A six-week cycle, configured once, validated before each session.

Training history

What you log is what the program can use.

Margin's session logging is not an optional record-keeping feature. It is the data layer that allows the program to build on itself. When you log a strength session, you record the actual weights you used against the effort descriptors, the number of reps you completed, and whether the session ran in full or was cut short. That record becomes the basis for how subsequent sessions and cycles are constructed.

The effort descriptor system works as follows: rather than being assigned a specific weight without context, you are given a description of how the set should feel — challenging but completable, with a specific number of reps in reserve. You select the actual weight that matches that description based on how you are feeling that day. This keeps load decisions grounded in real data from your body, not in assumptions a model would make if it were choosing for you.

Conditioning sessions are logged differently: duration completed, any relevant modifications, whether the session matched the prescribed structure. For bike intervals or run intervals, the structure is the key variable — the modality, the work periods, the rest periods.

Incomplete sessions are logged as such. If you train three of five sessions in a given week, all three are logged. The program accounts for what was done, not what was planned. Over time, the history of what you have actually completed is more useful than a record that assumes perfect adherence.

Movement exclusions: ruling out what doesn't work for you.

Margin's equipment configuration model handles what you own. The movement exclusion model handles what you cannot or choose not to do. If a specific movement causes pain or is otherwise off the table — overhead pressing after a shoulder injury, for example, or barbell back squatting due to a hip restriction — you exclude it. The program writes around it, substituting another movement that targets the same pattern within the constraint of your available equipment.

Movement exclusions are not a workaround for a limitation in the system. They are a designed feature. The practical constraints that shape real training — past injuries, structural restrictions, pain on specific loading patterns — are the norm, not the exception, for the adults Margin is built for. A program that does not account for them is not a program that runs indefinitely.

What happens at the end of a six-week cycle.

At the end of each six-week cycle, Margin generates a fresh program for the next cycle. The new cycle is not simply a repeat of the previous one. Your training history — what you lifted, how many reps you completed, which sessions you finished — informs how the next cycle is structured. Where progress was clear, the next cycle builds on it. Where adaptation was limited by logged history, the next cycle accounts for that.

This is the mechanism by which Margin runs indefinitely without becoming stale. Each cycle is generated from where you actually are, not from where a static template assumes you are. The six-week structure repeats; the content within it does not.

There is no designated end point. You do not "finish" Margin and move on to something else. When a cycle ends, a new one begins. The program is designed for the person who intends to train for the rest of their life — not the person who is training toward a specific event and then stopping.