By the time you finish this, your cardio and your steps will sit in the same place as your lifts. Each one with a number you can actually beat.

Here is the first thing to hold on to. There is one dropdown menu inside Hevy that decides whether your cardio is training or a diary entry, and most people never scroll far enough to see it.

Look at these two entries. Elliptical, 45 minutes. Elliptical, 20 minutes, 4.1 kilometers. Same person, same machine, same week. Nothing changed.

Now tell me, which one of those can you beat next Tuesday?

Sit with that question, because it is the whole thing.

The verse this sits on

Proverbs 27:23. "Know well the condition of your flocks, and give attention to your herds."

A shepherd who cannot tell how many sheep he has is not a shepherd. He is a man standing near sheep.

That is not a verse about spreadsheets. It is a verse about your attention. What you have been given, you are supposed to look at, not obsess over. Just look at it. Bring awareness.

You cannot take care of something you refuse to look at. Right now, most of you are looking at half your training and pretending the other half does not exist, and then wondering why the other half never improves.

Emily's new problem

Meet Emily. 38, HR, two kids. A few weeks ago she did something hard. She cut her cardio from five sessions a week to two, stopped grinding out 45 minutes on the elliptical at 5:15am, started walking more instead, and protected her three lifting days.

It worked. More energy, all three lifts moving, the scale finally moving.

Now she has a new problem, and it is a good problem nobody warns you about. She has two cardio sessions a week she genuinely chooses to do. Twenty five minutes on the bike Tuesday, twenty minutes Thursday with eight hard minutes in the middle.

And she has no idea if either one is getting better.

She knows her squat went from 95 pounds to 135. She could tell you that in her sleep. The cardio is gone, the moment she steps off the machine.

Give it four months. Emily starts to think the cardio is not doing anything, because nothing she can see has changed. Eventually she drops it, and the thing she dropped was the part taking care of her heart.

That is the actual cost. Not a messy app. You quit the training you cannot see.

Three lies about why your cardio isn't in there

I have heard all three. I have believed at least one myself.

Lie one: Hevy is a lifting app, cardio doesn't really belong in there. Half of you have a second app for cardio. Be honest about the last time you actually opened it.

Hevy is built for lifting, that part is true, and it is the best in the world at sets and reps. But watch what that belief does. Your training splits into two piles. Pile one is in Hevy, has history, has records, you look at it every session. Pile two is an app you downloaded in January and open twice.

Training you cannot see is training you stop doing. Not because you're lazy. Because there is no feedback. Nothing pushes back, nothing tells you that you did better. I tried Strava. Fantastic for outdoor sports, not great for running, and syncing it separately meant logging in twice for one workout. I don't open it anymore because I'm not running.

Lie two: I do log my cardio, 45 minutes on the elliptical is in there. It is in there, the way a receipt is in a shoe box.

Ask the question from the top again. What are you going to beat next week? 45 minutes, so you do 46. Is 46 better? You could do 46 minutes moving slower than this week and the number would be bigger while you got worse. There is nothing to chase in that entry. You wrote down that time passed while you stood on a machine.

Lie three: I need Hevy to count my steps, and since it doesn't, step tracking has to live in a separate app I never open. Flat answer, no suspense. Hevy will never count your steps. That is not what it is for. Hevy sends your workouts to Apple Health or Health Connect, it does not reach back and grab your step count.

That turns out to be good news, and I am coming back to why.

Why the same app does nothing for your cardio

Same app, same screen, same you. Here is the actual mechanism.

Hevy does not make you stronger. Hevy has never made anyone stronger. Beating last week's number makes you stronger. Hevy just takes last week's number and puts it on the screen where you cannot avoid seeing it while you are setting up your first set.

Compare last week's performance to this week. That is the entire product. Progressive overload, made visible.

For cardio, you have that mechanism switched off, because a number you cannot beat is not a target. It is a diary entry.

Say it with me. 45 minutes is a diary entry. 4.1 kilometers in 20 minutes is a target. Specific. Precise.

Cardio becomes training the moment it has a number you are trying to beat.

The dropdown

When you create a custom exercise in Hevy, it asks what type it is. Weight and reps, bodyweight, weight and bodyweight, assisted bodyweight, duration, duration and weight, distance and duration, weight and distance.

Most people scroll past without reading it, because they are used to creating lifts, where the first option is always right. For cardio, the first option is wrong.

The one you want is distance and duration.

Pick duration only, and all Hevy can ever show you is how long you were on the machine. A diary entry, forever, and you cannot fix it later without redoing the entire exercise.

Pick distance and duration, and something completely different happens. Hevy starts keeping your best pace, your longest distance, your longest time. It graphs them. It tells you when you break one, right there in the session, exactly the way it flags a lifting PR.

One dropdown. Two seconds. That is the difference between four months of cardio you can see and four months you cannot.

Log it, name it, beat it

Three words, no notes required.

