Slant Coach guide

The first time, the app asks six questions, one screen at a time ("Step 1 of 6"). You can change everything later from the Profile.

1. Language and warnings. Italiano or English, then "Before you start": seven warnings about what the app is not. Tick "I've read them." to go on.
2. Welcome. What's your name, and which animal are you: four animals are yours from the start, the others open as you level up and with awards. Twenty-six in all. They can't be bought or lost, and you change yours any time by tapping your face in the Profile.
3. A few numbers. Sex (or "Rather not say"), age, weight and height. They're only used to estimate calories, and the app shows your resting metabolism straight away.
4. The week. How many sessions, from 2 to 6 (3 to begin with), whether to alternate them with walks, and whether to do three minutes of tai chi on walking days.
5. What time. Session time (7:00 to begin with), reminders, the one to drink, the voice guide, sounds and vibration.
6. The kitchen. A short questionnaire about how you eat, described in the Kitchen chapter.

At the bottom there are four tabs: Today, Streak, Kitchen and Profile. Settings open from the icon at the top.

"Today" tells you straight away what kind of day it is, with your level, how many sessions to the next one and the numbers of the week:

• Today it's the exercises: about how many minutes, and "Start". Below it you can say "I'll walk instead" or "I already walked".
• Today it's a walk: "Start the walk", "…or with running intervals", "Already done it", "Not yet", "I can't go out". See Walks.
• Today is a rest day: nothing to do. If you feel like it you can still go for a walk or do the exercises.
• On holiday: your streak is paused, and it doesn't break.

Rough day? Two ways instead of the full session: "I'm short of time" does a single round of the circuit, "I'm sore" a mobility session. They're worth fewer points, but they keep the day alive.

When you're done you'll see "Done", with the day's postcard to send to anyone you like. Further down are the water you drank today and, if you allow it, your steps for the whole day.

Coming back after a break of at least ten days, the app doesn't drop you where you were: the first sessions are lighter (from 60%, or less after a long break) and build back up bit by bit.

The widget on your home screen shows what's on today and your streak, without opening the app.

A session is three blocks in a row:

1. Warm-up, about three minutes: marching on the spot, arm circles, twists and half squats. Then thirty seconds to get ready.
2. Circuit, repeated for three rounds at every level: exercises for the upper body, the lower body and the core, with something that pushes and something that pulls in every session. The exercises rotate from one morning to the next. As you level up the session doesn't get longer: it gets denser, with shorter changes and rests.
3. Cool-down, just under six minutes: seven stretches, two of them tai chi movements, the same at every level. A stretch doesn't get harder because you went up a level.

What guides you. An animated figure shows the movement, with the one thing to keep in mind written underneath. Timed exercises have a countdown, the others show the number of reps in large type. In the last three seconds you hear a short beep and feel a vibration, then a long beep at the end. Ten seconds before a rest ends, the voice tells you what's next. "Per side" exercises are two separate holds, with five seconds to switch.

Controls. "Done" when you've finished the reps, "Pause" and "Resume", skip and back. During a rest, "+30 seconds" makes it longer. If you leave halfway, the app asks whether to count what you did.

Silence. The speaker at the top mutes voice and beeps for this session only ("Mute this session"). In the Profile, "Silent session" turns them off for good and keeps the vibration; voice guide, sounds and vibration can also be turned off one by one, and the voice can be female or male. The voice uses the phone's text-to-speech: if the language is missing, the app tells you.

"I can't do this one". Under every exercise. The three answers do different things:

• "Just for today": skips it today, nothing else.
• "It's too hard": moves down one step of its ladder.
• "It hurts": takes it out of the circuit and tells you right away what replaces it. Pain isn't effort. The Profile lists what you took out, with "Put it back".

The test. Every eight sessions, after the warm-up, the app asks for one set of an exercise, as long as the reps come out clean, and how many you did. Next time it tells you how it went before. It isn't an exam: that day the circuit has one round less.

Using a chair for support. A switch in the Profile changes the whole session for anyone who struggles to stand for long or to get down to the floor: exercises seated or holding on to the chair, including the one that matters most, sit to stand.

Twelve levels, from "First light" to "Lighthouse". You climb with points: 120 for a session, 50 for a walk or a single round, 30 for mobility, plus a bonus on sessions when your streak has lasted 3, 7, 14 and 30 days. The Profile shows what opens at the next level.

Levelling up opens new exercises (the towel row, V push-ups, the side plank, the ones with water bottles…), new recipes and a new animal; and the session gets denser.

The ladder. Bodyweight training doesn't add kilos: it makes the movement harder — push-ups from the wall to the floor, squats from half to single-leg, a one-and-a-half-litre bottle that becomes two taped together. Twelve exercises have their own steps.

1. At the end of a session the app asks about one exercise only, in turn: did the reps come out clean?
2. After three "Yes, clean" in a row it offers the next step: "Yes, moving up" or "Not yet". Reps start again from a few.
3. A "No" or a "Not yet" resets the count. The app never moves you down on its own: it keeps the record, the judgement on the movement stays yours.

On walking days there are three ways to log your walk.

By hand. "Already done it": choose the pace (easy, brisk, jog, run) and the minutes. The app estimates the calories.

Started. "Start the walk", put the phone in your pocket, and at the end "I'm done". The first time, the app asks for permission to read the step counter, a sensor inside the phone; if you also allow location, it draws the route — only while the walk is running, never in the background. You can close the app: the count stays right. At the end you get steps, kilometres, pace and average speed, and the route with start, finish and direction. If you break into a run now and then, the app notices: the route is coloured green where you walked and yellow where you ran, and calories are added up stretch by stretch. Kilometres come from the route when it's complete, otherwise from an estimate based on steps, and it says which one you're looking at.

