No two lifters are the same, and no two training journeys are the same. Whether you’re chasing the podium at a high-level powerlifting meet, looking to hit your next garage gym PR, or balancing strength training with bodybuilding training, you need a plan specific to you and your goals. That’s where Evolve comes in.
Evolve provides personalized training programs designed to adapt to your needs while offering the flexibility to adjust your workouts in real time. This means you’ll always be training productively, even when life throws you curveballs. With a foundation built on tested training principles like progressive overload and fatigue management, Evolve ensures you’re not only making gains but doing so sustainably.
In this article, we’ll examine how Evolve creates and adapts your training program. From the initial onboarding process to weekly adjustments and long-term planning, you’ll see how our team has blended a tested Expert System with feedback-driven improvements and lifter input. Let’s dive in.
Evolve’s Expert System Ensures Adherence to Training Principles
At the heart of Evolve is an Expert System (1) designed to provide personalized training that adheres to key training principles such as progressive overload, specificity, and fatigue management while adapting to your goals, time availability, fatigue, and progress. But it doesn’t stop there—Evolve gives you the flexibility and autonomy to make adjustments along the way, ensuring the program fits your needs, not forcing you to fit into a program that claims to be all-knowing. Our team believes that effort applied to a training plan built upon tested training principles that adapt to you over time while being sustainable and flexible is where your potential is achieved.
There’s no shortage of trends or seemingly exciting training methods that pop up. Through the trends and hype, Evolve will anchor you to the principles that have and will continue to work. With that said, our value for evolving is in our name; we aim to gain new insights, challenge our beliefs, and benefit from never-ending improvements in the field. The recent rebrand of Evolve represents this value (2).
The last couple of decades have been a renaissance in strength training research. PubMed, a popular database for research articles, returns 397 results for the search term “Resistance Training” from 2004 and 3,929 from 2024 — a 990% increase! Beyond that, research designs and methods have become dramatically more applicable to lifters. Therefore, we believewe believe your training should benefit from the thousands of articles published each year. This does not mean unthinkingly applying research results but instead evolving our understanding of the underlying principles as new insights are gained and applying them with a coach’s lens into our Expert System—the result: the best possible training program for your goals.
While research-derived principles can inform a theoretical training program, results are made in real life, in the gym, one rep at a time. This is alongside unpredictability with other life commitments and training obstacles such as aches and pains. That’s why our team designed our Expert System with a coach’s lens, ensuring the lifter always comes first. This starts the first time you use Evolve; the app asks for key information, which starts applying these principles for you.
Key Factors Evolve Considers
Initial Questionnaire
Evolve begins by collecting biological and historical data to personalize your training program. Factors such as body mass, height, sex, goals, and training history are crucial in determining the starting points for your program. For example, larger lifters generally experience greater systemic fatigue and recovery demands, leading the system to adjust the training workload to ensure sustainable progress.
Weak Point Analysis
Many factors contribute to strength gains, but they can be consolidated into “muscle-centric” and “nervous system-centric”. The former does not necessarily apply to general muscularity, but instead applies to the “weakest link in the chain”. Therefore, the system will determine the muscle most likely to limit your strength for each squat, bench press, and deadlift and ensure sufficient stimulus is applied to improve force capacity over time.
Volume Requirements
Training volume, defined as the number of sets per muscle group or per lift per week, is analogous to the dosage of medicine; the system provides a starting point that evolves over time. Evolve estimates your Minimum Effective Volume (MEV) and Maximum Recoverable Volume (MRV). These act as guideposts for your program, with MEV representing the minimum workload needed to make progress and MRV defining the upper limit of what you can recover from. Evolve dynamically adjusts these values based on your biological data, training feedback, and progress, allowing the program to evolve with you over time. This evidence-based approach ensures you’re always working within an optimal training range to maximize results while minimizing fatigue and the risk of overtraining.
Evolve’s approach to training volume is evidence-informed and feedback-driven. The latest research has been consulted to inform each lifter’s starting point, but dynamic program adjustments refine volume in the short and long term.
Dynamic Program Adjustments
Readiness & Fatigue
Evolve adapts to your daily fluctuations in readiness and fatigue, ensuring your training stays effective and sustainable. By collecting daily readiness inputs—such as sleep quality, soreness, and stress levels—the program fine-tunes volume and workload variables on a day-to-day basis. This dynamic adjustment prevents overtraining on tough days while maximizing progress when you’re feeling your best.
