— Meal —
Log Your Meal
Snap or upload a photo. AI will identify foods and estimate portions, then score the meal against your targets for this slot.
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Hands scale with frames. Bigger person, bigger hand, bigger needs — which is why we use your hand to measure portions instead of a kitchen scale. The targets below are starting points; you'll calibrate them as you go.
A palm of protein — fingers and thumb included, but flat — is roughly 25g of protein at most meals. Don't measure with a scale; your hand scales with your frame, and that's the point. Bigger frame, bigger hand, bigger needs.
Fats are concentrated — a thumb's worth is enough for a meal in most cases. The thumb metaphor is for added fats: oils, butters, nut butters. Fats already inside your protein source (a fattier cut of beef, the yolk in an egg) count toward the same budget; you just don't measure them separately.
A cupped hand is your starchy-carb measure: rice, oats, potato, fruit. Round, dense foods fit naturally; leafy stuff doesn't count here (those are vegetables — fist-sized below). The cup is roughly half a cup of cooked rice or oats, or one medium piece of fruit.
Vegetables are the cheapest macro you have — they fill the plate, slow digestion, and barely move calories. A fist is the minimum per meal; two fists is better. If you're hungry between meals, the answer is almost always "more vegetables at the previous meal," not a snack.
Three pillars hold the program up: strength, mobility, and the patterns the body has to be able to express. Each pillar feeds the others — a strong shape you can't access doesn't help, and an accessible shape you can't load doesn't either. These principles are how we decide what to do when the prescribed work doesn't fit the day. Read them once a month.
The body adapts to the demand you give it consistently, not the demand you gave it once. Adding 5 lb a week beats adding 50 lb in a month and missing the next month from a strain. Slow, repeatable progress compounds; sharp jumps break.
When a working set feels honest for two consecutive sessions, add 5–10 lb on lower-body lifts or 2.5–5 lb on upper — not before. Track only the working set's top weight; the warm-ups don't count. If form drifts on the heavier weight, repeat the week without adding.
Compound movements teach the body to coordinate joints under load. Curls and extensions in isolation don't build the wiring needed to actually move heavy things in the world; they sharpen what the compounds already built. Pattern first, accessory after — every session, every block.
Open every session with a compound — squat, hinge, push, pull, carry. Two to four working sets, the heaviest work of the day. Only after the compound is done does anything get isolated. If you're tired and have to choose, choose the compound and skip the isolation.
A clean rep at moderate weight teaches the nervous system more than a heavy rep that snaps through range. Strength tracks with how much controlled time the muscle spends under tension, not with how high the number on the bar gets. Five seconds of honest work beats ten seconds of compensation.
Lower under control — a two- to three-second eccentric on most lifts. No bouncing out of the bottom, no momentum on the way up. If a rep moves faster on the way down than on the way up, the weight is too heavy for the technique you're using. Strip 10% and earn it back.
Stretching a tight muscle without strengthening it through that range buys you a few minutes of compliance and no lasting change. The body protects what it can't control. You earn range by being strong inside it, not by hanging in it. Loaded mobility — slow, ugly, hard — is the unlock.
Use end-range strength work — Cossack squats, deep lunges, controlled articular rotations, hanging variations. Three to five minutes per joint per session. If a stretch only feels like discomfort, you're not loading it; add tempo or a small load until the work shows up.
Most chronic pain isn't from one bad rep — it's accumulated tissue intolerance from doing the same thing the same way for years. The cure is variety and load tolerance, built slowly. Joints that can take many shapes under low and moderate load are the joints that don't break under high load when it counts.
Cycle through shapes the joint hasn't seen recently. For knees: deep squat hold, ATG split squats, sissy squats. For shoulders: hangs, scapular pulls, controlled overhead variations. Volume over intensity here — the goal is exposure, not maximums.
"Mobile enough" is vague; benchmarks are not. If you can sit in a deep squat, hang from a bar, touch your toes, and get up and down off the floor without using your hands, you're mobile enough for most of life. If you can't, the program has a job to do — and we work it explicitly, not as a vague aside.
Once a month, run the four checks. Hold a deep squat for two minutes. Hang from a bar for one. Toe touch with knees straight. Sit-down/stand-up from the floor without using hands. Whichever fails becomes the priority joint for the next four-week block.
Exercises are tools; movement is the job. The goal isn't a bigger biceps curl — it's a body that hangs, climbs, crawls, squats deep, picks things up, carries them, and gets back to standing. Exercises serve those movements. The day they stop serving is the day the program stops.
Audit weekly — which fundamental movements showed up? Hang. Crawl cross-pattern. Squat below parallel. Roll. Press something overhead. Carry. Hop. If a category is missing for two weeks running, that's the next session's warm-up.
Specificity is for people training for one thing — a sport, a meet, a date. For general health, variety is the mechanism. Different surfaces, loads, angles, speeds. Show the body many things often and adaptation generalizes; show it one thing endlessly and it specializes — but everything else gets fragile.
Rotate locomotion patterns weekly: walking, crawling, hanging traversal, jumping, climbing if you have access. Asymmetric loads (single-arm carries, offset squats) at least once a week. Don't run the same six lifts at the same tempos for six months — change one variable per block.
Pain is the body's alarm system, and like any alarm system it sometimes false-positives. The work is reading it accurately — not avoiding it on principle, not pushing through on principle. Sharp pain mid-rep is different from dull post-session soreness, and both are different from the unfamiliar discomfort of a new range you're trying to earn.
Classify before deciding. Sharp + sudden + localized = stop, scale back, return only when the spot tolerates load again. Dull + diffuse + symmetrical = usually a normal training response; keep working but watch volume. New discomfort in a position you're trying to earn = often the work itself; cut range or load by 50% and rebuild from there.
Snap or upload a photo. AI will identify foods and estimate portions, then score the meal against your targets for this slot.