What can I actually control through the assistant?
Five things, mostly: equipment access, injury or pain flags, exercise rotation, muscle-group priorities, and weekly training frequency. These map to real settings pages in the app — Equipment, Health Notes, Exercise Preferences, Priorities, and Schedule — but I almost never open those pages directly anymore. I just say what's true about my week and the assistant reads it back into the right place.
This matters because most training apps I've tried bury these controls three menus deep. FlexFit's bet, from what I can tell using it daily, is that a chat interface has a lower floor (you don't need to know where anything lives) without lowering the ceiling (the settings are still there, still precise, still yours to fine-tune manually if you want).
How do I tell it what equipment I have?
I just say it plainly: 'I only have dumbbells and a bench at home' or 'no barbell this week, hotel gym has machines only.' The assistant swaps out anything requiring equipment I don't have and substitutes the closest movement pattern it can find — dumbbell floor press instead of barbell bench, goblet squats instead of back squats. I checked the Equipment settings page afterward and it had updated automatically, listed exactly as I described it.
What I like is that it's reversible in the same sentence. When I got back to my regular gym, I texted 'I'm back home, full gym again' and it reverted without me hunting for a toggle.
How do I flag an injury or sore spot?
I say something like 'my shoulder's sore, no overhead pressing' and the assistant removes overhead work and, in my experience, tends to favor lateral raises or lighter angled pressing instead — never a hard vertical push. This goes into what the app calls Health Notes, which I've found stays there until I say it's resolved. I've made this same kind of injury note maybe four times over the past year (a cranky elbow, a sore knee, two shoulder flare-ups) and each time it stuck exactly as long as I needed it to.
I don't treat this as medical advice, and neither does the app — it's just pain-avoidance routing, not diagnosis. If something's seriously wrong I go see someone, obviously.
How do I get more variety or rotate exercises?
If I'm bored of an exercise, I just say so. 'I'm sick of leg press, give me something else for quads' usually gets me a Bulgarian split squat or a hack squat swap the next session. This is the Exercise Preferences setting, and from what I've read in Greg Nuckols's writing on exercise selection at Stronger by Science, rotating movements every so often can help with both boredom and hitting a muscle from a slightly different angle — though he's also clear that novelty for its own sake isn't a substitute for consistent effort on a smaller set of lifts.
How do I shift muscle-group priorities, like more chest or less legs?
I say it exactly like that: 'more chest, less legs.' The assistant reallocates sets — more chest volume, fewer leg sets — and I've watched my weekly set totals shift in the Priorities page afterward, usually within a session or two, not instantly mid-workout. I ran this experiment on purpose for about six weeks last year, bumping chest volume up by roughly 30% while trimming legs down, mostly out of vanity before a trip. It worked the way I'd expect basic volume manipulation to work — more sets, more local fatigue, more growth stimulus for that muscle, less for the other.
How do I change my weekly schedule?
'Make it 3 days a week' is the one I've used most, usually after a busy month shows up on my calendar. The assistant redistributes my split across fewer sessions — combining what used to be a push day and a pull day, for instance — rather than just deleting a day's worth of work. This lives in the Schedule setting, and I've gone as low as 2 days and as high as 6 depending on the season, always through the same kind of plain-language request.
Do I ever need to open the actual settings pages?
Honestly, rarely — but I still do it maybe once a month, mostly out of curiosity or to double-check something I said a while back actually stuck. The pages are there, fully editable by hand, with every field the assistant would touch also exposed directly. I think of the assistant as the front door and the settings pages as the rooms behind it — you can always walk in through either one.
Does saying things in different words still work?
Yes, in my experience — I've phrased the same request differently across weeks ('cut my training days down' vs. 'make it 3 days a week') and gotten the same result both times. It's not a fixed command list, more like the assistant is mapping intent to the closest matching setting. That said, being specific (naming the muscle group, the exercise, or the exact day count) has always gotten me faster, more accurate changes than vague phrasing.