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Using the App

A walkthrough of Loadout Waypoints once you're logged in — building the exercise library, building plans, running a workout, and the account/admin screens around them. For install/setup, see the Overview; for how the pieces work under the hood, see Architecture.

Logging in​

Local accounts (default): username + password. A fresh self-hosted install has one admin account, created from the ADMIN_USERNAME/ADMIN_PASSWORD values you set during install. If you didn't set a password, it defaults to admin and you'll be forced to change it before you can do anything else — every screen redirects to Change Password until you do.

LDAP / Active Directory: if the instance was configured for LDAP auth, the login form authenticates straight against your directory. There's no separate Loadout password to manage or reset — your directory account is your account. The first time an LDAP user logs in, a matching local profile is created automatically (display name and admin flag come from the directory); after that, contact whoever manages the directory to change a password, not Loadout's admin panel.

Dashboard​

The home page after login shows:

  • Your active plan (if you've set one — see Subscriptions & the active plan), with a shortcut to start today's workout.
  • Your last completed session and overall stats (total sessions, sessions this week).
  • Any in-progress workout you left mid-session, with a resume link.
  • A feed of recently published public plans from other users.

Exercise library​

Exercises in the nav lists every exercise — built-in ones plus anything anyone has added. You can filter by muscle group, equipment, or free-text search. Clicking one opens a detail popup with:

  • The muscle-group diagram (front/back body, primary muscles highlighted solid, secondary muscles highlighted lighter).
  • Equipment needed and written instructions.
  • Any uploaded photo/video media.
  • If you're logged in and have done the exercise before: a trend chart of your reps/weight/duration over time, built from every logged set.

Adding an exercise (New Exercise): name, description, one of three tracking types — reps, weight, or duration — primary/secondary muscle groups, equipment, step-by-step instructions, and optional image/video uploads (up to 100MB each). Muscle group and equipment options come from a fixed list (22 muscle groups, 17 equipment types) so filtering stays consistent across everyone's exercises. You can also quick-create a bare-minimum exercise inline from the plan builder's exercise picker without leaving the plan you're editing.

Plan builder​

New Plan (or Edit on one you own) opens the plan builder:

  1. Plan details — name, description, difficulty (beginner/intermediate/advanced), category (strength/cardio/hiit/flexibility/sports-specific/hybrid), estimated duration, tags, and whether it's public (visible/subscribable by everyone) or private.
  2. Days — a plan is a list of days (e.g. "Push", "Pull", "Legs" — labels are free text, not tied to calendar days). Add as many as you like, in any order.
  3. Exercises per day — for each day, add exercises from the picker (or quick-create a new one on the spot). Each exercise slot configures sets, rest between sets, rest after the exercise, and either reps, a timed duration, or both (an exercise can track both a rep count and a hold time at once — think a weighted plank). Turn on track sides to log left/right independently as separate entries (useful for single-arm/single-leg work).
  4. Supersets — group two or more exercises into a superset: they're done back-to-back as one "round," repeated for the group's configured number of rounds, sharing one rest period after the whole group instead of one each.

Saving publishes the plan (or updates it in place). Public plans show up in the plan browser for everyone; private ones are visible only to you (and admins).

Browsing & subscribing to plans​

Plans lists every public plan, filterable by difficulty, category, tag, and search. Opening one shows its full day-by-day breakdown before you commit to it. Subscribing adds it to your personal list on the dashboard; you can subscribe to more than one plan at a time, but only one can be your active plan.

Subscriptions & the active plan​

Your active plan is the one the dashboard's "start today's workout" shortcut points to — you can only have one at a time (the app enforces this, so setting a new active plan automatically clears the old one). You don't have to be subscribed to a plan to execute it directly from its page, but subscribing is what surfaces it on your dashboard and tracks its "last completed" date.

You can also duplicate any plan (yours or someone else's public one) to get your own editable copy.

Running a workout​

Opening a plan and picking a day starts guided execution — a full-screen, step-by-step view of just that day:

  • Each exercise is shown one at a time (or one superset round at a time), with the sets to complete, and your last-logged reps/weight/duration for that exercise pre-filled as a starting point (tracked independently per rep count, so a 5-rep set and a 12-rep set of the same exercise remember their own numbers).
  • Check off each set as you finish it; a rest timer counts down between sets and between exercises automatically.
  • Turn on Auto-Advance to skip straight to the next exercise once its last set is checked off, instead of tapping "Next" yourself.
  • Add Set lets you throw in an extra set (or an extra superset round) on the fly — mid-workout — and optionally save it back to the plan permanently instead of using it just for this one session.
  • The plan's owner (or an admin) can edit the day mid-workout — reorder, add, or remove exercises — without losing progress on the sets already completed.
  • Progress autosaves as you go. If you close the tab or walk away, reopening the app offers to resume exactly where you left off, or discard the in-progress attempt and start fresh. You can only have one in-progress workout at a time, across all plans.
  • Finishing the last exercise logs a completed session (date, duration, exercise count) and updates every exercise's last-known values and history chart.

History & progress​

  • Per-exercise history: every exercise's detail page shows a chart of your logged reps, weight, or duration over time, so progressive overload is visible at a glance rather than something you have to remember or write down.
  • Profile page (Profile in the nav): total sessions, sessions this week, your favorite (most completed) plan, a list of recent sessions, and a GitHub-style activity heatmap — click any day on the heatmap to see exactly what you did that day, or click a session to see its full set-by-set breakdown.
  • Appearance: under Profile → Appearance, override the app's light/dark theme colors for your own account (text, background, accent, menu colors — independently for light and dark mode). Leave a field blank to fall back to the app default.
  • Backup: under Profile → Backup, export your own plans, sessions, or exercise history as CSV, or import them back in — scoped to just your account, regardless of what's in the file (see CSV Import & Export for the column format of each entity).

Self-hosted: license activation​

A fresh self-hosted install redirects everywhere to /license until it's activated — even the login page. From there you can:

  • Start a trial by entering your email — a license key is emailed to you (the app itself never shows or generates one), which you then paste into the activation form on the same page.
  • Activate an existing key (trial, lifetime, or an offline token) directly.
  • Buy a license, which redirects to a hosted checkout page.

Once activated, the license is cached locally, so a temporary outage of the licensing service never locks you out — see Licensing System for exactly how that works and why.

Admin area (self-hosted only)​

Visible only to admin accounts, under Admin in the nav:

  • Users — create, edit, promote/demote admin status, reset a password (forces the user to change it on next login), or delete.
  • Exercises — the same create/edit form as regular users, plus bulk CSV import/export and the ability to see (and be warned about) which plans use an exercise before deleting it.
  • Sessions — visibility into every user's in-progress (not yet completed) workouts, useful for clearing out ones stuck from a crashed tab.
  • Import/Export — full-instance CSV import/export for exercises, users, plans, sessions, and exercise history (as opposed to the self-service, own-data-only versions under each user's own Profile → Backup).
  • Settings — hostname (WEB_FQDN) and TLS certificate management; changing these hot-swaps the running server's listener without a container restart.
  • License — the same activation screen as /license, plus the current cached status (type, expiry, last validation).