The paper workout log my bots run

Rebecca and I work out from paper sheets that one of my AI bots writes and prints every week. I fill mine in with a pencil as I go, take one photo of it when I’m done, and send that photo back to the bot. It logs every lift and uses the log to pick next week’s weights. There’s no app to tap through between sets and no spreadsheet for me to keep up.

Here’s how the loop works and what the first two weeks of pencil marks show.

How the loop works

The bot that runs it is Home Bot, the one that handles family and house stuff in my fleet of AI bots. Each week a small Python script on our always-on Mac mini builds a pack: one sheet for me and one for Rebecca for every training day. Each sheet fits on a single letter page, and the pack prints on the color laser printer connected to the Mac mini.

We print once, on Sunday, for the whole week. The only time it reprints mid-week is when a skipped day or an injury changes the plan.

Every sheet lists the lifts with sets and reps, a blank for the weight I actually used, a yes or no box for whether every rep was clean, and a spot to circle easy or hard. Under the table are short how-to notes for each move, so nobody has to remember setup cues mid-workout.

After a session I photograph the sheet and send it to Home Bot. It reads the pencil marks and logs one row per lift to a progress file. When a mark isn’t clear, it asks me instead of guessing.

That’s one of my real sheets. I swapped the first lift for a bent over row and changed the hip thrust to single leg, and wrote both right on the page. That’s the nice thing about pencil: the plan bends, and the record still matches what I did.

The rule that sets next week

The progress rule is short. If every rep was clean and it felt easy, the weight goes up one step next week: 10 pounds on barbell squats, deadlifts and hip thrusts, and 5 pounds on everything else, per hand for dumbbells. If not, it holds. Any lift with no log yet starts as a baseline, picked so I finish with about two reps left in the tank.

Training runs in four week blocks. Weeks one to three build, and week four is a deload at about 90 percent plus a test. The first block is straight sets, six sets of six. The blocks after that move to supersets, then heavy fives, then tri-sets. Strength sessions stay around 40 minutes with no more than four main lifts, and the script flags any sheet that looks like it will run long.

The week looks like this:

• Monday: legs, anchored by squats and deadlifts
• Tuesday: upper body push and pull
• Wednesday: interval conditioning
• Thursday: back, pull and glutes
• Friday: arms in tri-sets, plus core
• Saturday: full-body circuit
• Sunday: optional 10 minutes of mobility

One bench, two people

We share one Rogue bench, and it’s the bottleneck. I get priority on it, so the script reorders Rebecca’s moves to keep her off the bench while I’m on it. If we still overlap, we alternate sets: I go first, and she does hers during my rest. Rebecca’s sheets lean on dumbbells, kettlebells, bands and bodyweight.

The gear is a Rogue squat rack, an Olympic bar and plates, an adjustable curl bar, the bench, a pull-up bar, a dip station, two sets of dumbbells, two kettlebells, bands and a mat. There’s no cable machine.

What two weeks of pencil marks show

Only what’s in the log:

• Pull-ups: my best set went from 10 to 12 to 14 in eight days.
• Barbell bench: 115 pounds for six sets of six, then 125 pounds for six sets of six a week later.
• Squat and deadlift: baselines of 100 and 115 pounds for six sets of six. The next targets are 105 and 125.

It’s early, and those are the only numbers I’ll put here. What I like is that next week’s weights are already printed on the sheet, set from last week’s photo.

What isn’t automated yet

The plan describes an automation that would build the Sunday pack and take in my photos on its own. That isn’t live. Right now Home Bot builds each pack on the Mac mini itself, and I send the photos by hand.

If you want to see the rest of the setup behind my bots and cameras, it’s on Uses.