Every term here is one we print on a screen. So every definition here is the one the code actually uses.
Most training glossaries are written from other glossaries. This one is written from the app. When it says maximum adaptive volume for back is 14 sets a week, that's the number in muscleVolume.js, and it's the number the dashed line on your volume radar is drawn at. When it says a drop set gets 90 seconds of rest after the last drop, that's what the timer will give you.
That matters more than it sounds, because the same acronym means slightly different things in different apps, and the difference is usually hidden. An estimated one-rep max from one formula won't match an estimated one-rep max from another. A set-per-week count that includes warm-ups isn't the same count as one that doesn't. If you're going to compare a number this week to the same number in six weeks, you need to know what it's made of.
Terms with enough to say get a page of their own. The rest are answered here, in full, in one place. Nothing on this page is a stub that sends you somewhere else to find out what a word means.
How hard a set was, and the four ways a plan can ask for it.
A 1 to 10 scale for how hard a set actually was, judged at the moment you rack the bar. RPE 10 means you couldn't have done another rep with the form you were using. RPE 8 means about two were left. The scale is subjective on purpose. It reads the set you did rather than the set someone planned for you, which is exactly what you want on a day when 100 kg feels like 120.
In Fire Your Coach RPE is what we record. exercise_logs.exercise_rpe is a number from 0 to 10, stored once per exercise rather than per set, and it's the only effort figure the app collects from you directly. Plans can also be written in RPE: the parser reads "RPE 8-9" out of a prescription and files it as intensity kind rpe, which is how most of our conditioning protocols carry effort. Imported Hevy history brings its RPE column across intact.
The number of reps you could still have done when you stopped a set. 2 RIR means two left in the tank. 0 RIR is failure. It carries the same information as RPE, counted from the other end, and most lifters find it the easier question to answer honestly. The mapping is direct: RPE 8 is 2 RIR, RPE 9 is 1 RIR, RPE 10 is 0 RIR.
In Fire Your Coach RIR is what we prescribe. All ten coach profiles set intensity as a RIR ramp across the block rather than a fixed number. Dr. Mike Israetel opens accumulation at 2 RIR and peaks at 0. Matt Fitzgerald never goes below 2, because his strength work is in service of running. When you report rough readiness at the start of a session, the engine adds a rep back to every target rather than cutting the session, then takes a set off on top.
The heaviest load you can move for a single rep. Percentages of it, written %1RM, are the oldest way to program strength: 5 x 3 at 85% means nothing until you know what 85% is 85% of. A tested max is accurate on the day you test it and drifts from then on, and testing costs a session plus the fatigue that follows. That's why most lifters estimate instead.
In Fire Your Coach %1RM is one of the ways a prescription can express intensity in our schema, alongside RPE, RIR and Zone. The parser reads both "80%" and "75-85% 1RM" and keeps the range rather than flattening it to a midpoint. We never ask you to test a max, and no plan we generate requires one: the starting weights come from your logged history instead, which is what makes a tested max optional rather than a prerequisite.
A projection of your single from a set you actually did, so you get a comparable number without testing a true max. It lets you put a set of 5 at 100 kg and a set of 8 at 90 kg on the same axis, which raw weight can't do. It is an estimate, and it inherits every assumption of the formula behind it, which is why the formula is worth knowing.
In Fire Your Coach We use Epley, weight x (1 + reps / 30), and it's one line in trajectory.js. It runs on completed working sets only. The strength trend takes your best e1RM per lift per week across your five most-trained compound lifts and averages them into one line. Beat your own best inside a rolling 13-week window and the session receipt prints an Estimated 1RM PR against the mark it beat.
A band of conditioning intensity, usually numbered 1 to 5. Zone 2 is conversational and aerobic, the pace you could hold for an hour. Zone 4 and 5 are the ranges you hold for minutes. Zones do for running and rowing what RPE does for lifting: they name a target intensity without naming a pace, so the same prescription still works on a hot day or a tired one. HR, when you see it, is heart rate in beats per minute.
