Nothing below is a secret, and none of it is ours. It is the oldest, dullest, best-evidenced way for a beginner to get stronger, and the only thing First Rep adds is that it carries the record so the method survives a week when your life does not cooperate.
i. Open it and there is the log
Not a library, a planner, or a split to choose. The five lifts — squat, bench press, deadlift, overhead press, barbell row — sit as chips above the log, with today's sets, the week's chart, and the run of sessions you have kept.
You can read your whole week in the car park before you go in, which is deliberate. A record you cannot see at the door loses to a bad Wednesday.
ii. Log the set as you rack it
Tap the lift, mark the weight and the reps you got. It takes about as long as re-racking the bar, which is the only speed a gym log can survive at. A Siri phrase and a watch app cover the days when even that is too much.
If you got the reps, last session's number is right there when you next open it — add a little. If you did not, the app records that too, without comment.
iii. The record decides the next number
Small, boring increases are the method: a little on the presses and the row, a little more on the squat and the deadlift, added only after a session you actually completed. First Rep keeps what you lifted last time in front of you — including a next-squat figure worked from your last squat — so that call is made from facts, not memory.
When you stall, the standard move is to take some weight off and climb back. The log is what makes that ordinary instead of a crisis: you can see exactly where you were and exactly how you got back.
iv. It counts whether you came back
Sessions attended is the number you actually control, and over six months it is the one that decides everything else, so First Rep keeps it in front of you — a run of days and a plain week, shown quietly.
Everything is exportable to CSV whenever you want the record in your own hands, and nothing you lift is shown to anybody else.
Why it was built this way
Most lifting software is written for people who already lift. It assumes you know what RPE 8 feels like, that you want fourteen accessories programmed, and that you will follow a twelve-week block to the end. In the first six months none of those assumptions holds, and every one of them is a place to quit.
So the design brief was narrow: make logging cost nothing, and make the day after a bad session cost nothing. Everything the app does not have — the food log, the feed, the coach, the ring — is absent for that reason and not because it has not been built yet.
What it does not do
It does not coach your technique. It cannot see the bar, so it has no way to tell you a lift is safe and will not claim to. Get a session with a coach if that is available to you, and if it is not, learn the lifts properly from the established teaching sources before you load anything heavy.
It also has no opinion about what you eat, what you weigh, or what you look like. Your training log lives on your device and your own private iCloud, the register is used once, and nothing you lift is shown to anybody.