Workouts & fueling

Building real workouts from an 873-exercise database, putting them on a weekly schedule, and letting that schedule change what you should eat and drink.

Building workouts

The Workouts tab works in the order you’d expect: build workouts first, then put them on your week.

Create a workout with a name, type (strength, cardio, sports, mobility, other), default duration, and whether it’s outdoors. Then open it and add exercises from the built-in database — 873 exercises with instructions, searchable by name, muscle group, and equipment.

Each exercise carries target sets × reps × weight. When you train, you log set by set, and Steady keeps the history — so next time you open that exercise you can see what you actually lifted last time. That’s the entire mechanism behind progressive overload: knowing your last numbers at the moment you need them.

Starter templates are there if you don’t want to build from scratch — StrongLifts 5×5, Push/Pull/Legs, and Couch-to-5K. Start from one and edit it into whatever you actually do.

As your collection grows, All Workouts keeps everything searchable and alphabetized one tap away, so the main screen never turns into a wall.

The weekly schedule

Put any workout on a day and time and it becomes part of your week. The schedule drives several things at once:

• Rest days vs. training days. Workouts only count toward your daily goals on scheduled days; everything else is a rest day and Steady doesn’t nag you about it.
• Your calorie and water targets for that day (below).
• Workout reminders, if you’ve enabled notifications.
• Calendar sync. One tap writes your schedule into your iPhone calendar as weekly repeating events, using EventKit — locally, no server. Re-run it after you change the schedule.

The fueling engine

This is the part that answers “I’m riding for two hours tomorrow, what do I actually eat?” — and it runs entirely on your phone. No AI, no network. It’s deterministic sports-nutrition math from your workout’s type, intensity, duration, and your current bodyweight.

The guidance follows mainstream endurance nutrition (ACSM and ISSN ranges):

Mid-workout carbs only matter for cardio and sports that run long. For strength training, mobility, and anything under an hour, the engine tells you so plainly and focuses on what you eat before and after — which is where it actually matters.

Everything scales with your bodyweight and the specific session. A 45-minute easy jog and a three-hour hard ride get genuinely different answers, not the same advice with different numbers.

It’s guidance, not a prescription. Dial it to how you feel — the app says as much on the screen.

Your own sweat rate

Athlete mode. The fluid numbers above are population averages, and population averages are wrong for most people by a lot: measured sweat rates span roughly 0.3 to 2.4 litres an hour between people doing the same session. One test replaces the guess.

The protocol takes one session and a scale:

1. Weigh yourself right before — dry, minimal kit, after the bathroom.
2. Train as normal. Twenty minutes minimum; an hour is better.
3. Track everything you drink. This is the number people forget, and it’s half the calculation.
4. Towel off and weigh again, in the same clothes.

The mass you’re missing, plus everything you drank, is what you sweated. Steady divides by the duration and that’s your rate.

Log it under Hydration → Sweat rate. From then on your fluid and sodium targets come from your own numbers instead of a table. Steady weights recent tests more heavily, scales between session types (a rate measured on a hard ride isn’t applied whole to a stretching session), and quietly ignores a test whose arithmetic is impossible — a mistyped weight can’t skew your average.

It also flags how salty your sweat is from the white-crust-on-your-kit question. Sweat sodium runs from roughly 200 to 2000 mg per litre, and across a long hot day that difference is several grams.

Do a second test in genuinely different weather. Knowing your rate in both February and August is what makes the summer advice trustworthy.

Heat and humidity

Athlete mode. The same ride in April and in July are not the same hydration problem. With weather-aware fueling on, Steady works out the heat index — apparent temperature, once humidity stops sweat evaporating — and scales your fluid and sodium with it.

Carbs don’t move with the weather; only what you drink does.

In real heat you’ll also get told so plainly, because no fueling plan makes a dangerous heat index safe — moving the session earlier is the actual answer. In the cold you get the opposite reminder: thirst drops but fluid loss doesn’t, so drink on a schedule rather than on thirst.

Fluid advice is capped at what a person can actually absorb — about 34 oz an hour. If your losses run higher than that, Steady says so and tells you to make the rest up afterwards, rather than setting a target you’d have to drown to hit.

Where fueling shows up

Today’s Fuel card appears on the dashboard on days with a scheduled workout. It shows carbs-per-hour at a glance for each session; tap one for the full before/during/after breakdown.

Any day’s detail page shows the same guidance for whatever date you’re looking at — so you can open next Saturday’s long run and plan for it now, rather than only finding out on the morning.

Week’s Fuel (Workouts tab) maps the next seven days in one screen: what’s scheduled each day, carbs during the long sessions, recovery protein, each day’s budget adjustment, and which days are rest days. This is the “what does my eating look like this week” view.

Fuel Calculator answers the question without touching your schedule at all. Pick a type, intensity, and duration and the plan updates live. Useful for a one-off event, or for sanity-checking a session you’re considering.

Training-day nutrition

A scheduled workout changes that day’s targets automatically:

• Calories go up by the session’s estimated burn, so eating the fuel your training requires doesn’t read as going over budget.
• Water goes up by the session’s fluid guidance, for the same reason.

Both adjustments show on the day, labeled — “+450 cal · +20 oz water added to today’s budget for training” — so you always know why today’s number differs from yesterday’s. Nothing changes behind your back.

You can turn this off in Settings if you’d rather hold one flat budget every day.

Workouts from other apps

Anything written to Apple Health imports automatically — Apple Watch, Garmin Connect, Strava, and anything else that syncs there. Each session imports once (Steady remembers the identifier), gets mapped to a workout category, and counts toward your minutes and your streak.

So if you track your runs elsewhere, you don’t have to log them twice. See Integrations.

Next: Tracking & stats →

Steady is a personal project by Hunter Baisden · hunter.baisden@gmail.com
Everything you log stays on your iPhone. Read the privacy policy.