Hevy, Strava, Strong — 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” button 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 old numbers. You get 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 living with muscular dystrophy, run by the group member who has it herself.
• One logbook of her own Hevy sessions: the sensory, the emotional, the motivational.
• Removal as a method: a session without the app, to see how tangled up with the training it had become.
• Three design critiques. After the first two, Crazy 8’s — eight sketches in eight minutes — to get back above the details.

The redesign rests on two criteria. The first is flexibility: structure, visualisations and expectations you can adjust, so training starts from your actual situation.

A heart in onboarding. Under Physical circumstances you can note an injury, a chronic illness or reduced capacity; do that, and the heart by your profile picture fills in. Or leave it out. Training periods let you start fresh, so you are never confronted with what you could do before — “I haven’t wanted to be confronted with the fact that I can’t do what I used to,” as one participant put it; another, without a disability, wanted the same thing “in a period with less motivation”. And the data view is yours to pick: progress does not have to be 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 would be great.” So instead of compare, forums for specific groups. One participant already had a message group with friends who share the condition, and explained why it mattered: when they write “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 it”.

Two critiques in a row asked the same thing: had the redesign grown so wide that an app made only for people with muscular dystrophy would serve them better? Fair point — designing for everyone can mean losing the people you started with. But the material said otherwise. Our participants wanted to be in 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 behind the special entry point — stayed, after an argument; the category list got broader, so nobody would fail to find themselves in it.

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

• Move beyond the performance paradigm, and a training app gets more inclusive.
• The evaluation backed it: flexibility, forums, training periods.
• The line to walk: making bodily circumstances visible and categorised touches identity and motivation. Handle 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. Revised after both.