PlayThenics is a calisthenics and bodyweight workout tracker that answers the question a notebook cannot: what should you do today? Not what works for beginners in general — what your own logged sets, your recovery and your weak pattern say about your next session.
No XP. No fake points. Nothing you did not earn. Logging is free, works offline, and needs no account.
Goal
HYPERTROPHY
Volume
34/68
sets this wk
Frequency
3/4
days this wk
Readiness
74
solid · hold
Today's dose · vertical pull
Home — today's advice, from this athlete's log
"What should I train today?"
The sets your weakest pattern is short of, on the day your recovery says you can take them. Not a template someone else is running.
"Is any of this working?"
A rank you can point at, records that moved, and a load curve that shows whether the last two months built anything.
"Why have I stopped progressing?"
Usually the pattern you avoid, or the recovery you skipped. Both are numbers here, and both are named out loud.
Most people who quit calisthenics do not quit because it got hard. They quit because nothing they could see was moving. A notebook records the sets and hides the shape of the year. PlayThenics was built around the three ways that goes wrong.
01
Fifty pages of sets is not a picture. You have no idea whether the last four months were progress, maintenance, or a slow slide — and you cannot argue with a feeling.
→ Stats that state their own window, a twelve-week heatmap, and momentum measured as four weeks against the four before them.
02
Nothing announces a stall. You keep training the pattern you are good at, avoid the one you are not, and the hold you have been chasing has not actually moved in eight sessions.
→ Stall detection, weakest-link ranking and a volume model that learns your real ceiling instead of quoting a textbook.
03
Points you award yourself for opening an app feel hollow within a week. Streaks that punish a rest day teach you to train hurt.
→ Rank you earned with a set, records that cannot run out, and a streak that counts recovery as showing up.
Three questions decide whether a training week works. PlayThenics answers all three from your own logged evidence — and says calibrating out loud until it has enough of it to be honest.
This week's plan
BUILD
4/ 4
in band
V PUSH12 / 8–13
V PULL11 / 8–13
H PUSH9 / 8–13
H PULL11 / 8–13
2 sessions · the tick marks the floor of each range
The bar's full width is the point where more sets stop helping you; the tick is the least that still moves the needle. Work past the top never fills it further — the bar turns the recovery colour and reads OVER, because the honest answer that week is fewer sets, not more.
Every pattern gets a real number, drawn between four points that matter: the least work that holds what you have, the least that actually grows it, the range where progress lives, and the point past which extra sets only cost you recovery. Those four move with your history, not with a table from a textbook.
A plan is a choice you make on Monday, not a number handed down. Sunday closes the loop with a review of what actually landed.
Only real working sets fill the bars, and one shared filter is used everywhere — so the number on Home cannot disagree with the number on Stats. Cardio lives in its own table and never inflates calisthenics volume.
Fourteen sets in one heroic session is not fourteen sets across three. The plan says how many days to spread the work over, and the week strip shows which of them you actually took.
Primed · solid · tired · recover — worked out from how hard this week has been against what you normally carry, how varied that work was, and your own sleep, energy, soreness and stress check-ins. Low readiness is guidance to recover, never an alarm.
Pro
The generic table is a starting point, not a verdict. Several recent weeks of dose, recovery and adaptation are read back to personalise your landmarks — and the app reports the trend, so you can see your ceiling moving.
Pro
Isometric work is aimed at the 5–12 second window: hold above the top of the range and the app progresses the variation, below the bottom and it regresses it. Nine end-goal skills, from the front lever to the maltese.
Every engine has a threshold below which it genuinely cannot produce a valid answer, and it says CALIBRATING instead of inventing one. Readiness needs 5 check-ins, load 8 sessions, tolerance 3 weeks, plateau detection 6.
Every article you have ever read was written for the average of thousands of people, none of whom is you. This one starts from the opposite end: a snapshot of your logged training — the load you are carrying, the pattern you have been avoiding, the hold that stopped moving, how you have been sleeping — and answers from that. It is not allowed to invent numbers, and every sentence traces back to a set you logged.
Already done
Push-to-pull ratio is 3.9:1; horizontal pull and core untrained for four weeks.
Next session: add three sets of pull-ups or rows before your handstand work. Keep it short.