Log it. Cardio goes inside the same Hevy workout as your lifting. Not a second app, not a different day. Finish your last set, scroll down, add the cardio to the same session, hit finish once, one place. If it lives somewhere you don't open, it does not exist. That is not motivational, that is a fact about your phone.

Name it. When you build the exercise, pick distance and duration. The step everyone skips, and the only one you cannot fix later without starting over.

Beat it. Before you start, look at the left side of the screen where Hevy shows your last time. Pick one thing to beat. Same distance in less time, or more distance in the same time. Not both. Chase both and you half chase each one and beat neither.

Progressive overload. Same principle as lifting. This time it is your heart doing the pumping.

Why steps get their own number, and Hevy not counting them is correct

Your steps are not a workout. They are a background number, coming from how you live across 16 waking hours, not from a thing you decided to do for 20 minutes. Your phone already counts them for free, whether you ask it to or not.

The mistake I see constantly is trying to log steps daily inside a training app. It fails every time, for the same reason. You are asking yourself to open an app and type a number on a Saturday when you did nothing structured. Nobody keeps that up. Two weeks and it's dead.

Here is what actually works. Once a week, one number. Sunday night, open your phone's health app, look at your weekly step average, and put that single number into Hevy.

The trick: build a custom exercise called weekly steps, set the type to distance and duration, same as your cardio, then put your step average into the distance box. Hevy will label that box kilometers or miles. Ignore it completely. You are borrowing the box, because it is the only field in the app that takes a large number with a decimal and draws a line on a graph.

8,400 steps goes in as 8.4. That is your week. Six weeks in, you have something almost nobody has, a single line showing whether the way you are living is producing more movement or less. Not a daily guilt number. A trend.

The free plan is enough

The free version of Hevy allows seven custom exercises. Everything described here needs three. Easy cardio, hard cardio, weekly steps. You have four spare.

Nobody watching needs to pay for anything to do this. This is not a sponsored video, Hevy does not sponsor me. This is what I actually use.

One honest limit worth knowing now rather than in December. On the free plan, graphs go back about three months. For lifting, three months is usually fine, your bench moves fast enough to see it in that window. For cardio, three months is tighter, because cardio improves slowly and quietly. The gap between your first easy bike session and a genuinely fitter version of you is more like a six to nine month picture. If you get a year into this and want the full line, that is when Pro becomes worth it. Not today.

Building the three exercises

Exercise one: easy cardio. Type: distance and duration. This is your recovery session, bike, rower, incline walk, whatever you enjoy. Do what you enjoy, that is the most important thing about cardio.

Exercise two: hard cardio. Type: distance and duration. Same machine is fine, but it needs to be a separate exercise entry. Your hard sessions and your easy sessions can never share a graph, or the line goes up and down like a heartbeat and tells you nothing. Easy and hard get their own line, always.

Exercise three: weekly steps. Type: distance and duration, the borrowed box. Equipment: none. Primary muscle group: cardio.

For the time field on weekly steps, use your total waking hours for the week as a placeholder, roughly 16 hours a day times 7. For the distance field, enter your weekly step average as a decimal, 8,400 becomes 8.4. You can add a note with the date range so you remember which week it was.

Ten minutes, one time, and it runs itself for years.

What it looks like in practice

Emily lifts. Last set done. Instead of hitting finish, she scrolls down, taps add exercise, picks easy cardio. Rides 20 minutes. Screen says 9.1 kilometers. She logs 25 and 9.1, hits finish. One workout, one entry, lifting and cardio together.

Thursday, same thing with hard cardio. Hevy shows her last Thursday on the left, 6.2 kilometers. Her job is one number: beat 6.2.

Sunday night, she opens her health app, sees her weekly average, 8,400 steps, opens Hevy, logs 8.4 under weekly steps. Two seconds, done.

She did not add a single minute of training. She added about ten minutes of one time setup and twenty seconds a week.

Eight weeks later she can answer a question she could not answer before. Is the cardio getting better? Yes. 6.2 to 6.6 kilometers on the same 20 minutes. Not a feeling. A line on a screen.

Two things to watch

Do not let the number take over the plan. If you are chasing a faster time on your easy session every single week, that session stops being easy. The entire reason it exists is that it is easy, and it protects your lifting days. Beat the number on your hard day. Let the easy day stay easy.

And if you are coming back from an injury, or your knees or hips are talking to you, the number is not the priority. This is education, not medical advice, and I am not your doctor. Get checked by someone qualified before you build any of this into your week.

The bigger question

Which one of the three mistakes were you making? Cardio living in a separate app you don't open, the 45 minute diary entry, or the steps question?

And a bigger one. What is the one part of your training right now that you genuinely cannot see? Not cardio, something else. Sleep, food, how much you actually walk on a workday. I would guess most of us have one, and I would guess it is the one that has not moved in a year, because you cannot improve what you don't track.

Go back to the two lines at the top. 45 minutes. 4.1 kilometers in 20 minutes. The difference is not the effort, Emily worked the same on both. The difference is that one of them can be beaten.

​Log it. Name it. Beat it. Ten minutes today, and it runs itself for years.