Forma
Browse the guide

Guide › Progress

Strength

How your lifts are moving.

The Strength screen shows how your lifts are moving and how much work each muscle is getting. It works from the sessions you log in the Train tab.

When to use it

  • After a few weeks of logging sets, to see which lifts are going up and which have stalled.
  • When you wonder whether a muscle is being trained enough in a normal week.
  • When you want the trend for one particular lift, session by session.
  • With the diet coach on and a cut going, to check you are holding your strength while losing weight.

Step by step

  1. Open the Progress tab.
  2. In the Your body & training card, tap the Strength row. If the training coach is on and you have not logged any sets yet, the row says "Log a session to start".
  3. Read the line under Lifts. It says how many of your lifts are up and the median change across them.
  4. Tap any lift to open its own page. Touch the chart and slide your finger along it to read the exact value for any day.
  5. Go back and look at the Sets a week per muscle card. Each muscle shows the average number of working sets a week over the last weeks, with a status against the 10-to-20 band described below. Warm-up sets never count.
  6. For a week-level look across your whole routine, tap the History and reports button (the clock-and-arrow icon) at the top of Progress and open Sets per muscle. That report shows the hard sets each muscle got this week, and your total working sets per week over the last 8 weeks.

How a lift is judged

Forma takes your best set of the day for a lift and turns it into an estimated one-rep max: the weight you could lift once. It never asks you to test that; the estimate comes from the sets you log. A lift with a load plots one estimated one-rep max per training day, drawn from your best set that day. Sets above 12 reps are left out because the formula is unreliable there. A lift with no load, like a hold or bodyweight reps, follows your best hold time or reps in each session instead.

The estimate has noise in it, so small day-to-day moves do not count for much. Judge the direction over weeks: whether the estimate is higher than it used to be.

The percent change next to a lift and the summary line at the top compare recent history rather than everything you have ever logged. Lifting heavier today than you did as a beginner years ago does not read as a gain today.

How much work a muscle needs

The sets-per-week figures use a band that the Strength screen spells out: between 10 and 20 working sets a week per muscle grows muscle best, and under 10 is maintenance at most. A set counts when it is not a warm-up. Most people build fine anywhere in that range, and the report in Sets per muscle shows where a muscle sits.

Good to know

Direction, not decimals. Charts, records and changes are estimates, and small changes are inside the noise. Read weeks and months, not single sessions.

No logging, no trend. Everything on this screen comes from sets you log in the Train tab, or history you bring in from another app. A lift logged on only one day cannot have a direction yet.

Warm-ups stay out. Warm-up sets never add to your sets per muscle and never affect the estimates.

Starting the trend. The summary line needs at least two different lifts, each logged on two different days. Until then the screen says what to do instead: repeat a lift in two sessions and the trend starts. No test day or special equipment is needed.

Something unclear or missing? Write to and say which page.