How it works

The ladder

Ten tiers, five divisions each. Fifty rungs, from Aspirant at the bottom to Ascendant at the top. Every tier is painted, and the painting is what you see when you reach it.

It is calibrated so that a strong intermediate lifter sits around the middle with the entire top half still ahead of them. That is deliberate. A scale a committed lifter finishes in a year is a scale that was measuring attendance. This one is meant to take years, and most people will never see the top of it, which is what makes a position on it worth having.

Three pillars

Your position is not strength alone. It is a composite of three things.

Standing

Where you are against human potential. This is the strength half, scored against the published standards below.

Earned

What you actually did. Consistency, effort, and the personal records you set along the way. This is the part that rewards showing up, kept separate from the part that measures how strong you are, so neither can quietly stand in for the other.

Progress

Movement toward your declared goal, measured against your own baseline rather than against anybody else.

The weighting between the three comes from what you said you are training for. Somebody training for fat loss is scored mostly on things they can move, rather than being demoted for losing weight successfully. A powerlifter is weighted toward Standing, because that is the thing they are actually trying to change.

Where the standards come from

The strength standards are published ones, normalised allometrically. Strength is scaled to body mass by the two-thirds exponent, the approach the National Strength and Conditioning Association recommends, rather than the simple bodyweight ratio most apps use. The simple ratio systematically flatters lighter people, and a scale that is wrong in a predictable direction is worse than no scale at all.

Programming parameters follow the American College of Sports Medicine's position stand on resistance training: how sets, loads, rest and frequency are chosen for a given goal.

Every standard in the app stores the source it came from, and the app can show it to you. If you disagree with where a number sits, you can see what it is based on and judge for yourself.

Lodestar is principle-based and traceable to published sources. It is not a clinical instrument, it has not been validated in a trial, and it is not affiliated with any university or standards body. The references above are the literature the design follows, not an endorsement of it.

What it does not do

No calorie counting. No diet plans. No body-fat estimates. No BMI. No before-and-after photographs. No weigh-in streaks.

Lodestar measures training. Bodyweight is recorded because strength standards are relative to it and the arithmetic needs it, and that is the whole of the app's interest in your body. Everything else on that list belongs to a different kind of product, and most of them are how a fitness app ends up making someone feel worse for using it.