Your Vitruvian, back in a training plan

If you own a Vitruvian, you own a very good two-cable trainer and almost nothing around it. The company is gone, and the software went with it. What's left is a machine that still works perfectly well, and no straightforward way to plan a block on it, keep the record, or see whether any of it is moving.

That's what this is for.

Turn it on once

From then on it appears everywhere equipment matters — the exercise picker, the plan editor, the set fields, and the trainer panel in the logger.

Eccentric's Settings equipment list: KAATSU, Barbell and rack, Bodyweight, Dumbbells / adjustable, Gym Machines, Vitruvian Trainer and Voltra I, each with a green Owned button on the right. — Settings → Equipment. One tick, and the Vitruvian is available everywhere else in the app.

Every two-cable movement, and a filter that shows only those

Everything that already worked on a two-cable trainer is there from day one — chest press, incline press, overhead press, lateral raise, tricep pressdown, leg press, squats, deadlifts, rows, curls, and the rest.

When you add an exercise there's a Vitruvian filter, so you're choosing from what the machine can actually do instead of scrolling past a rack of barbell work.

The Add exercise panel with equipment filters across the top — All, Barbell, Bodyweight, Dumbbell, Free Weights, Gym Machines, Vitruvian, Voltra — with Vitruvian highlighted. Below it: Lateral Raise, Tricep Pressdown, Chest Press, Incline Press, Overhead Press and Leg Press, each labelled with its muscle and Vitruvian. — Filter the picker to Vitruvian and every option in front of you is something the machine can do.

Load is per cable — and the field says so

This is the number worth slowing down for. The Vitruvian counts weight per cable. A 50 kg set on a two-handle movement is 100 kg on you.

Every other piece of equipment in Eccentric names a total, so this field is labelled Load per cable. You never have to work out from context which number you're writing down. The range is 0–100 kg per cable, in 0.5 kg steps.

Six modes, and the fields follow the mode

Old School, Pump, TUT, TUT Beast, Eccentric Only, Echo.

All five weight-based modes take a Load per cable and Warm-up reps (0–10). Old School, Pump and Eccentric Only add Progression per rep (−3 to +3 kg — the weight climbing or dropping every rep); TUT and TUT Beast don't ask for it.

Echo works differently, and its fields say so. No weight at all — just Echo level (Hard, Harder, Hardest, Epic), Eccentric load as a percentage (0, 50, 75, 100, 125 or 150%), and the same Warm-up reps as every other mode.

Change the mode and the fields change with it, so you're never filling in a setting the machine would ignore.

There is a ceiling, and it's borrowed, not measured

You can send up to 100 kg per cable, changing by no more than 3 kg a rep. Ask for anything outside that and the app refuses the set rather than sending it — it names the number it refused, the range it would accept, and tells you nothing reached the trainer. It does not quietly substitute the nearest number it likes.

That matters because the instruction that sets a set up also arms the machine the moment it lands — there's no separate start — so a mistyped number would be a loaded cable, not a rejected form. Holding you at the top of the range would have started a set pulling with a weight nobody chose, while the panel showed the number you asked for. Refusing is worse for the one set that was wrong and better for the person on the machine.

Neither figure is a measurement. The published maximums — 200 kg, 220 kg depending on the model — are machine totals, and it has never been stated what makes them up, so we don't know what a single cable will take. Both figures are instead the point beyond which the two surviving reference implementations refuse: 100 kg on a cable and ±3 kg a rep. This post previously said 110, which was those apps' number for something else — what they put on the wire after adding a fixed 10 kg, not what they let you type.

Both limits are declared on the equipment itself, not written into the code that talks to the machine. When someone measures a real one, the number can change without waiting for a release.

A full planned set for Chest Press on the Vitruvian: working max, equipment, mode, the four Vitruvian fields, then muscle, laterality, range of motion, tempo, rest, and a straight four sets of eight. — The full set editor — equipment, mode, and only the fields that mode needs.

Connect to the machine

Start a session with a Vitruvian exercise in it and a trainer bar appears at the bottom of the logger. Open it, connect, and Eccentric reads the machine directly: what each cable is carrying, how fast it's moving, which way you're going, and the rep counts the trainer keeps itself.

Then the button sends the set you're about to do — its mode, its load per cable, its reps, its warm-up — straight to the machine. It names the load it's about to apply, so you can check it before you touch anything. Take the weight off ends it, and it's never blocked.

The Vitruvian trainer bar connected and idle: left cable, right cable and both at zero kilograms, reps zero, both speeds zero, Doing reads resting. A green button reads Put Chest Press — Set 1 on — 32kg per cable, above Take the weight off and Disconnect. — The button says what it's about to do, in kilograms per cable — not just which set.

The same bar mid-set, its header reading On the cables: Left cable 32.3kg, Right cable 32kg, Both 64.3kg, Reps 3, Left speed 0.52 and Right speed 0.51 metres per second, Doing reads lifting. The arm button is dimmed and reads A set is on the cables, beside Take the weight off and Disconnect. — Mid-set. Per cable, and both added up — the same distinction the load field makes, now in live numbers. While a set is running that button is locked, so nothing changes the resistance under you.

The trainer bar just after connecting: left cable, right cable and both at zero kilograms, reps zero, both speeds at zero and Doing reads resting. Below them a notice reading Turning this on lets the app add resistance on your trainer while you're using it. Only enable it on your own trainer, standing right next to it — you can take the weight off at any time with the button below. Under it a button reading I understand — enable trainer control. — Connecting and reading move nothing. The notice is shown once, before the first time anything goes onto the cables.

Program it, log it, read it

In the plan editor, add a set, choose Vitruvian Trainer, choose the mode, fill in the fields. Then train and check sets off as you go, exactly as you would with anything else.

Reps and load feed volume, per-exercise history and trends, and estimated 1RM. Your Vitruvian work sits in the same record as your barbell and bodyweight work, not in a corner of its own.

The same equipment list on a phone-width screen, each equipment name stacked above its Owned button, fitting the screen with no sideways scrolling. — The same equipment list on a phone, which is where you'll be standing when you check it.

One thing it doesn't do

There's nothing to import afterwards. No service is left running, so there's no file or account to pull a finished session from the way you can with a Voltra — and the app doesn't offer it or pretend otherwise. Everything the machine tells Eccentric, it tells it live, while you're lifting.

Which is the whole point. Plan a block, run it on the machine, and keep the record — that's more than the Vitruvian has had in a while.