Load
1.06 · productive
This week
4/3
Last session
Today
Worth training
→ Stalled
Straddle planche hold has not beaten its best in 8 sessions (46 days).
The coach's own screen, rebuilt here in HTML.
One verdict, one situation, one highlighted action, and the figures underneath it. One idea per reply — a screen that opens with nine observations is a dashboard, not a coach.
Ask why the plan says what it says, what to do about a tweaked shoulder week, or how to split four days. It answers with your history in front of it, and it remembers the notes that matter across conversations.
Weekly targets and a block the mentor saves against your goal — not a PDF programme written for someone else three years ago.
Every claim opens onto the snapshot behind it: what was logged, over what window, and which rule fired. You can audit your coach.
The same question — "should I add pull-ups?" — gets a different answer depending on what your log says. Behind on horizontal pull and well recovered: yes, three sets. Already at the top of your range with readiness falling: no, and here is what to cut instead. General advice cannot tell those two apart. Yours can.
What it is given. A computed snapshot of your training plus the messages you write — never a dump of every raw set unless a tool fetches a specific slice. The processors are named in the privacy policy.
What it is not. Not medical advice, not physiotherapy, not a guarantee. It is decision support for an adult who is responsible for their own form and their own load.
Free coaching too. A rule-based insight engine — balance, frequency, improvement and plateau observations — runs on the device with no model and no account at all.
There are no points here. Nothing awards you a number for opening the app, and nothing can be farmed. What the app marks instead is what training science says drives progress: showing up, working inside your productive range, keeping your patterns balanced, beating a real personal best — and recovering. A banked rest day scores like a session, because on the right day it is worth more than one. Every surface can be switched off, and the measurement keeps running underneath.
Overall
5 of 6 patterns · weakest-link weighted
INTERMEDIATE I
Not yet measured: core
Six movement patterns — vertical push, vertical pull, horizontal push, horizontal pull, core and legs — each scored from your logged sets against published calisthenics standards and the progression ladder. Thirteen rungs, and the overall figure is weighted toward your weakest link, because that is what actually caps a skill.
Rank is derived, never incremented. Recompute it from your history and you get the same answer every time — which is the whole difference between proof and points. Thin history is reported as thin, not rounded up. And nothing is ever compared to another athlete: there are no leaderboards and no social feed in this app.
M
T
W
T
F
S
S
Say it plainly, because every other app gets this wrong: a rest day keeps the streak alive. Bank it and the moon takes the flame's place — the day still counts. A check-in or a weigh-in counts too, and a single missed day between two active ones is bridged rather than punished. Only a real lapse resets it.
Which is the point: a streak that punishes recovery teaches you to train hurt. Milestones at 3, 7, 14, 30 and 60 days, no countdowns, no "you are about to lose it", and the flame stays unlit until today is genuinely earned.
64
One score out of a hundred, but the point is the signed decomposition: every component states what it is contributing, so you can see exactly which lever is holding the number down. Withheld entirely until there is enough history to mean anything.
Fifty-four steps from a wall push-up to the full planche, front lever, muscle-up and freestanding handstand push-up — wired by prerequisite, so a milestone is a real unlock, not a threshold someone invented. Awards leads with what is next, with a form cue.
Best set, heaviest, longest hold — detected automatically from what you log, across 1 month, 3 months and all time. There is no authored list, so they cannot run out, and they are compared only to your own past.
Eleven moments worth keeping: first session, first rest day, first rank-up, first week inside the band, a deload completed, an improved retest, 100 sessions. Eleven, not eighty — so each one still means something.
Six independent toggles — streak, rank, weekly plan, athlete index, milestones and records, celebrations. Turn one off and its surface disappears while the measurement keeps running underneath. With all six off it is still a complete tracker.
A plateau is almost never a motivation problem. It is a measurement problem: something in your week is wrong and nothing in your notebook can tell you which thing.
After six weeks of data the app watches every hold and lift for a best that has stopped moving, and says so plainly: "straddle planche hold has not beaten its best in 8 sessions (46 days)." A stall you can see is a stall you can attack.
The weakest-link rank and the push : pull ratio put the pattern you have been avoiding at the top of the screen. Four weeks without horizontal pull shows up as a number, not a nagging feeling.
Accumulating fatigue looks exactly like working hard. Comparing this week against the weeks you normally handle — and noticing when every session is the same grind — tells the two apart, and the plan bars refuse to fill past your ceiling. The honest answer is often fewer sets.
