A coach for the quality of a rep, not just the count

Set a tempo, in your own words

A tempo is four durations: eccentric, bottom pause, concentric, top pause, with a timed or explosive split on the concentric. Set one per exercise in the editor, or have your coach set it. A coach's tempo wins while it is active, and if they clear it you fall back to the one you set, not to silence.

You also name the four phases. "Down, hold, up, hold" and "lower, pause, drive, squeeze" are the same prescription in two lifters' vocabularies, so the words are yours to pick. It is all four or none: half your words and half the defaults reads as a bug rather than a choice.

Tempo is opt-in per exercise and off by default. The program generator never sets one for you, so a lifter who never opens this sees nothing change.

A pacer you can hear across a gym, and see from the floor

Once the set starts, MuscleBuddy speaks and sounds the whole thing: a lead-in and countdown so the set does not begin mid-word, a "go" that means now, each phase as it arrives, your rep count as each rep finishes, and a warning at the start of the last one. Your phone is the counter, so it can stay in your pocket.

Co-located cues are deliberately ordered rather than left to chance. "One. Last rep. Down." lands on a single millisecond and is spoken in that order, because the number closes the rep that ended, the warning opens the one starting, and the instruction goes last so it is the word still in the air.

If the phone is propped where you can see it, the pacer takes the whole screen: the phase word legible from the floor, a ring draining over the phase, reps done against reps planned, and a wake lock so a propped phone does not black out fifteen seconds in and take the visual half with it. It draws the same cue objects the audio was scheduled from, so what you see and what you hear cannot drift apart.

Tones, volume, speech, vibration, rep counting and countdown length all switch independently, and they are stored per device rather than synced. They describe this phone's speaker in this gym, not the prescription: syncing them would mean silencing your phone at one gym silenced your coach's tempo everywhere. Any one channel can be off and the pacer still works.

Rep Trace: what your set actually measured

Prop your phone and film a set. MuscleBuddy reduces the clip to a 1-D motion signal and reads rep count and per-phase duration off it: "eccentrics averaged 1.2s against a prescribed 3.0." That's a real measurement, not a guess dressed up as one.

The motion it measured is drawn as a time series, so you can look at the shape of the set instead of reading a table of seconds. There is no target line over it and no shading: it is a picture of a measurement, not a scored attempt, and that distinction is the whole basis the feature rests on.

Film without a tempo set and you still get your rep count, no invented comparison. And if a clip doesn't segment into clean reps, MuscleBuddy tells you why rather than shipping a rep count you shouldn't trust.

Cue Check: coaching cues, only when you ask

Pick the reps that matter and get direct coaching cues anchored to that exercise's own stored form cues, each with a confidence and what in the frame supports it. It runs only when you tap for it, because a vision pass costs money and most sets don't need one.

Cue Check never scores a rep and never renders a verdict. The response is parsed and any joint angle, numeric score, or pass/fail the model tries to invent is rejected outright rather than quietly stripped, because a single phone camera cannot resolve joint geometry reliably enough to tell you that. What it gives you is words a coach would say looking at the same clip.

Your clips stay yours

A filmed set is your data. A coach can read a clip only through an active coaching relationship, and even then a coach can never run a Cue Check or delete your clip; that stays your call. Clips expire after 30 days unless you pin one.

How it reads the rest of MuscleBuddy

Rep Coach reads the load and tempo your Training program already prescribes, so the comparison it gives you is always against your own plan, not a generic standard. A stalled tempo or a set that came in rushed is context your coach sees alongside the rest of your training log, the same log Nutrition and Health both read for recovery and adherence. Upkeep never touches Rep Coach directly, but the same "your own data, explained" approach runs through all four modules.