | 1 kg | 1 kg |
| Cable or machine | 5 kg | 5 kg |
| Kettlebell | 4 kg | 4 kg |
Once you start training
It adjusts around you
Everything up to here is an educated guess about someone we've never watched lift. That changes with your first workout.
Struggle once, and it comes down
You're given a weight that turns out to be too heavy. You grind out 8 reps, then 6, then 5, then 4. One session is enough to act on that, and how far it drops depends on how much you struggled.
It watches your sets as well as your reps, because a bad session can hide. In that 8/6/5/4 workout your first set hit all 8. Look only at your best set and everything appears fine. It's the three sets afterwards that tell the real story.
Breeze through it, and it goes up, but slowly
If you finish exactly what you were asked to do, all Hone learns is that you can lift at least that much. It has no idea whether you had two reps left or twenty, and neither do you.
So an easy session earns a bump of about 8%, and no more. Rate that same session a 9 out of 10 and it earns nothing at all, because a hard-but-finished workout at the right weight is exactly where you're meant to be.
Which is why it's quicker to back off than to push. Too light costs you one slightly easy workout and fixes itself next time. Too heavy costs you a failed rep with a loaded bar on your chest. Those aren't the same, so Hone doesn't treat them the same.
Being straight with you
What it won't do
- Overrule a number you measured. A max you've actually tested moves by 15% at most, however much your sessions disagree with it.
- Touch a weight you've decided on. Edit a weight or accept a suggestion and that exercise leaves the automatic system for good. That's on purpose.
- Suggest a different exercise. If the sums land below an empty bar, you get the bar rather than a nudge towards dumbbells.
- Know what you had left in the tank. Finishing a set proves you could do at least that. The rest is up to you to find out.
Which is the honest summary of all of it. Hone doesn't know what you can lift. It makes a careful, structured guess, tells you plainly that it's a guess, and then spends your first few workouts being corrected by the only thing that actually knows, which is you, under the bar.