End-of-week and end-of-block check-ins
At the end of each week and training block, Evolve collects feedback to assess your performance, recovery, and overall fatigue levels. These check-ins allow the system to recalibrate key variables like volume and intensity.
Periodization
Why Periodize Training?
Periodization can be defined as a logical method of organizing training into sequential phases and cyclical time periods in order to increase the potential for achieving specific performance goals (3). In other words, periodization ensures a sufficient stimulus for the factors contributing to your next personal record. Further, periodized training decreases monotony, which may reduce injury risk.
Block Structure
Evolve uses periodization on multiple time scales, but the most notable is on the level of the training block. A training block is 3-8 weeks and often has a specific purpose. For example, a lifter in the final weeks of training before a powerlifting meet will likely be in a ‘strength’ or ‘peaking’ block, meaning the main goal of the training is to maximize short-term performance. This is opposed to ‘work capacity’ or ‘hypertrophy’ training blocks, which typically precede ‘strength’ or ‘peaking’ blocks and emphasize adaptations such as muscle growth that will enhance the strength potential of the lifter.
Empowering the Lifter
Encouraging Training Skill
While Evolve uses a principle-based Expert System based on the latest research and extensive, ongoing program personalization, no system is perfect. Consider a world-class powerlifting coach — they may know more than anyone else in the world about program design, but they will also ask for input from their lifters, which ensures autonomy and sustainability. Further, elite coaches encourage the use of autoregulation, which is the dynamic adjustment of training variables by the lifters themselves. Evolve is a massive leap forward because it provides guided autoregulation; the guesswork is removed because the aforementioned factors provide day-to-day program adjustments. However, this guided autoregulation is not sufficient, and the Evolve team has recently placed a larger emphasis on encouraging Training Skills. Training Skill reflects an understanding of the goal of a training session, listening to your body, and “picking your spots” based on these factors. While the system will get you there most of the time, it is not in your shoes; therefore, you have the final say.
For example, if a lifter is time-limited, our add/drop set feature allows them to reduce the set volume where they see fit. Previously, lifters may have felt like they were going “off program” if they didn’t adhere to exactly what the program said. Now, lifters are empowered to lean into and continually develop their training skills.
Evolve’s recent rebrand reflects an emphasis on Training Skills, which our team believes top-level lifters have, instead of forcing themselves to work within a rigid program that may lead to psychological burnout or injury.
Drag-and-Drop Split Feature
We’ve also empowered the lifter with our new drag-and-drop split feature. Evolve’s extensive database has hundreds of possible splits, but we understand this may not cover every situation. Therefore, Evolve can now accommodate countless combinations of squat, bench press, and deadlift, and accessory training. This feature allows lifters to ensure the program fits their needs, not vice versa.
Visual Insights
Evolve’s visual insights feature allows lifters to gain a clear understanding of their progress through intuitive data visualization. By tracking metrics such as weekly volume, readiness scores, fatigue trends, and strength improvements, lifters can observe patterns and make informed decisions about their training. These insights not only foster excitement about ongoing progress but also help identify areas that may need adjustment.
Additionally, these visual tools empower lifters to connect daily actions with long-term outcomes, improving decision-making and reinforcing the effectiveness of the program. Whether it’s celebrating milestones or spotting trends to refine their approach, our visual insights provide lifters with the tools to take ownership of their training journey.
Wrapping It Up
Evolve is designed to provide a thoughtful, adaptable approach to training, combining research-backed principles with the flexibility to meet individual needs. Balancing structured guidance with room for personal adjustments ensures that your training remains effective and sustainable over time. Whether you’re pursuing strength, muscle growth, or simply consistency, Evolve helps you stay on track while adapting to the challenges and changes of your journey.
Footnotes
- An Expert System is a type of AI designed to mimic the decision-making abilities of a human expert in a particular domain. While AI remains a core component of Evolve, our team is constantly adapting our perspective on training and the role of mobile applications. As a result, we’ve recently rebranded from ‘EvolveAI’ to ‘Evolve’—dropping the AI in our branding to emphasize the control the system now provides.
- We’ve recently added new team members to ensure Evolve stays on the cutting edge! Stay tuned.
- This definition is from a 2017 meta-analysis by William and colleagues.
