User Guide

Logging Workouts in Herculog

By NexusWorks · Updated July 2026 · 6 min read

The Add form is the heart of Herculog — the screen you'll touch every training day for years. It's built so the minimum log takes seconds, but it also hides real speed: history bubbles that prefill an entire entry in one tap, chips for RPE and warmups, and PR alerts the moment you outlift your past self. This guide covers every field, every chip, and every shortcut.

Anatomy of a logged item

One entry in Herculog is one exercise performed at N sets × reps × weight — a set-group — stamped with a date and time. "Bench press, 3 × 8 × 80 kg, today at 6:12 pm" is one logged item. Log four exercises in a session and you've logged four items.

Beyond that core, every entry can carry optional extras: a muscle group, an RPE rating, a warmup flag, a bilateral / unilateral marker, and free-text notes. None of them are required — but each one makes your history a little more useful, and we'll cover all of them below.

Filling the Add form

Working from the top of the Add tab down:

• Name field with autocomplete. Start typing and Herculog suggests exercises from two sources: your own logging history and the built-in exercise list. Your usual lifts surface after a couple of letters.
• History bubbles. Once you've picked an exercise you've logged before, your past sessions appear as bubbles. Tap a past weight to prefill the whole form from that session — sets, reps, weight, the lot. Tap the row itself to prefill from your most recent session. This is the single biggest time-saver in the app: for a repeat workout, logging becomes tap, adjust, Add.
• Sets, Reps, Weight. The core numbers. Decimals are supported, so 22.5 kg dumbbells and microloaded plates log exactly as lifted.
• Kg vs lb. The Metric chip switches the unit for this entry. It's per-entry, not a global setting — so a kg barbell session and an lb dumbbell rack can live in the same log honestly.
• Muscle group. For known exercises this fills in automatically; for anything Herculog doesn't recognize, set it manually so your muscle-split chart stays accurate.
• Date and time picker. Entries default to now, but you can back-log past workouts — yesterday's session you logged on paper, or last week's hotel-gym improvisation. Pick the date and time and it lands in your history where it belongs.

The optional chips

Four optional extras turn a bare number into a complete record:

• Warmup. Flag a set-group as warmup work and it's logged — part of your history — but excluded from all metrics and PRs. Your 60 kg warmup will never dilute your charts or masquerade as a record.
• Bilateral / Unilateral. Mark whether the work was two-limbed or single-limb, so split squats and single-arm rows are tracked for what they are.
• RPE 1–10. Rate how hard the set felt. It takes one tap and pays off for months — an "80 kg × 5 @ 7" tells future-you the weight should go up. New to the scale? Read RPE Explained.
• Notes. A place for how this session went: "paused reps," "left shoulder cranky," "new gym, stiff bar." Notes never carry forward when you prefill from history — that's by design. A note describes one day, not every future day.

Personal Record alerts

Herculog checks every non-warmup entry against your history the moment you log it, and two alerts can fire:

• 🏆 New all-time PR! — this entry beats the best you've ever logged for that exercise. The big one.
• 💪 New 3-month best! — not an all-time record, but better than anything you've done in the last three months. The "you're back" alert after a layoff, and the drumbeat of a good training block.

These are the live, at-the-bar versions of Herculog's record tracking. The full picture — records across 3-month, 6-month, 1-year, and lifetime windows — lives in the Metrics tab, covered in Metrics, Charts & Personal Records.

Editing and deleting entries

Fat-fingered the weight? Logged 3 sets when you did 4? Every entry stays editable:

1. Go to Home and tap the day on the calendar.
2. Tap the set card you want to change.
3. The edit form opens — make your changes and tap Save, back out with Cancel, or remove the entry entirely with Delete.

The same edit form is also reachable from the other direction: Metrics → an exercise's History list. Handy when you spot the bad data point on a chart rather than a calendar. For the full tour of the calendar and day view, see The Home Calendar & Summaries.

Speed tips

The habits that get the phone out of your hand fastest:

• Prefill from the bubbles. For any exercise you've done before, tap a history bubble instead of typing numbers. Adjust what changed, tap Add, done.
• Double-tap the Add tab to clear the form and start fresh — no hunting for a reset button.
• Use the keyboard's Done button to dismiss the keyboard and get back to the form in one tap.