With running intervals. "…or with running intervals": choose how much to run today, and the voice tells you when to go and when to ease off, with a warning fifteen seconds before. Every outing has five minutes of walking to warm up, the intervals with two minutes of walking in between, and five minutes to wind down: it always lasts just over half an hour, only the running changes. You pick the step every time.

Step	Intervals	Running
1	8 × 1 minute	8 min
2	7 × 1½ minutes	10.5 min
3	6 × 2 minutes	12 min
4	5 × 3 minutes	15 min
5	4 × 4 minutes	16 min
6	3 × 6 minutes	18 min
7	2 × 10 minutes	20 min

Outdoors, the voice is the only thing guiding you: wear headphones or turn the volume up.

Raining? "I can't go out" offers a jog on the spot: the warm-up, four five-minute blocks of brisk marching and the stretches, about half an hour. It counts as the day's walk: your streak doesn't break because of the rain.

The "Streak" tab keeps your days in a row, your best and the month's calendar. The streak rules are few:

• A planned rest day keeps a live streak going, but doesn't start a new one.
• Doing the other activity — walking instead of the exercises, or the other way round, or a single round — saves the day once. The second time in a row the streak breaks: if you're no longer following the plan you set, a rising streak wouldn't tell you anything.
• Doing tomorrow's today counts: tomorrow is already done.
• Holidays are set from the calendar, tapping a day from today on, for up to 31 days: the streak pauses without breaking.

The calendar colours the days: green for exercises, yellow for walks, grey for rest, light blue for holidays. A day saved with the other activity is paler. Tap a day to see what you did, the walk's route and "Share".

Awards number 39 and unlock by themselves: the streak, the way you kept it, real progress. Eleven are tiered and don't stop when you reach the top level: 100, 500 and 1000 km on foot; one, one and a half and two minutes of plank; 250 and 500 sessions; six months, one year and two years from day one.

Charts ("How it's going") show calories, streak, kilometres and plank by week, month or year, starting from the day you began.

Postcards are pictures to send to anyone you like: the day, the exercises (or your best, if the streak has ended), your best with its dates, the walks. They contain only the numbers, your name and your animal, and they don't leave the phone unless you send them.

The questionnaire (at first start, then from the Profile): how you eat (everything, no meat, vegetarian, vegan), allergies, what you don't like, how many minutes you have for breakfast, whether you have a kitchen machine, how often you eat out and whether you can bring lunch from home.

Recipes: 112, high in protein and written from scratch — breakfasts, snacks, lunches and dinners. 44 are open from day one, eleven per meal, and the rest open as you level up. They're ordered from easy to involved and filtered on your answers. If you have a kitchen machine you'll see, where there is one, the same recipe with speeds, times and temperatures.

What's there? The open-fridge question: tick what you have at home — tomatoes, chicken, lemon — and the app suggests the dishes you can make without going out, and tells you what's missing for the others.

Shopping.

1. "Choose the meals" for the week. The ones you leave empty are when you eat out: no need to say so.
2. Out comes "This week's shopping", split by aisle in supermarket order, each line saying which recipe it's for. You can add things that don't come from any recipe too.
3. In the aisles, one tap means "got it".
4. Back home, "I've finished shopping": a single question asks how far what you bought will go, and if you like its use-by date (even just month and year).

From then on the app knows in advance when something will run out — and whether it will go off first — and tells you before you're left holding an empty bowl.

Eating out: twelve real situations, from the lunch break (the café, the canteen, ten minutes in a supermarket) to dinner out (pizzeria, sushi, drinks). For each: what to take, what to leave and one rule to remember. It isn't nutritional advice, and the allergen filter is no substitute for a product's label.

The same tab also keeps your weight, with one weigh-in a week.

Reminders are off until you turn them on from the Profile, and notification permission is only asked then.

• "Remind me to train": at session time, only on planned days — "Time for your exercises" or "Today you walk". If you work shifts, "A different time each day" gives each day its own time.
• "Remind me to drink": every so often (from half an hour to four hours, an hour and a half to begin with) within the hours you're awake, 8 to 20 to begin with. From the notification, "Done" logs the glass.

Backup. Your data exists only on the phone, so you make the copy: "Export" creates a file slant-coach-YYYY-MM-DD.json and you save it wherever you like. On another phone, "Restore" opens it and replaces everything. Android's automatic backup to Google Drive is excluded on purpose; direct transfer from one phone to another works.

Export as CSV: sessions and weigh-ins in a zip file, to open in a spreadsheet.

Health Connect, if you turn it on: sessions, walks and steps go into the phone's health store, where other apps can see them. Slant Coach only writes, it reads nothing, and it doesn't write calories because they're estimates. Requires Android 9 or later.

If something's not right — a reminder that doesn't ring, a silent voice, the app closing — "Send the note" prepares a message with what the app was doing, and you send it yourself, with the app of your choice. Without it, it's hard to tell what happened.

Settings also hold the language and the warnings: what the app is not, and how much the calories it estimates are really worth.

No account, no server, no ads, and no Internet permission: without it, the app can't send anything anywhere even if it wanted to. The other permissions, one by one:

• Notifications, phone start-up, vibration: reminders and beeps.
• Physical activity: the step counter, asked only when you start a walk or want the day's steps. The sensor is inside the phone.
• Location, precise and approximate, with the foreground service: the walk's route, only while it's running and only if you say yes.
• Health Connect (exercise and steps): write only, only if you turn it on.
• Network state, wake lock, foreground service: not requested by the app itself, they come with the Android library that runs the reminders. Network state can only tell whether the phone is connected: opening a connection takes the Internet permission, which isn't there.

The full policy, in Italian and English, is in a public repository whose history anyone can see, so it can't change silently.