How long does it take to set up Base?

About five minutes, and every step can be skipped with a sensible default and edited later. The longest step is entering the meals you eat most days, which is also the step that pays back the most — it is what makes one-tap food logging possible.

Why does Base ask for my sex and age?

Because the fallback metabolic estimate and the heart rate zone maximum both depend on them, and there is no honest way to compute either without them. Where an answer is missing, the app shows nothing rather than assuming a value and presenting the result as if it were yours.

Do I need to connect a wearable during setup?

No. You can skip it and connect later in settings. Without one you still get manual logging, adaptive maintenance from weight and intake, and endurance prescriptions from a manually entered threshold — you lose recovery scoring, sleep scoring and automatic session matching.

What if I do not know my threshold pace?

Skip it. Base can estimate it later from your best sustained effort of at least twenty minutes, or you can enter a recent race result. A manual entry from a real test always beats anything inferred from training data.

Can I change my answers later?

All of them, in settings. Onboarding writes real rows rather than a separate setup state, so nothing is locked in and there is no configuration mode to escape from.

Onboarding: Five Minutes, and Every Answer Is Editable

The six steps

1. Stats. Height, weight, age, sex, activity level. These feed the Mifflin-St Jeor fallback estimate used until there is enough logged data to measure your maintenance properly, and the age-derived maximum that heart rate zones are a percentage of.

2. Goal. Target weight, target rate of change, and the surplus or deficit that implies. The rate is the input; the calorie figure is derived from it, because the rate is what your body can deliver and the calories are downstream.

3. Standard meals. Three to six meals you eat most days, with their macros. This is the longest step and the one that pays back most.

4. Day templates. Those meals grouped into a training day and a rest day, with hour slots.

5. Program. The weekly split, with exercises, target sets and rep ranges.

6. Health permissions. Which data types to read, with a plain explanation of each and what it is used for.

Why the meals step is worth the five minutes

It is the step people want to skip and it is the one that determines whether you are still logging in six months.

Base logs food by template replay rather than by database search. You save the day you usually eat once, and one tap logs the whole thing. That is not a convenience feature — it is the difference between a habit that costs one minute a day and one that costs five, and five minutes a day survives about three weeks.

A serious athlete's diet is repetitive by design. Optimising for search is optimising the wrong thing. Why the add sheet is ordered the way it is.

Why it asks about sex, and what happens if you skip

The Mifflin-St Jeor constant differs by sex, and several reference tables in the app are male ones.

If you do not answer, Base refuses to rank you rather than assuming male norms and presenting the result as if it were yours. You get the parts of the app that do not depend on it, and the parts that do say they are unavailable.

Same logic on birth year and heart rate zones: no birth year means no honest maximum to take a percentage of, so no zones at all rather than an assumed forty. It costs something — a less useful screen — and the alternative costs more.

The health permissions step

This is where the app asks for sleep, heart rate variability, resting and walking heart rate, respiratory rate, active and basal energy, steps, bodyweight and workout records.

Two things are stated plainly at that moment rather than buried:

What each type is used for. HRV and resting heart rate feed recovery score. Sleep feeds sleep score. Active and basal energy build the daily calorie target. Workouts get matched to endurance prescriptions and graded.

That the platform will not tell the app whether read access was denied. iOS deliberately does not report this — a denied type looks identical to a type with no data. Which is why the health screen later shows last-sync times rather than a permission checkmark it cannot actually see. The detail.

You can skip the whole step. Without a wearable you still get manual logging, measured maintenance, and endurance prescriptions from a manually entered threshold. You lose recovery scoring, sleep scoring, and automatic session matching.

Skipping threshold, and why that is fine

Onboarding does not demand a threshold pace or an FTP, because most people do not have a current one and a guessed threshold produces a whole screen of confident, wrong prescriptions.

Base can estimate it later from your best sustained effort of at least twenty minutes, projected to a one-hour equivalent. Or you can enter a recent race result or a proper test, and a manual entry always wins — a real test beats anything inferred from training data. How the estimate works and what the confidence label means.

Until there is one, the endurance screen shows a prompt to set one and nothing else. Not a partially useful screen with placeholder bands.

The first fortnight

Worth knowing what to expect, because the app is deliberately less useful at the start than it will be.

Timeframe	What is available
Day 1	Logging works. Calorie target from the formula estimate, labelled as estimated
Days 1–14	Recovery and sleep say "building baseline" with a countdown
Day 14	Recovery scoring becomes available
Day 14+	Measured maintenance replaces the estimate, once ten logged days and eight weigh-ins exist
Weeks 3–4	e1RM trends become readable
Weeks 4–6	Threshold estimate reaches useful confidence

Nothing here shows a number before it can mean one. A recovery score computed from four days of baseline is arithmetic rather than information, and dressing it up as a score would teach you that the rest of the app's numbers are decorative too.

What to do next

Do the meals step properly even though it is the boring one. Then log honestly for fourteen days and change nothing — at the end of that fortnight you will have a maintenance figure that is genuinely yours, and every decision after it gets easier. What that number is and why it matters.