In Fire Your Coach Zone is a first-class intensity kind in the schema, so a protocol can be prescribed in zones exactly as a lift is prescribed in RIR. Ten of our 99 canonical protocols carry a zone target. Where a zone alone is too loose we print a heart rate beside it, as in "30 min continuous running at Zone 2 (conversational pace, HR 130-150 bpm)". That bpm range is a reference for you to read, not a gate. Nothing in the app reads your heart rate.
How much work, counted in sets rather than kilos.
A set that counts. Not a warm-up, not a rehearsal, not a walk to the water fountain with a bar in your hands. Every volume number you'll ever read is a count of working sets, so the definition matters more than it looks. Change what counts and every sets-per-week figure moves with it, which is the main reason two apps can show you different volume for the same training.
In Fire Your Coach One rule, applied in one place, used everywhere. A set counts if you marked it complete and it isn't a warm-up, a protocol row, or a time or distance entry. Cardio measured in minutes or metres is real work but it isn't rep volume, so it's excluded rather than converted into a fake set count. The same filter feeds the volume radar, the strength trend, personal records and plateau detection, which is why those four never contradict each other.
The fewest hard sets per week for a muscle that still produce growth. Below it you maintain. At it you progress slowly with plenty of recovery left over, which makes it the sensible place to open a block. Start at your ceiling instead and you've got nowhere left to progress to, so the block becomes four weeks of holding on rather than four weeks of building.
In Fire Your Coach MEV is a starting instruction in our coach files, not a number we calculate for you. Dr. Mike Israetel's profile opens a block at MEV and builds toward MAV across the accumulation weeks, and the generator names week one "MEV" so the plan browser can label it. We deliberately don't publish a personal MEV figure. Producing one honestly needs recovery data we don't collect yet, and an invented floor is worse than no floor.
The upper end of weekly sets per muscle group where most lifters still progress without outrunning recovery. Below it you adapt. Above it you accumulate fatigue faster than you build, and extra sets stop buying anything. It's a reference band drawn for a population rather than a line drawn for you, and treating it as a personal limit is the most common way to misread it.
In Fire Your Coach MAV is the dashed reference polygon on your volume radar, and these are the real targets in sets per week: chest 12, back 14, shoulders 12, arms 10, legs 14, core 10. A completed working set counts once for each directly trained muscle group, even when several primary muscles map to the same group, averaged over a rolling 12-week window. Secondary activation stays visible in the detailed muscle breakdown without inflating the MAV comparison. Sitting above the line isn't a failure state. The app reads it as a prompt to check recovery, not as a score to beat.
The most weekly work you can do and still recover from before the next session. Push past it and performance falls while effort rises, which is a miserable place to spend a month. MRV is the ceiling in the same family of landmarks as MEV and MAV, and it's the one that moves most between people, between weeks, and between one job and another.
In Fire Your Coach MRV appears in our programming rules as a phase rather than a figure. A coach whose compound intensification is set to "rare" allows an intensifier on a primary compound only in the MRV peak week, meaning the last accumulation week before volume comes back down. We don't compute a personal MRV and we don't display one. It depends most on sleep, stress and food, and the app measures none of those.
Ways to keep a set going after the load stops being liftable.
Two or more exercises run back to back with no rest in between. Usually paired to save time. Sometimes paired because the two movements don't compete, like rows between sets of pressing, where neither one steals anything from the other. Rest comes after the whole pair rather than inside it, so a superset is a single unit of work that happens to have two names.
In Fire Your Coach Supersets are yours to make. You group the exercises, on the plan or mid-session, and the grouping is stored on the session rather than inferred from the order things happen to sit in. In the session they render as one run with a coloured rail down the side, and they drag as one block when you reorder. Imported Hevy history keeps its superset grouping, so pairs you built in another app arrive still paired.
Take a set to or near failure, cut the load, and keep going with no real rest. One cut is a drop set. Three in a row is a triple drop. The point is to hold the muscle under tension after the load you started with has stopped being liftable. It's cheap in time and expensive in recovery, which is the whole argument for and against it.
