A missed week of the gym costs you nothing in Zyra Workouts: the program is a sequence of cycles, not a calendar, so no day is rescheduled, no target is regenerated and no penalty is applied. The only thing the app learns from is the next session you log — and if that session falls short of a target's rep floor, the progression engine steps the load down one increment for the time after. What a week actually costs in training terms is a separate question, and this page keeps the two apart.
Zyra Workouts is in development and not yet on the App Store; the screens described here may change before release.
What a week actually costs
Honestly: this site does not tell you what happens inside your body during a week off. Zyra Workouts is a training log; it measures what you lift, not what you are made of, and no page here makes a claim about muscle, strength or anything else changing over seven days.
What the log can tell you is what a week costs *in the plan*:
| What | Effect of a missed week |
|---|---|
| Program schedule | none — the next unfinished day of the current cycle is still next |
| Cycle targets | none — cycle 3's RIR is still cycle 3's RIR when you get there |
| Records (1-RM, volume, reps) | none — nothing expires |
| Weekly set counts | the missed week shows as zero sets; the current week starts fresh on Monday |
| Progression recommendations | unchanged until you log a session; then rebuilt from that session |
| Trajectory (30-day e1RM) | only sessions inside the window count; a gap simply leaves fewer of them |
That last row deserves a note: the dashboard's trajectory label needs at least two sessions of an exercise in the last 30 days to show a percentage. Come back after a long gap and it reads 0% until there is something to compare.
Why a cycle-based program does not punish you
A cycle is one pass through the program's days. The app advances to the next day when you finish the current one, and to the next cycle when you finish the last day. There is no clock behind it. If you trained day 1 and day 2 of a three-day cycle and then missed a week, day 3 is still waiting, with the same targets it had.
This is a deliberate design: the source notes say a missed workout does "nothing, programmatically" — programs are cycle-based, so skipped days do not reschedule, penalise or regenerate the program. Resuming needs no action; you start the next unfinished day.
The RIR ramp inherits this. Effort rises by *completed* cycles, so a week off in cycle 2 does not drop you into cycle 3's harder targets on return; it leaves you in cycle 2.
In plain terms: the app's answer to "what now?" is "the same next session as before, whenever you do it".
Coming back one step lower
The progression engine has no memory of the gap. It reads the last completed working sets of each exercise — from whenever they happened — and compares each to the cycle's target. Three outcomes:
- progress — reps above the ceiling (midpoint of the rep range + RIR): add one load step
- hold — reps inside the range, at or under the ceiling: same weight
- backoff — reps below the rep floor:
weight − step, reps reset to the floor
The step depends on the equipment: for a barbell it is two of your smallest plate (2.5 kg with 1.25 kg plates), for dumbbells, machines and cables it is a fixed 2 kg, and bodyweight exercises have no load step (reps are the only lever).
Suppose your last back squat before the break was 100 kg × 8 against a 6–10 @ RIR 2 target (ceiling 10). The recommendation on return is hold: 100 kg × 8, because 8 is inside the range. You squat, and it goes 100 kg × 5. Five is under the floor of six, so the next recommendation is backoff: 97.5 kg × 6 — one plate pair off, reps back to the floor. The session after that decides again from what you actually did. The same logic on a barbell bench press at 80 kg × 4 against the same target gives 77.5 kg × 6.
Nothing in that sequence is a punishment. It is the same rule that runs every session; a short first session back is just a set of numbers it responds to. A yellow wand on the set shows the rule it applied, in the form "Last time 100 kg × 5 · target 6–10 @RIR 2 (ceiling 10) → under the rep floor, backing off to 97.5 kg × 6".
If you would rather choose the first load back yourself, two options are built in. The first-cycle deload position makes the opening cycle of each block lighter (see how to deload), and any recommendation can be overridden by typing a different weight — the engine reads what you log, not what it suggested. This is arithmetic, not a trial result: it describes what the engine does with a short session, not what a week off does to a person.
The short version
A missed week changes nothing in the program: cycles wait, records stand, targets stay. The progression engine rebuilds its recommendations from the first session you log on return; land under the rep floor and it takes one load step off (2.5 kg on a barbell, 2 kg on a stack or dumbbell) and resets reps to the floor. Prefer a gentler restart? Set the deload to the first cycle. The rules the whole program runs on are in the program guide.
Educational overview only — training guidance, not medical advice.