Personal training log · functional fitness · free beta

What gets
measured,
gets better.

5bar is a training log built on sports science you can't see — the kind of science elite teams use to keep athletes from breaking. We've simplified it into one daily call. You log. We tell you what comes next.

Start tracking — free during beta Or read why it exists ↓
· Built around the four-vector model · Eight movement planes · Zero fluff
Not another wearable.
Not another step counter.
A training log that knows what it's looking at.
Scroll →
01 · The problem

Steps. Calories. Streaks. Rings.

None of it tells you whether you're getting better.

Effort is easy to increase.
Progress is not.
Most apps measure the first and call it the second.
What wearables measure
  • Steps walked
  • Calories burned
  • Resting heart rate
  • Recovery score (whatever that is)
  • Streaks. Rings. Badges.
Look impressive on a chart. Tell you nothing about whether your body can hinge under load next year.
What 5bar measures
  • Load through eight movement planes
  • Strength per plane, tracked over time
  • Acute load vs the chronic base you've built
  • Distribution: what you're overusing, what you're neglecting
  • One number: are you progressing, or aren't you?
The same things a strength coach would track for you on a clipboard. Just done quietly, every session.
"I walked 12,000 steps today. Lifted nothing.
App says: great job." — every fitness tracker, every day
02 · The goal that matters

You don't need ten fitness goals.
You need one. Mobility.

Past 40, only one goal matters for the quality of the next forty years: mobility — the ability to move through the world without losing capacity, balance, or autonomy.

Mobility doesn't come from stretching. It comes from three things. Lose any one of them and the stool falls over.

Strength
01
The ability to apply force when you need it — picking up a grandchild, catching yourself on the stairs, putting groceries on a high shelf.
Endurance
02
The capacity to keep going. Walking five miles. Climbing four flights. Carrying weight without your heart deciding it's done.
Speed
03
Force delivered quickly. The difference between catching yourself on the stairs and not. Speed is strength with a clock — and it's the first thing you lose if you stop training it.
"I want to look good in a swimsuit" is not a fitness goal.
"I want to lose 10 pounds" is not a fitness goal.

Those are flaky, ephemeral, and disappear the week you eat a slice of cake. The body doesn't measure itself in inches around a waist. It measures itself in what it can still do.

5bar picks the goal for you. You only choose the pace.

Built for
Average Joe Average Jane Recovering desk-worker Post-40 anyone
Scales for
Serious lifters Endurance athletes Climbers, runners, fighters

Same engine. Same science. Different pace.

03 · How it works

Three inputs.
Eight movement planes.
One outcome.

Every workout you log is measured across three training inputs and eight movement planes. Get the inputs right — consistently, in balance — and the outcome takes care of itself.

01
Strength
kg, peak load

Peak load expressed through movement planes. Heavier lifts in isolation are noise; force you can deliver across planes is capability.

02
Endurance
kg, total volume

Total work delivered in a session. Sets × reps × weight. The capacity number.

03
Speed
kg / min · efficiency

Volume per minute of training time. Force delivered quickly. The number that separates good training from long training.

produces →
Mobility
The ability to move through the world without losing capacity, range, or control as you age.

Not a metric you chase. The outcome of everything to the left, done consistently and in balance.

This is the one goal.
The eight movement planes

Push · Pull · Press · Hinge · Squat · Side Squat · Twist · Run

Every exercise in your log belongs to exactly one plane. No double-counting, no overlap. Over four weeks, the system watches the distribution and tells you which planes are under-trained, which are spiking, and which to load next.

Strength without mobility is brittle.
Endurance without efficiency is wasted.
Mobility without strength leads to collapse.

Six planes of movement, hand-drawn
From the principles deck — six of the eight planes, drawn by hand.
04 · The science

Borrowed from elite sport.
Built for the rest of us.

Most of what's in 5bar isn't new — it's been used by professional rugby teams, Olympic squads, and university strength labs for fifteen years. It just never made it past the clipboard. We dragged it into a personal app.