In Fire Your Coach A drop set is a prescription shape, not a note in the margin. The set rows are generated for it: a drop set marks the last row as a drop, a triple drop marks every row after the first. So is the rest, at 0 seconds into a drop and 90 after the last one, so the timer never invites you to sit down mid-technique. Coaches restrict them by exercise role. Israetel's profile allows drops on secondary compounds and cable isolations and never on a primary compound.
One activation set taken close to failure, then a run of short mini-sets at the same load with about fifteen seconds between them. The first set does the recruiting. The mini-sets harvest reps from a muscle that's already fully recruited. You get a lot of effective reps in very little time, which is the appeal, and also the reason it belongs on accessories rather than on a squat.
In Fire Your Coach In the app a myo-rep prescription is one working row followed by mini rows, which is why isolation exercises get a set cap of four under Israetel rather than three: one top set plus three minis. Rest is generated at fifteen seconds between minis and two minutes after the last one. When readiness or soreness lands at moderate, myo-reps step down to a drop set. At severe they're stripped, and the chip renders struck through so you can see what was cut and why.
A top set taken near failure, then fifteen to twenty seconds of rest, then as many more reps as you can get at the same load. Repeat once or twice. It looks like myo-reps and does something similar, but the emphasis is different: rest-pause is about squeezing more out of one heavy load, where myo-reps are about accumulating stimulating reps.
In Fire Your Coach Rest-pause is one of the six intensifier shapes a prescription can carry, and it's the only intensifier any of our coaches will put on a primary compound. Ryan Humiston does, on the last set only; the other nine leave primary compounds alone entirely. Generated rest is fifteen seconds between clusters and two minutes after the final one. Humiston's adjustment ladder is harsher than the default on purpose: for him the intensifier is the first thing to go at moderate soreness, before a single set or a rep of RIR is touched.
Partial reps performed in the stretched part of the range, added once a full-range set has run out. A leg curl that can't complete another full rep can often still move through the bottom third, and that bottom third is where the muscle is under the most tension. Partials at the shortened end of the range are a different and much weaker idea.
In Fire Your Coach This is Jeff Nippard's signature intensifier in our coach set, applied to stretch-biased isolations and selected accessories and never to a squat, bench, deadlift or overhead press. It encodes as two working rows plus one partial row, which is why his isolation set cap is three rather than four. Rest is generated at 0 seconds into the partial row and two minutes after it. The default ladder keeps partials at moderate soreness, because the partials are the stimulus, and strips them at severe.
A prescribed speed for the rep, almost always a slow eccentric: three or four seconds lowering the weight before you lift it. Slowing the lowering phase adds time under tension without adding load, which makes it the cheapest intensity technique there is in recovery terms. It also exposes a rep you were previously getting through on bounce alone.
In Fire Your Coach Two different things in the app carry this word, and it's worth knowing which one you're looking at. On a lift, the intensifier is slow_eccentric and its chip reads Tempo. On a conditioning protocol, tempo is a structure type meaning steady continuous work, like a Zone 2 run. The lifting one is the only intensifier the default adjustment ladder keeps even at severe soreness, on the grounds that obeying a tempo cue costs you almost nothing.
tempo as a conditioning structure →Different concept that happens to share the word. Not this term's page.
How weeks and sessions are shaped, and the words for the shapes.
A stretch of weeks with a single job. Five weeks of building muscle, or eight weeks of getting ready for a race. A plan is made of one or more blocks, each holding its own weeks and sessions, and the block is the unit that actually carries a training decision. Weeks are too short to hold one and a year is too long to hold it steady.
In Fire Your Coach Block is the house word. All ten coach profiles use it and the schema is built on it, running plans to blocks to weeks to sessions. Block length is a coach property and the range is wide on purpose: three to five weeks for Israetel and Nippard, six to twelve for Lucy Davis, whose aerobic builds need the runway. The block is also the boundary your training memory gets read across, which is what makes the next one different from the last.
