Hevy, Strava and Strong are all built around efficiency and measurable improvement. Hevy logs sets, reps and weight, draws the history as rising graphs, and adds likes, sharing and a compare function on top. Every one of those choices assumes that real training is tracked, and that progress means more.

If your training does not fit that shape, there is no way to change the starting point and no way to opt out of your earlier numbers. The app shows decline or stagnation instead. That is not a neutral tool. It is a design that decides who counts as a real user.

• Four interviews with women who train, two of them living with muscular dystrophy. Those two were run by the group member who has the condition herself, which made the conversations more personal.
• A logbook of her own Hevy sessions: the sensory, emotional and motivational side of training.
• Removal as a method: a session without the app, to see how closely it had become tied to the training itself.
• Three design critiques with fellow students and supervisors. After the first two, Crazy 8’s, eight sketches in eight minutes, to get above the details again.

The redesign rests on two criteria. The first is flexibility: structure, visualisations and expectations that can be adjusted, so training starts from the user’s actual situation.

Onboarding now includes a heart. Under Physical circumstances, a user can note an injury, a chronic illness or reduced capacity, and the heart by their profile picture fills in. Those who would rather not simply leave it out.

Training periods let a user start fresh, so they are never confronted with what they could do before. One participant put it plainly: she had not wanted to be confronted with the fact that she could no longer do what she used to. Another, without a disability, wanted the same function for periods with less motivation. The data view is also a choice: progress does not have to be drawn as an upward line.

Hevy’s social layer is built for comparison. What the participants with muscular dystrophy wanted was recognition: to follow others and be part of a group with the same or similar problems. So instead of the compare logic, the redesign introduces forums for specific groups. One participant already had a message group with friends who share the condition, and explained why it mattered: when they say well done, it means more, because they know how hard it was to get there. In the evaluation she said the forums would be the primary reason to use the app.

Two critiques in a row asked the same question: had the redesign grown so wide that an app made only for people with muscular dystrophy would serve them better? It is a fair point, since designing for everyone can mean losing the people you started with. But the material said otherwise. Our participants wanted to be part of the training community everyone else is in, and that community is Hevy. So we redesigned the app to hold people with and without a disability, rather than build a separate one.

The sunflower, the Hidden Disabilities symbol on the special entry point, stayed after some discussion, and the category list was made broader so that nobody would fail to find themselves in it.

The expo settled it. Several of the testers were already Hevy users, and they had missed training periods and alternative graphs themselves, since injuries and periods of low motivation sit badly with Hevy as it is. Ideas that began with people with a physical disability turned out to be for a much broader group.

• Moving beyond the performance paradigm makes a training app more inclusive.
• The evaluation supported it on flexibility, forums and training periods.
• The line to walk: making bodily circumstances visible and categorised touches identity and motivation, and has to be done with care.
• Tested as an A/B session with two participants, one with muscular dystrophy and one without, before the third critique and the expo. The redesign was revised after both.