Fitbod is very good at your next workout. Fire Your Coach is built for the whole block.
Fitbod does one thing very well: it turns “I have no plan today” into a complete, sensible session without you planning anything. It reads the equipment in the room, tracks muscle fatigue, and records effort in RIR. This is a respectful look at where the generated workout ends and the block begins.
| Capability | Fitbod | Fire Your Coach |
|---|---|---|
| Set and rep logging | Yes | Yes |
| Generates a session from your equipment | Yes | Yes |
| RIR tracking | Yes | Yes |
| Adjusts today for fatigue | Yes | Yes |
| CSV export of your own sessions | Yes | Not yet |
| Periodized blocks and phases | Short-term | Yes |
| Adapts the plan, not just the session | No | Yes |
| Stimulus-first exercise swaps | No | Yes |
| Carries decisions across blocks | No | Yes |
| Records why you deviated from the plan | No | Yes |
Fitbod asks a good question every morning. Given the equipment you have, the goals you set and how recovered you are, what's the best session you could do today? It answers fast, and it answers better than most people answer it for themselves at six in the morning with a coffee and no plan.
If you're five weeks into a block, that is not the question you are asking. You're asking whether the quad volume you added in week two is paying for itself. Whether the reason you moved to a close-grip press still applies. Whether the last month actually moved you toward the thing you decided this block was for.
None of those are answerable from today's fatigue readings. They need a record of the decisions, not just the sessions, and a workout generator has nowhere to keep one. Nothing carries your programming decisions into the next block, because that was never what a generator was built to do.
Generation was never the hard part. Continuity is.
Fire Your Coach is not trying to out-generate Fitbod. Generation is how you start here, the same way it is if you arrive with a plan a model wrote for you. It's not the product. The product is what happens from week two onward: what you decided, why you decided it, and whether it worked.
You keep the programming decisions. When the rack is taken and you swap the movement, the swap is recorded as a typed deviation with its reason attached, so the next block knows you haven't barbell benched in a month. When you sleep four hours, the session adjusts and the adjustment is recorded too. Sets, deviations and session notes are recorded as you train, not typed up afterwards.
If Fitbod is filling a gap where you have no plan at all, it's doing a real job and you should keep it. If you already trust a coach-written program and the issue is what happens after you start running it, that is a different comparison. And if your plan already comes from a periodized generator like Alpha Progression, the gap looks different again: the plan is precise, but it doesn't bend when your week does. This page is for the other case: you have a plan, or you are ready to run one, and you want the reasoning behind it to still be there in November.
Fire Your Coach builds a structured plan from a short intake: your history, your equipment, your goal and your deadline. Then it runs that plan with you, session by session, and keeps what each session taught you. Your Fitbod history stays in Fitbod. The importer reads Strong and Hevy exports today, not Fitbod's. If you also log in either of those, bring the CSV and the memory starts from sessions you've already done.
Fitbod generates today's workout from your equipment, goals and muscle fatigue, and it does that well. What it does not do is hold a plan across blocks: it optimizes workout to workout, not month to month, and keeps no record of the intent behind your programming. Fire Your Coach is a training memory system for lifters running structured blocks. It keeps the reasoning behind each decision, tracks balance across weeks, and adapts the session when sleep or time is short.
Because a generator that optimizes one session at a time has nothing to be coherent with. Fitbod picks each day's exercises from your available equipment and your current muscle fatigue, which is a reasonable way to fill a Tuesday and a poor way to build a twelve-week block. The individual sessions are sound. What is missing is a phase, a target and an intent sitting above them, deciding what the sessions are for.
Not today. The Fire Your Coach importer reads Strong and Hevy CSV exports, and Fitbod's export is a different format that is not supported yet. You do not need an import to start. A short intake builds your first plan, and the memory begins with your first logged session. If you also log in Strong or Hevy, upload that export and your history comes across with exercise names normalized against the canonical library.
No. Fitbod is good at the job it does. If you are between plans and want a solid session without planning one, it will give you that. Fire Your Coach works one level up. It holds the plan, the phase and the reasoning behind each decision across blocks, and it records why you deviated when you did. Nothing stops you from running Fitbod on unplanned days and Fire Your Coach for the block you are actually training.