A block of training with a single focus, typically three to six weeks, sitting between the individual week and the season-long plan. The word comes from periodization literature and is standard in strength and hypertrophy circles. It means what we mean by block. We say block in the app because it's the shorter word and because nothing in the product should require you to know the longer one.
In Fire Your Coach Our schema calls it a block, our coaches call it a block, and the plan browser labels the weeks inside it. The planning question that usually comes attached to this word, which is how to decide what the next one should contain, gets a page of its own rather than a paragraph here. It deserves the room, and answering it twice in two places would only split the answer.
A planned easy stretch, usually a week, where volume drops sharply and effort backs off so accumulated fatigue can clear. In hypertrophy and strength programming it's the standard way a block ends. It is a convention of that tradition rather than a law of training, and plenty of good conditioning programmes never use one.
In Fire Your Coach Seven of our ten coaches deload by cutting volume while keeping frequency, so you still train the same days, just lighter and shorter. The other three don't deload at all. Hunter McIntyre, Lucy Davis and Matt Fitzgerald taper instead, and the word never appears in their coach files. So the app doesn't write a deload into a conditioning or hybrid plan on principle. A deload week carries an explicit flag on the week itself, never a guess made from coach prose about one that's coming.
You start a fixed piece of work at the top of each minute and rest with whatever's left before the next one starts. The rest is the variable, which makes an EMOM self-pacing: move faster and you earn more rest, move slower and the format takes it away. It's the most common conditioning structure in written plans and the most commonly written badly, because "10 min EMOM" doesn't say what happens inside the minute.
In Fire Your Coach EMOM is a protocol structure type in the schema, sitting alongside AMRAP, Tabata, Circuit, Intervals, Tempo, Ladder and Pyramid. The parser detects it from either the acronym or the phrase written out in full, pulls out the round count, and hands it to the in-app timer rather than leaving you to watch a clock on the wall. How to pick the work so the last round is still hard has a page of its own.
As many reps or rounds as possible inside a time cap. The work is open and the clock is fixed, which inverts the usual arrangement. Because the number you finish on is the score, an AMRAP is one of the few conditioning shapes that produces a directly comparable result week to week, as long as the movements and the cap don't change.
In Fire Your Coach AMRAP is a protocol structure type. The parser recognises it, pulls the cap out of the description, and the in-app timer counts the cap down while you log rounds. Rounds completed are stored on the session, so the same AMRAP repeated in six weeks has something honest to be compared against. The programming side, meaning how to set a cap and how to pick work that survives one, belongs on its own page.
What counts as progress, and what counts as stuck.
Your best result on a lift. The word usually means the heaviest single, but a rep added at the same weight is a record too, and so is the most total work you've ever done on one movement in a session. Which definition you use decides how often you get to set one, which is worth knowing before you decide you've stalled.
In Fire Your Coach We record four kinds: Weight PR, Rep PR, Volume PR and Estimated 1RM PR. Each is judged against a rolling 13-week window rather than against all time, because a mark set two years and one injury ago isn't the bar you're held to today. Records are written onto the session when you finish it and read back unchanged afterwards. History never recalculates them. The window moves, and a record that quietly stopped being one would be worse than none.
A lift that has stopped moving. Not a bad session and not a deload week, but the same top set turning up again and again while everything around it changes. Naming it matters because the fix depends on which lift is stuck and for how long, and by the time a stall is obvious you've usually already spent a month inside it.
In Fire Your Coach A plateau is detected rather than guessed. We read each lift newest first and flag it when the same top weight, best-set reps and total reps at that weight repeat across three or more consecutive sessions inside a 12-week window. Adding another work set at the top weight still counts as progress. Anchoring on the most recent session is deliberate: a stall you've already broken out of doesn't qualify, however long it lasted. At most two are surfaced at once, because a list of five stuck lifts is a mood rather than a plan.
Every intensity chip, structure label and intensifier in Fire Your Coach carries its own explanation in place. This page exists so you can read them all at once, not because you should have to.