Cycle Tracking and Zealo: Where Things Actually Stand

This page used to be a step-by-step guide to a cycle tracking feature. It is not one any more, because cycle tracking is not part of the current App Store build.

We would rather have a short honest page than a detailed guide to something you cannot open. So this is the short honest page.

What Is Not in the Current Build

Cycle tracking is not live. There is no cycle setup, no daily cycle check-in, no phase dashboard, no cycle prediction, and no cycle history in the shipping app.

There is no cycle-adaptive coaching. Nothing in the current build reads a cycle phase and changes your training, your sets, your intensity, or your calorie and macro targets. Any description you find elsewhere of Zealo adjusting a program by cycle phase is describing something that does not ship.

There is no AI cycle coach. No feature in the current build interprets symptom entries and returns coaching.

If any of that changes, this page will be rewritten to describe what actually shipped, and only then.

Why We Are Not Documenting It Anyway

Product documentation that runs ahead of the build costs readers real time. Someone reads a setup guide, opens the app, cannot find the screen, and concludes either that they are missing something or that the app is broken. Neither is true, and neither should have happened.

It is a worse problem on a health topic. Documenting cycle-adaptive coaching as live implies the product has an opinion about how you should train around your cycle, and that opinion would be doing work in a reader's head whether or not the feature exists. That is not a claim we are prepared to make on the basis of software that has not shipped.

What the Evidence Says About Cycle-Based Training

Worth knowing regardless of what any app does, because it changes what you would want from such a feature in the first place.

The most complete synthesis available for resistance training found no influence of menstrual cycle phase on acute strength performance or on adaptations to training (Colenso-Semple et al., 2023). The broader meta-analysis of exercise performance across cycle phases reported effects that were trivial in size and drawn from low-quality studies, and recommended an individualised approach rather than a general phase-based rule (McNulty et al., 2020).

The practical version: train and recover by the symptoms and performance you actually log, not by assuming a calendar phase guarantees strength, calories, or recovery. Notice that this needs no special software. A notes app and your training log will do it.

Where to Go Instead

The education is the useful part, and it is all here:

• Menstrual cycle and training: the full four-phase picture and an honest account of what the evidence supports
• Symptom tracking: how to run a decision journal that turns energy, pain, sleep, and performance into add-load, hold, or deload calls
• Training during your period: symptom-led decisions, and which symptoms belong with a clinician
• Recovery across your cycle: what sleep and HRV averages can and cannot tell you
• Luteal phase nutrition: why a calendar calorie surplus is not supported
• Science and evidence: the references and equations behind the numbers we publish

What the App Does Do Today

The current build is a training logbook: workout logging with sets, reps, and RPE, document import for trainer-written programs, an exercise library, history and analytics, PDF export, iOS widgets, and Apple Health reads. Those are covered in the workout logging guide, the import guide, and the PDF reports guide.

Sources

• Colenso-Semple LM, D'Souza AC, Elliott-Sale KJ, Phillips SM. Current evidence shows no influence of women's menstrual cycle phase on acute strength performance or adaptations to resistance exercise training. Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, 2023.
• McNulty KL, Elliott-Sale KJ, Dolan E, et al. The effects of menstrual cycle phase on exercise performance in eumenorrheic women: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Sports Medicine, 2020.