How Rally decides

Rally tells you what to train and how much to lift. This page explains how it arrives at those numbers, because you should not have to take a training decision on trust.

Effective 21 August 2026 · Version 1.0

1. The short version

Your plan and your loads are produced by software following rules that people wrote and can explain. The same inputs always produce the same answer. Every recommendation is shown to you with the reason for it, in a sentence, on the screen where the decision appears. You can override any of it.

2. How your week is built

You answer a short set of questions: how many days you can train, what you are training for, roughly where you are now, and what equipment you can get to.

From that, Rally picks sessions by movement pattern rather than by muscle name, so that a week covers pushing, pulling, hinging, squatting and carrying instead of accumulating six variations of the same thing. It then fills each pattern with a movement you can actually perform in the place you train. If the gym has no cable stack, you will not be given a cable exercise.

You can also start from one of the published programmes and change it.

3. How your next weight is chosen

Rally uses double progression, which is one of the oldest and most tested approaches in strength training and is unglamorous on purpose.

Each exercise has a target rep range. You stay at the same weight and work towards the top of that range. When you complete the top of the range on every set, the weight goes up by the smallest increment you can actually load. When you fall short of the range for three sessions in a row, the weight comes down by ten percent and you build back through it.

Three things go into that judgement: the reps you completed, the load you used, and how hard the set felt, which you report yourself. Nothing else is inferred about you.

4. You can see the reasoning, and you can overrule it

Every change is written out where you meet it. For example:

Stay at 17.5kg and aim for 12 on all 3 sets. Last time you got 9 on your best set.

That sentence is the whole of the logic, not a summary of something hidden behind it.

You can change the load, change the reps, swap the exercise for another one, skip the session, or ignore the plan entirely and log whatever you did. What you actually did is what Rally reads the next time.

5. What Rally cannot know

It is worth being plain about the limits.

Rally does not see you train. It does not know your technique, whether you slept, whether you are ill, whether a weight felt wrong in a way you did not report, or whether an old injury is complaining. It cannot diagnose anything and it is not a substitute for a coach or a clinician.

A recommendation is a starting point for your judgement, not an instruction. If a suggested weight looks wrong to you, it is wrong. Change it.

See the fitness and medical disclaimer for the rest of this.

6. Artificial intelligence

Rally's training decisions are not made by an AI model, and nothing you enter is sent to a model provider.

This is a design choice rather than a limitation. A rule that is written down can be shown to you, gives the same answer twice, runs on your phone with no signal, and cannot invent a number that looks plausible and is not. Those properties matter more when the output is a weight you are about to put over your chest than they do in most software.

If that ever changes — for example if Rally uses language generation to phrase an explanation more clearly — this page will say so before it ships, and you will be told inside the app.

7. Questions

Write to hello@rallyfit.co and a person will answer.