Reasonable questions, answered plainly.

• What is cleanlift?

  A record of your training and your body, kept properly. You log the work, it keeps the sets, reps, load, date, time and place, takes in your DEXA scans and what Apple Health already knows, and then shows you what a decade of that actually looks like. It is a record first and everything else second.

• Who is it for?

  Anyone who has trained long enough to wish they had kept better notes. It does not care whether you squat 500 pounds or you are on week three, because the interesting question is never how you compare to a stranger, it is what you looked like a year ago and which way you have moved since.

• What does it cost?

  Four dollars a month, or forty eight for the year if you would rather think about it once. That is about one tub of protein powder annually, and unlike the protein powder it will still be doing something for you in ten years.

• Is there a free trial?

  Thirty days, everything working, no card asked for at the door. A month is long enough to log a proper training block and see your own numbers come back at you, which is the only demonstration worth anything here. If it has not earned four dollars by then, it has not earned four dollars.

• Why is it paid rather than free?

  Because the free version of this product is the one that sells you. A record of your body is about the most valuable thing an advertiser could ask for, and the only way I can promise never to sell it is to take money from you instead. Four dollars is the price of that promise being keepable.

• Do you sell or share my data?

  No. Not to advertisers, not to insurers, not to a research partner with a friendly name. There is no clever exception hiding in a schedule at the bottom of a document. Your record is yours and the business model is the subscription you already paid.

• Where is my data actually kept?

  On Google Cloud, in their Canadian region, encrypted in transit and at rest. It does not travel south to save a few dollars a month, and the number of people who can reach it is one.

• What can I log?

  Lifts with sets, reps and load. Cardio with time and effort. Bodyweight. Whatever you did that day that counted as work. If it took effort and you want it counted, it goes in.

• Does it really record where and when I trained?

  Yes, and it turns out to be the best part. A number on its own is a number. "315 for 15, ten past six on a Tuesday morning, Goodlife at Yonge and Eglinton" is a memory. You will be surprised how much you enjoy reading those back.

• Can I upload a DEXA scan?

  Yes. You paid a small fortune for a PDF that has been sitting in your downloads folder ever since, and it deserves better company. Upload each one and they line up as a series instead of a scatter of forgotten files.

• Does it connect to Apple Health and Apple Fitness?

  Yes, through a small companion app on the App Store whose only job is that. You copy a token from your profile into it once, then press export whenever you feel like it. Rings, workouts, heart rate, VO2 max estimates and bodyweight come across and land beside the work you logged by hand. Both ends discard anything they have already seen, so pressing it twice costs you nothing.

• What about Garmin, Whoop, Oura or Strava?

  Not yet. Apple Health is first because it is where most of this already pools, including a good deal of what those devices collect. The others are on the list, and the waitlist is the fastest way to make yours the loud vote.

• Do I need an iPhone? Is there an Android app?

  cleanlift is a web app, so it runs in the browser on whatever is in your pocket, Android very much included, and everything except the Apple Health import works exactly the same there. The one native app is the little Apple Health courier described above, because Apple will not let anyone read that data any other way.

• Will it tell me what to lift?

  No. There are a great many programmes in the world and almost all of them work if you follow one. What almost nobody has is an honest record of whether they did, and what happened when they did. That is the gap this fills.

• Will it check my form or keep me from getting hurt?

  No, and be careful of anything that says it will. A phone cannot see what a good coach sees from across the room, and pretending otherwise is how people get hurt with a green tick on the screen. This tells you what you did. A human tells you how it looked.

• What does N = 1 mean?

  It means the study has one participant and it is you. Population averages are useful for populations and quietly useless for a Tuesday. Your response to a given amount of work is your own, and the only way to know it is to measure the same person repeatedly, which is exactly what a good record is.

• Does it compare me to other people?

  Only if you want it to, and never as the headline. You against you last year is the comparison that changes behaviour. Population context is there when it is genuinely interesting and out of the way when it is not, and friends are opt in on both sides.

• Why do weeks start on Monday?

  Because a training week starts on Monday, whatever the calendar app thinks. A week that begins on Sunday cuts most people's programmes in half and makes a good week look like two mediocre ones.

• Will it nag me?

  No. It will notice things and mention them, which is different. If your pull ups have drifted from forty four to thirty over two months, that is worth a quiet word. If you took three weeks off because life happened, that is not a moral failing and it will not be treated as one.

• What happens to my record if I stop paying?

  It goes read only rather than dark. Everything you logged stays there to look at, you simply cannot add to it, and you have ninety days to download the lot in a form you can actually open before it is deleted. Nothing vanishes the moment a card expires, and holding a decade of your training hostage would be a poor way to earn a renewal.

• How do I get in, and when?

  The waitlist goes first, in batches, before it opens to anyone else. That is not a velvet rope, it is one person making sure the first few hundred records are handled properly rather than the first few thousand handled badly. Join it and you are ahead of the queue that has not formed yet.

• Who is behind it?

  One person in Toronto who has waited his turn at the squat rack, which is not a qualification you can hire for. I write the software, I answer the email, and I am using the thing daily on my own decade of training, which is the only reason to trust that it will not quietly get worse.

Nothing matches that. Join the waitlist and ask me directly, I answer my own email.