How TPF works.

Intensity & load

Every prescription carries a target intensity, not just sets and reps — a percentage of your 1RM on the lifts, and a target pace on the runs and intervals. Where the app doesn’t have your 1RM or race pace on file yet, it suggests one from the rep range and the prescribed reps-in-reserve. So the load is never left to guesswork: you train at the intensity the adaptation needs — heavy enough to drive the stimulus, not so light that the session fails to earn it.

Strength & hypertrophy

The TPF Effective Sets™ system credits every working set on what actually drives growth — how close to failure you went, how heavy you lifted, how long you rested, and which muscles the lift really trains. Compounds count differently from isolation. Stretch position counts differently from short. Volume landmarks — the floor, the sweet spot, the ceiling — are tuned to your training age, not pulled from a textbook average.

Strength and hypertrophy don’t grow on the same curve. The engine knows it — separate dose-response models for each, anchored to Schoenfeld 2017 (hypertrophy) and Ralston 2017 (strength), scaled to your experience level. For hybrid loads the strength volume is intentionally held lower so the conditioning can live in the same week without one cannibalising the other.

Recovery cost

Every set adds to a running fatigue total, weighed against the capacity that comes with your training age. Daily and weekly views colour the picture green, amber, red — sustainable, high, over the line. Built on the Banister fitness-fatigue model (1991), the Vanrenterghem two-pathway fatigue framework (2017), and the Foster session-RPE literature (2001+). Conditioning lands on the same scale as strength — a hard interval block or a long endurance session sits next to a heavy squat day, weighted on the same terms. Nothing is scored in isolation.

Conditioning

Every conditioning session lands across four energy systems — aerobic endurance, aerobic capacity, anaerobic capacity, anaerobic power — because a Z2 ride and a Tabata block train different things and deserve different credit. TPF Effective Mins is the unit: each session minute counts more as the work zone gets harder, so a minute at VO2max is worth roughly seven minutes of easy base work, and a minute of true sprint reps is worth eight. EPOC counts. Rest ratios count. Reps count. Built on the Edwards TRIMP framework and the Buchheit & Laursen interval-programming work.

Runs score by zone and duration. Easy mileage builds the base; tempo and threshold work hits the middle; intervals and race-pace efforts push the top end. Each rep is scored not by its RPE tag alone but by what’s happening metabolically inside it — the alactic system pays for the first thirty seconds, the VO2max system runs the next sixty, the lactate-threshold engine carries anything longer. Rucking is aerobic endurance with a load modifier — heavier kit at the same pace costs more and stimulates more.

Seven of the most-used conditioning protocols — Norwegian 4×4, Tabata, MAF Z2, Yasso 800s, hard continuous intervals, Cardiac Output Method, 5K race-pace work — are pre-validated against the engine. If your block matches one of these, you can trust the dose-response.

The cross-over

Lifting and conditioning compete for the same recovery. Heavy cardio before heavy strength dulls the strength adaptation — the engine knows it and tells you when your session order is fighting you. The interference effect is modelled per Wilson 2012 and Schumann 2022.

Fatigue doesn’t reset at midnight. Monday’s long ruck still hangs on your legs Tuesday morning. Wednesday’s intervals show up in Thursday’s tempo run. Nothing in the week is scored alone — the engine sees the whole picture.