The getting-started guide for your Voltra: graduating from the notebook
Week one with a smart cable trainer usually means a notes app — cable length, load, curve, reps, sets, RPE, all typed in by hand. Here's how Eccentric helps you graduate quickly from manual entry to automated performance.
A Voltra I measures every rep you do. Range of motion, bar speed, power, force, both directions. It is a genuinely great instrument, congrats on your purchase!
However with all the configuration you now have - cable length, weight, curve, eccentric, chains, etc etc, it's often overwhelming to manage. How are you supposed to just get started? How do you log this?
This isn't your run of the mill Reps x Weight logging...
Writing it down works. It just stops working somewhere around week four — when the question changes from what did I do last time to is any of this working, and the answer is spread across forty notes in no particular order. You're getting all this fantastic data off the trainer, how are you associating together?
This is the whole loop. Four steps:
- Build a plan
- Set it up for the trainer
- Record the session by tapping, not typing
- Read what actually happened
1. Build a plan (or migrate your old one)
Two ways to skip the blank page.
Pick a starter. The Plans page offers proven programmes you can turn into a real, editable plan in one tap — Starting Strength, StrongLifts 5×5, 5/3/1, plus dumbbell and bodyweight-only options if the Voltra isn't the only thing in the room. They aren't read-only PDFs; you get an actual plan with workouts, sets and opening loads, and you edit everything after. With Voltra marked as owned, the builder binds the sets to your trainer, so StrongLifts arrives as cable work with Voltra fields rather than a barbell programme you have to translate in your head.
Or ask an AI to write it. Eccentric connects to Claude, ChatGPT, or any MCP-compatible assistant, scoped to your account and limited to exactly what you can already do yourself. Setup is a two-minute job on the AI page. Then you type something like:
I've got a Voltra I and about 25 minutes, three days a week. Build me a full-body plan. Five exercises a session. Put eccentric overload on the presses. When complete, send as a proposal to Eccentric.
It writes the plan — workouts, exercises, sets, loads, eccentric settings — straight into your account. The second conversation is the useful one, because by then it can read what you actually did: "my chest press is slowing down across this block, what should I change?" The longer version of that loop is in Planning, tracking, and optimizing workouts with AI.
2. Set it up for the trainer
This is the part that replaces the notebook. Pick Voltra I as the equipment on a set and a Mode selector appears, because the trainer does more than one thing — Weight Training, Resistance Band, Damper, Isokinetic, Isometric Testing, Custom Curves, Rowing, Skiing. The fields underneath change to match.
Everything a notes app was holding, with a field to hold it:
| Was in the notes app | Where it lives |
|---|---|
| Cable length | Start length, in cm — a real field, and one the app can send to the trainer |
| Load | Load, plus the modifier row: eccentric multiplier, chains, inverse chains |
| Strength curve | Resistance curve (Power Law / Logarithm), or Custom Curves mode with min force, max force and range — and you can save a curve under a name and reuse it |
| Reps & sets | Prescribed on the set, then compared against what the trainer actually counted |
| RPE | Per set, on the half-point scale — in RPE or reps-in-reserve, whichever you think in |
| Attachment | Nothing dedicated yet — carry it in the exercise name ("Rope Face Pull") or the session note |
Reps, sets and effort sit further down the same panel.
Two things worth knowing.
Some settings are the trainer's own dials. Intense mode, inverse resistance, limited range, auto-assist, the isokinetic eccentric options — no app can send those over Bluetooth yet, and changing them on the trainer transmits nothing back. What it gives you instead is a place to write down what you intend to dial in, attached to the set, so it's on screen when you walk up to the machine and it's still there next week. That is the notebook's job, done by the thing that already knows what set you're on.
3. Record the session by tapping
Three ways in, depending on how planned the day is.
You have a plan for today. Open Log, pick the workout, and the session is already laid out — every exercise, every set, every prescribed load and rep target. You check things off rather than entering them. A rest timer runs between sets. Tap a set to correct it if what happened wasn't what was planned.
You're improvising. Pick Empty session and add exercises as you go. Same fields, same Voltra parameters, no plan needed. This is the twenty-minute-in-the-garage case, one tap from the Log screen.
Or let the trainer do the counting. Connect the Voltra over Bluetooth — from the iOS or Android app, or a Chrome-based browser — and reps land as you do them. The counter climbs on its own, and each rep's speed, power, range and force arrive with it. You can push the set's load out to the trainer from the app too, so you're not keying weights into the machine between sets either.
If you'd rather train with the phone in your pocket, that works too: lift, then bring the measurements in afterwards — a CSV export from Beyond+, or the Cortex API pulling your workouts in automatically. Either way Eccentric lines the measured sets up against what you planned and shows you where they disagree. That whole path, with the matching screen and the import options, is in How to use Eccentric with your Voltra, end to end.
4. Read what actually happened
Here's the part a notes app can never give you, and the reason the whole exercise has a point.
Once a few weeks are in, Analytics stops being a list of sessions and starts answering questions. Is the work going up? Am I actually recovering between weeks? The weekly view puts total load, time, working sets and reps side by side, each with a shaded band for ordinary week-to-week noise, so a wobble doesn't read as a trend.
Owning a Voltra unlocks a second layer the trainer paid for: Velocity & power. Speed at a given load, peak power on your top set, and a velocity-based 1RM estimate that sits alongside the usual rep-based one rather than replacing it.
Two honest notes about those charts. They tell you when you have enough data and when you don't — a panel with one point says so rather than drawing a line through it. And velocity at a fixed load only works if you actually repeat a load; if your programme adds weight every session, peak power and the load–velocity profile are where you'll get your read instead.
Then hand it to someone
Everything above lands in one place — planned loads, measured speed and power, the note you typed at 6am. That makes it something you can hand to a coach without exporting anything, and something an assistant can reason about instead of guessing.
If someone else is writing your programming, the next thing to set up is their access — what they can see, what they can change, and what stays yours. That's its own guide: Sharing your training with a coach.
Build a plan → set it up for the trainer → tap through the session → read the block. The trainer was measuring all of this from day one. The only thing that changes is that you stop retyping it.
Train on purpose.
Eccentric turns what your equipment records into progress you can read. It's free to start.