The Insights Screen: Four Trends, Kept Separate

Expenditure

Your measured maintenance over time — derived from what your trend weight actually did against what you actually ate, not predicted from your body size.

For a hybrid athlete this is the most informative chart in the app, and what to look for is not the level.

It should visibly rise when a training block ramps. If your endurance volume went from twenty to forty miles a week and this line is flat, one of two things is true: the block is smaller than it feels, or your logging has holes in it. Both are worth knowing.

It rising during a surplus is correct. More mass costs more energy, and non-exercise movement often rises when energy is plentiful. That is confirmation, not a problem.

It falling during a sustained deficit is also correct, and it is the adaptive response that makes a prediction-based target progressively more wrong the longer you use it.

Weight

Trend weight plotted against the raw weigh-ins behind it.

Both are shown deliberately. The trend is an exponentially weighted moving average with an alpha of 0.25 — each morning's weigh-in moves it a quarter of the distance — and seeing the raw points scattered around it is what makes the case for using the trend.

Raw scale weight swings up to four pounds across two days on identical body composition: glycogen, sodium, food volume, hydration, gut content. Every decision is made against the trend. The raw points are there so you can see how much noise it is removing.

Two patterns worth recognising:

Strength

Estimated one-rep max across your main lifts, as a trend rather than a set of points.

The value is the slope. Across a block your working sets vary for reasons unrelated to strength — a deload, a bad night, a change in exercise order — and e1RM converts all of it onto one axis so the block becomes one readable line.

Meaningful movement: 0.5 to 2% per week early in a block, tapering as it goes on. Flat for three weeks alongside a second fatigue signal is a deload trigger, not a programming failure.

Epley, and only for sets of twelve reps or fewer, because every 1RM formula degrades above that and over-predicts. The arithmetic.

Volume by muscle group

Fractional sets per muscle per week: direct sets counted in full, indirect sets counted at half.

That fractional model is what the hypertrophy dose-response literature actually supports — it fit the data better than counting only direct sets or all sets equally, across 67 studies and 2,058 subjects. A barbell row is one direct set for the lats and half a set for the biceps.

The target band moves with your endurance load, which is the specifically hybrid part:

Most people discover two things when they first look at this honestly: their back volume is higher than they thought, because indirect work adds up, and their hamstring volume is a fraction of what they assumed. The calculator.

Why they are never combined

A single blended score cannot distinguish these four situations:

• Squat e1RM rose 4%, threshold flat.
• Threshold improved 3%, squat flat.
• Squat rose 8% and threshold degraded 4%.
• Both improved slightly.

Every one produces the same movement in a composite, and they call for completely different responses. The third is the specific thing a hybrid athlete is trying to avoid, and it is indistinguishable from the fourth in any summary.

There is a second problem: normalising the two capacities to make them comparable requires a weighting, and the weighting is a value judgement pretending to be arithmetic. Is 1% of threshold worth 1% of squat e1RM? For a marathoner in a race block, no. For someone in a strength block, the reverse. Any fixed weighting encodes one answer to a question only you can answer, and hides it inside a number that looks objective.

The full argument.

Reading the disagreements

The information is in the pattern, and specifically in what happens when two charts point opposite ways:

Row two is the classic hybrid failure and its cause is almost always easy runs run too hard. Row five is the one to catch quickly, because the intuitive response — eat more, since strength is not moving — makes it worse.

What is not here

No body fat percentage chart. Measurement error on every consumer method exceeds the change you are looking for over any reasonable window, and adding a noisy line to four clean ones makes the set worse.

No projection. Nobody can compute your future physique honestly, and a plausible-looking projection is worse than none.

No percentile. Ranking your expenditure against other people ranks their body size and their jobs.

What to do next

Measuring progress as a hybrid athlete covers the timescales — how long each of these signals needs before it means anything, which is longer than people check them.