Write it in markdown, keep it in iCloud Drive where it stays yours, and Simply Train runs you through it set by set: a workout timer that takes its rest timers, its intervals and its whole plan from the file you wrote.
# New Workout kg 60s One set per line. Switch to Preview to see the plan, then tap Start Workout. ## Main ### Push-Ups- x 10- x 10- x 10 ### Plank- 30s- 30s
Built for iPhone and Watch · iPad · Mac
# New Workout kg 60s@rest: 60s at the top of the file is the entire rest configuration: sixty seconds between every set, unless a set line says otherwise. Put @rest: 90s on one set and that set gets ninety.
For the sets you can’t put a clock on, there is @rest: open. The timer counts up instead of down and the session simply waits until you say you’re ready. Load the bar as heavy as you like.
### Goblet Squat open- 12 kg x 10- 12 kg x 10
### Plank- 30s- 30sWrite - 30s and the set becomes a countdown. Three seconds of get-ready come first, so a plank doesn’t start while you’re still lowering into it, then haptics at ten seconds and again at three, two, one.
The timers are wall-clock, not tick counters, so locking the screen or taking a call doesn’t drift them. If music is playing, the cue ducks it and hands it straight back — it never stops your audio.
# New Workout kg 60s One set per line. Switch to Preview to see the plan, then tap Start Workout. ## Main ### Push-Ups- x 10- x 10- x 10 ### Plank- 30s- 30sFive set lines in that file. Five sets in the summary. Count them.
Tap Done and the session is gone. No history, no chart, no streak to keep alive, nothing written to Health — not from the phone and not from the watch. Whatever you wear already measured the workout; this app’s only job was to get you through it.
That is the whole syntax. One line is one set, and the line says what kind of set it is. Anything the parser doesn’t recognise as a set — prose, bold, links, headings you added for your own sake — it leaves alone.
Switch to Preview and the file becomes the plan it compiles to — sections, a block per exercise, every set counted out with the rest that follows it. Tap any row and the editor jumps to the line that produced it.
# Upper Body A strength, push kg 60s 90s Quick session focused on push strength. Keep core tight throughout. ## Warmup ### Arm Circles- 20- 20 ### Jumping Jacks- 60s ## Main ### Push-Ups- x 12- x 12- x 12 90s ### Sit-Ups 45s- x 20- x 20- x 20 ### Goblet Squat open- 12 kg x 10- 12 kg x 10- 12 kg x 10
### Bench Press- 225 lbs- 225 lbs x 5- 225 lbs is not a set. It has a weight and no reps, so the app says so on that line, offers to add the reps for you, and won’t start a session until the file is one it can actually run.
What it will never do is quietly ignore the line and let you discover halfway through that a set went missing. If you meant it as a set, you get told. If you meant it as prose, nothing happens.
On an iPhone that supports Apple Intelligence, you can say what you want in ordinary words and the app writes the markdown for you. Or point at a workout you already have and ask for a change instead: heavier, or one more set on the last exercise.
It runs on Apple’s on-device foundation models. Nothing is sent anywhere because there is nowhere to send it — no key, no account, no server, and the app still makes no network calls of its own. What comes back is a file in the same format you would have typed, so you read every line before you start and rewrite any line you disagree with. On hardware that can’t run the models, the feature simply isn’t there.
What you type
“Upper body. Three exercises, three sets each, forty-five seconds between them.”
The player is read at arm’s length in the sun and at arm’s length in a badly lit garage, so it is built in both appearances from the ground up and follows whichever one your phone is in.
Everything scales with Dynamic Type, including the big numeral. Every step has a VoiceOver label and rest milestones are announced. And the timing cues are haptic as well as audible, so the whole session works with the phone face-down on the floor beside you — which is where it usually is.
The files live in the app’s iCloud Documents container, which means they are also just files in the Files app. Write one on the Mac with a real keyboard, edit it on the iPad with the plan open beside it, run it from your phone — or from your wrist.
The Watch app is a remote control, not a tracker. It starts, mirrors and steers the session running on your phone: the same target, the same countdown, the same controls, with the haptics delivered wrist-down. It measures nothing, because your watch already does that.
On the Mac it is the same document in a real window, with a real keyboard — which is where writing a long plan actually belongs. And while a session runs it mirrors into the Dynamic Island and onto the Lock Screen, so the countdown is there without unlocking anything. Siri and Shortcuts can open or start a workout by name.
That is the App Store privacy label, and it is a description of the architecture rather than a promise about it: there is no account system, no analytics SDK, and no server for anything to be sent to. It works offline because there is nothing for it to be online for.
Most of this list isn’t a roadmap gap. It is the product.
Built for iPhone and Watch · iPad · Mac