Rest days and rough days

Rest is not the app being quiet. It is part of the plan, it has its own colour, and it is a thing you can choose. This page covers both the rest that is built in and the rest you decide on at eight in the evening.

Rest in the plan

Every program is sessions with rest between them, and the rest is written down rather than left as a gap. A two-session week is laid out as session, rest, rest, session — so the day off is a thing on the plan, sitting on a date before you start.

On a rest day, home goes quiet. The date is purple in the strip, and the day says Rest.

On the Programs page the week is padded out to seven days, with the weekday on the left and Rest on the right, so a week reads like a week rather than a list of workouts with holes in it.

Marking your own rest day

If you train Day by day — or your program is paused, or you let it go — then today has no plan on it, and home offers a Rest button instead. Press it and it asks once, Mark this as a rest day?, with a tick and a cross. Tick it and the day turns purple.

This is for you, not for us. It is a note that says this was deliberate, so that when you look back at the month you can see the difference between a day off and a day that got away from you.

Training on a rest day

Rest days are not locked. If you feel like moving:

• On a program rest day, home usually offers the next session under Or this one. Take it and the plan reshuffles around you. There is usually an Or explore sessions link too.
• On a day you marked as rest yourself, the day's three sessions are still there under If you want.
• Anything in Sessions is available on any day.

Finish something on a day you marked as rest and the mark clears itself — the day becomes a day you showed up, because that is what happened.

The reverse is fine too. If the plan says session and you want the day off, use Change this and either Skip for now or Move it to another day. Neither of those is recorded as a failure anywhere.

Rough days

Some days you feel like rubbish and a twenty-minute session is not happening. At the bottom of home, next to the day, there are two small links for exactly that.

Rotten day gives you one exercise. Not a session, not a circuit — one move, picked to suit your level and whatever kit you said you have, with its steps and a chip telling you how much of it to do.

If the one you get does not appeal, Give me another pulls a different one. Stretches next to it opens the stretching sessions instead, which is often the better answer on a day where everything aches.

And leaving it is also an answer. Opening the app still counts.

No streaks

There is nothing in Body Beats that punishes a gap:

• No streak counter, so nothing to break.
• No badges, no points, nothing to unlock.
• No progress bars that empty when you stop looking.
• No notification asking where you have been.

The calendar on your You page is a record, not a scoreboard: a blue dot for a day you showed up, a purple ring for a rest day you marked yourself, and a plain number for everything else. A quiet month is just a quiet month.