Blocks run as a four-week ramp from the minimum effective volume toward the top of the band, then a real deload week — and the training-load chart draws the payoff: the load drops, and the block after it comes back above the old ceiling. That is supercompensation, and it is the one thing a flat, never-varying week can never show you. A logged deload counts as engagement, so recovery reads as progress rather than a gap.
Holding a tuck front lever for thirty seconds is not progress, it is a variation you outgrew. The static-hold engine keeps you inside the productive 5–12 second window — over the top, it progresses the variation; under the floor, it regresses it — and the movement-pattern assessment can be retaken whenever you think the graph has you in the wrong place. An improved retest is one of the eleven journey markers, on purpose.
Every figure above the records list comes from a single daily-activity query, so the screen cannot argue with itself. Each card states its own window and leads with a written takeaway before the numbers.
100%
consistency
🔥 7
day streak
39/36
target sessions
13
sessions
▲ +2
3.3
per week
on target
129
sets
▲ +43
Plus a workout calendar with colour-coded days, body metrics (weight, body fat, max reps, hold times, sleep, soreness, protein, calories, water) and six subjective check-ins that feed readiness.
Captured from a real Android build, on eleven weeks of real training — a front-lever block with its deloads, its stalls and its records. Every number on these screens was computed from the sets behind it.
Your training log lives on your phone, in a real database, and every training feature works with no account and no network. An account is additive: it backs the log up and moves it to your next handset.
Email and password, Sign in with Google, or Sign in with Apple. Provider sign-in uses short-lived signed tokens bound to a one-time nonce — the app never sees, stores or forwards a provider password.
A workout is marked synced only after the server confirms that exact record, the cursor is server time rather than your phone's clock, and a retried push updates instead of duplicating. A sync that cannot run is a silent no-op, never an error in your face.
Pro
See each signed-in session — "Pixel 7 · last used 2 minutes ago" — end any one of them, sign out everywhere, and read an append-only audit trail for the "was that me?" moments. Tokens live in the OS keystore, never in plain app storage.
CSV export
Everything you have ever logged, free on every tier.
JSON backup
A full snapshot out through the share sheet, and back in again.
Imports
CSV with a template, and WHOOP workout exports, de-duplicated.
Deletion
Delete the account in-app; the log on your phone is never touched by it.
Two things put data on a server, and only if you choose them: signing in (a cloud copy for backup and a second device) and the Pro coach (a computed snapshot plus your messages, processed off-device). Your phone stays the source of truth. The full detail is in the privacy policy.
Every exercise sits on a ladder, and each rung knows what comes before it. Log a qualifying set and you own that rung — and the next one opens. Which is why the app can tell you the next step rather than a list of everything that exists.
Wall and incline push-ups through diamond, archer and one-arm work; dips, pike and wall handstand push-ups to the freestanding HSPU.
Dead hangs and negatives to the first pull-up, then rows, archers, typewriters, the muscle-up and the one-arm pull-up.
Hollow body, L-sit, dragon flag, hanging leg raises; squats to pistols, hinges, calves and jumps.
Front lever, back lever, planche, maltese, iron cross and the rest — each with the tuck → advanced tuck → straddle → half-lay → full ladder underneath it.
Rep-based or hold-based, with added weight, per-set notes, a rest timer that survives backgrounding, a 1-10 effort rating for the session, routines you can reuse, cardio in its own table, and rest and deload days you can plan in one tap.
A movement-pattern assessment places you on the graph on day one, so your first progression is the right one — not the one from a video.
The stage where guessing stops working. This is where sets, frequency and readiness start deciding whether the next six months move at all.
Straight-arm work programmed into the productive hold window, with a real deload and a learned volume ceiling instead of a generic table.
Import the CSV, keep logging, and get twelve weeks of shape out of the same data you were already writing down.
The line between them is simple: writing your training down costs nothing, and what you pay for is the layer that turns it into an answer. Your log stays on your phone either way, and CSV export works on every tier.