Concept 01
Acute : Chronic Workload Ratio

Your acute load is what you did this week. Your chronic load is what your body's used to over the last four. The ratio between them tells you whether you're growing — or asking for an injury.

< 0.8×
Under
Nothing changes
0.8 – 1.3×
Sweet spot
Adaptation, no injury
> 1.5×
Risk
Injury climbs fast
Hulin, Gabbett et al. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 2016. Studied across 400+ elite players, two full seasons.
Concept 02
Movement Patterns, Not Exercises

Dan John and Gray Cook spent decades arguing that the body doesn't care about exercises — it cares about patterns. A swing is a hinge. A push-up is a push. The same load distributed across the same plane.

5bar bakes that in. Every exercise belongs to one plane. Coverage is what gets measured, not exercise variety.

Concept 03
Distribution Beats Volume

Two people can do the same total weekly volume and have completely different fitness outcomes. The difference is where the load went. Was pull neglected? Was hinge spiked? That's the signal almost no tracker shows you.

Volume tells you how much.
Distribution tells you whether it's working.

You'll see none of this in the app. No ACWR charts on the home screen. No graphs of plane distribution unless you go looking. The science runs underneath. The dashboard just tells you what to do next.

05 · Under the hood

Hard tech.
Hidden tech.

The best visual effects in Forrest Gump didn't look like effects — they made you believe Tom Hanks shook hands with Kennedy. That's the bar for 5bar's tech.

Underneath the notebook, 5bar runs a stack of specialised LLMs — different models tuned for different jobs. One reads your logged workout and classifies every set across the four vectors. Another generates the next session given your last four weeks, your equipment, and your fatigue state. A third writes the daily decision in plain English. Each one is fed prompts built from real sports-science literature, not the public internet.

You will never see a chat bubble. You will never type into a prompt. The dashboard just knows what comes next — and is right often enough to feel like having a coach in your pocket.

"I could do this with ChatGPT" → no, you couldn't.
You could get an answer. You couldn't get a system.

Quietly running underneath
  • Multi-model LLM router · job-specific tuning
  • Sports-science prompt corpus · papers, not blogs
  • Per-vector load model · ACWR + 28-day baseline
  • Plane-distribution analyser · 8-pattern coverage
  • Assessment generator · diagnostic, then guidance
  • Equipment-aware planner · works with what you own
  • Stress-profile classifier · per logged session
None of it visible. None of it editable. All of it accountable.
06 · The product

It looks like a notebook.
It thinks like a coach.

Three views you'll see every day. No charts you won't read. No widgets you won't use. Just the call, the plan, and the log.

5bar dashboard
01 Today's call One paragraph. What to push, what to hold, what to skip. Backed by your last four weeks.
5bar stats matrix
02 Your stats Every plane, every vector. Coverage score. Look once a month, not every day.
5bar daily guidance
03 Daily guidance The reasoning behind today's call. Read it once. Trust it later.
07 · Principles

Read before you sign up.

Four pieces. About thirty minutes if you read them all. They explain the system before you trust it.

01
The Four-Vector Model
Every session is scored against four fixed vectors. They define what progress means and keep every workout accountable. Strength must transfer across movement — isolated outputs are noise.
Measurement · 3 min read
02
How to Scale Right
Training load is a double-edged sword. Too little and you stall, too much and you break. The science of the acute:chronic workload ratio gives you a framework that actually works.
Scaling · 6 min read
03
Body Trains in Patterns, Not Exercises
The body doesn't care about exercises. It cares about movement. Understanding how stress distributes across patterns is the key to balanced, sustainable training.
Movement · 5 min read
04
Why 5bar
Fitness became a scoreboard of steps and calories, but activity by itself changes nothing. 5bar reveals the system that is already there — so you can train with intent.
Philosophy · 4 min read
5bar

What gets measured,
gets better.

Free during beta · Google sign-in · Five minutes from here to your first workout plan.

No credit card. No upsell. We'll ask once a quarter if it's working for you. That's the deal.