Stronger foundations, smarter Apple Health, every cue rewritten
For the last few months I've been heads-down on the parts of ZenMotion that make a calisthenics app actually feel like one. This release is the result. Three things shipped, and they're the three things I've been most embarrassed about not having sooner.
Your workouts are now in Apple Health
Every finished session in ZenMotion now writes to Apple Health as a Functional Strength Training workout. That means duration, active energy, and start/end time all show up in the Health app and feed your daily Move ring like any other workout source — no extra setup beyond granting permission the first time.
If you let ZenMotion read your body weight, the calorie estimate gets honest. The math is the standard MET formula for strength training (kcal ≈ 6 × weight × hours), and using your actual mass beats falling back to the 75 kg average we'd otherwise have to assume. If you'd rather not share your weight, the estimate still works, it's just slightly less personal.
Calorie tracking in strength training is inherently approximate — no consumer device can measure it precisely, and even the Apple Watch is making an educated guess. But it's the closest reliable proxy, and from now on your ZenMotion sessions count toward your daily ring alongside everything else you do.
Every single exercise has new step-by-step instructions
This is the change that nobody asked for and nobody will mention, but I think it's the most important thing in the release.
Calisthenics is a form-dependent sport. The difference between a clean Tuck Front Lever and a hanging crunch with delusions of grandeur is exactly four cues, executed in the right order. Until this release, a lot of ZenMotion's exercises had vague guidance — perfectly fine for "Push-Up", actively unhelpful for "Advanced Tuck Back Lever Hold". I went through every one of the 829 exercises across all 15 programs and rewrote the cues from scratch, three to four steps per exercise, focused on what to do, in what order, and what to feel.
You'll see this in every detail screen now. Open any exercise mid-workout and you'll get the same kind of execution breakdown a coach would give you on the spot — not a textbook description, just the working cues.
This was a big content lift. It was worth it.
The workout timer no longer lies to you
This one's a bug fix, but it's a bug worth talking about because it taught me something about iOS.
ZenMotion's workout timer used to count seconds with a Timer. That works fine while the app is foregrounded — but iOS suspends timers the moment your app drops to the background. A 45-minute Front Lever session, with the screen off between sets and the phone in your pocket, was being recorded as somewhere between 30 seconds and a couple of minutes. Your history was wrong. Your streaks were wrong. Your sense that the app was on your side was wrong.
The fix: the timer no longer counts ticks. It anchors to wall-clock time. When you tap Start, ZenMotion remembers the moment. When you pause, it remembers that too. When you resume, the elapsed pause gets folded into a running total. The displayed time is always now − start − total paused, which means it stays correct regardless of whether the app spent the last minute foregrounded, backgrounded, or killed-and-relaunched. iOS can suspend whatever it wants. Math doesn't care.
There's also a smaller fix in the same area: if iOS killed the app while you were paused — mid-rest, screen off, phone in pocket — the previous build would default to "you just paused now" on relaunch and silently log the killed time as active training. That edge case is also gone. The pause anchor now survives cold-starts.
If you've been wondering why some of your historical workouts looked impossibly short: they were. They're correct from here on out.
One more thing — premium is free for 3 months
Alongside this release I've turned on a 3-month free trial for the premium subscription. The app itself is still free to download, but everything that used to be gated behind premium — full access to every level of every program — now opens up for the first three months once you subscribe. No credit card surprise: your subscription only starts billing if you don't cancel before the trial ends, and Apple sends a reminder in the days before that happens.
If you've never had a reason to try the paid tier, this is the moment. Pick a skill, work the progression, see if it's the calisthenics app you want to keep around.
Update from the App Store and let me know how it feels. As always, the fastest way to reach me is support@zenmotion.app — every email gets read by the person who wrote the code.
— Jacob