PlayThenics
Free
no account · no network · no card
PlayThenics Pro
$39.99 /year
≈ $3.33 a month · 7-day free trial
Annual
$39.99
7-day free trial · saves 52%
Monthly
$6.99
no trial · cancel any time
Prices shown are USD reference figures — the store sets the real price in your currency. Subscriptions renew automatically until cancelled; cancel any time in your store account, at least 24 hours before the period ends. The trial converts unless cancelled, and we remind you two days before it does. Terms · Privacy
Rank is measured, not accumulated. PlayThenics reads the sets you actually logged and scores each of six movement patterns — vertical push, vertical pull, horizontal push, horizontal pull, core and legs — against published calisthenics standards and the progression ladder. The ladder runs Novice, Beginner I–III, Intermediate I–III, Advanced I–III and Elite, the overall figure is weighted toward your weakest pattern, and every rank shows the set that earned it. There is no XP, and recomputing from your history always produces the same answer.
There is a motivation layer, and there are no points in it. Nothing awards you a number for opening the app, and nothing can be farmed. What gets marked is what actually drives progress: showing up, training inside your productive range, keeping your patterns balanced, beating a real personal best — and recovering. A banked rest day keeps your streak alive, because a streak that punishes recovery teaches you to train hurt.
Streaks, milestones on the progressions you own, auto-detected records, eleven journey markers, measured rank and the Athlete Index all map to something you did. Experience points, a hundred levels and eighty badges existed in an older version and were deleted. There are no leaderboards and no comparison to other athletes, and each of the six motivation surfaces can be switched off individually — with all of them off, it is still a complete tracker.
Three things. A daily briefing that leads with one verdict, one action and the figures behind it; a mentor chat that answers with your whole training history in front of it and remembers the notes that matter; and a training block with weekly targets built for the athlete your log says you are.
Under the hood, PlayThenics computes a snapshot of your training — load, adherence, balance, stalls, what you have been avoiding — and an AI model interprets that snapshot plus the messages you write. It is instructed not to invent numbers. It is decision support, not medical or physiotherapy advice.
It answers three questions: how many working sets each movement pattern needs this week, how many days to spread them across, and how ready you are to take that load. The set targets sit between four points the app works out for you: the least work that holds what you have, the least that actually grows it, the range where progress lives, and the point where extra sets stop helping. A block ramps toward the top of that range over four weeks, then deloads. Work past your ceiling never fills the bar further — it turns the bar to the recovery hue and reads OVER.
That is most of what the measurement layer is for. Once there is enough history the app flags a lift or hold whose best has stopped moving and says how many sessions and days it has been; the weakest-link rank and push:pull ratio surface the pattern you have been avoiding; this week measured against the weeks you normally handle tells you whether you are under-recovered rather than under-worked; and the static-hold engine progresses or regresses your variation to keep you in the productive hold window. You can also retake the movement-pattern assessment whenever you think the graph has you in the wrong place.
No. Every training feature works signed out and offline. An account is additive — it backs the log up, moves it to a new phone, and is what cross-device sync runs on. When you do sign in, you can use email and password, Sign in with Google, or Sign in with Apple; tokens live in the OS keystore, and you can review every signed-in device, end any session, sign out everywhere or delete the account from inside the app.
Logging is free: unlimited sets, reps, holds and RPE, all 102 built-in exercises and their progressions, overall rank, milestones, records, streaks, rest days, the calendar, body metrics, check-ins and CSV export of everything you have logged. The free tier also includes two routines and five custom exercises, and stats read back 30 days — older sessions stay on your phone and stay exportable, nothing is deleted.
PlayThenics Pro adds the layer that reads the log back: the coach, all of your history, training load and readiness, volume tolerance, balance, the Athlete Index, goal targets, per-pattern ranks with their evidence, cross-device sync, and unlimited routines and custom exercises. Pro is $39.99 a year with a 7-day free trial, or $6.99 a month; the store shows the real price in your currency.
The tracker does, completely — logging, the catalog, the graph, streaks, stats and every free engine run on the device. Two features need a network by definition: cloud sync and the Pro coach. Everything else is yours on a plane.
Coming soon. PlayThenics is on Google Play today.
No, and it will not pretend to be. It is decision support built on your own training data. You are responsible for your form, your injuries, and whether the prescribed volume is appropriate for you. If something hurts, see someone qualified.
Log tonight's session. In a month you will have a rank you can point at, a plan in sets and days, and a coach that has read every rep of it.
Download onGoogle Play
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PlayThenics