Is it bad to train harder than your program says on a deload week?

A lifter on a deliberately light deload week, with a target effort of RIR 4 meaning stop with plenty left in the tank, trained harder than that anyway. The app scored the session a perfect 100. The coach, in the same conversation, told him to pull the load back. The score and the coaching advice disagreed, and the score was wrong.

Why "hit your target" isn't always the same question

A target RIR can show up in your program for two different reasons, and they don't mean the same thing when you beat them. Sometimes the block deliberately chose an easy week, a deload planned weeks in advance to let fatigue dissipate, and pushing harder than that misses the point of the week. Other times there's no active block, and the target is just a general guess based on your stated goal. In that case, training harder than a guess isn't a mistake — it's just outperforming an estimate.

The bug treated both cases the same: hit the number, get full credit, no matter which kind of number it was. That's how overshooting a deload week could score a perfect 100 while the coaching advice said the opposite.

The fix

The score now knows the difference. A stamped block-week target is a real prescription. Overshooting it counts against you, the same way undershooting would, because both mean you didn't train the week as programmed. A goal-based guess, with no active block behind it, stays a guess, where beating it is fine.

The coaching narrative and the number on the chart now agree. A deload week pushed too hard shows up as a real mark against the score, not a contradiction between what the coach says and what the chart records.

Part of why Yield's numbers are actually trustworthy.

Yield Strength is in beta on TestFlight. Read more about what makes it different, or join the waitlist to try it yourself.