Frequently Asked Questions

tonal.coach is a free, open-source AI personal trainer that connects to your Tonal home gym. It reads your workout history and programs custom workouts that get pushed directly to your machine. Think of it as having a personal trainer who actually knows your training data - your actual lifts, your strength trends, your recovery.

Sign up, connect your Tonal account, set your preferences (goals, schedule, injuries), and start chatting with your AI coach. The setup takes about five minutes. Learn more on the how it works page.

Yes, an active Tonal membership is required. tonal.coach uses the Tonal API to read your training data and push custom workouts to your machine. If your Tonal subscription lapses, the connection will stop working until it is renewed.

Yes. Your credentials are used once to obtain an access token and are never stored. The resulting token is encrypted with AES-256-GCM before being saved to our database. We only access the data needed for coaching — workout history, strength scores, and movement data. See our privacy policy for full details.

We access workout history, strength scores, movement performance data, and basic profile info such as your name and training level. We never access payment information, personal contacts, or account settings. Data is only used to generate coaching responses and is not sold or shared with third parties.

No. tonal.coach only reads your data and adds custom workouts to your Tonal account. It never modifies or deletes existing workouts, programs, or account settings. Custom workouts pushed by the coach appear as a separate category and can be deleted from your Tonal app at any time.

Yes. You can disconnect your Tonal account from the settings page at any time. When you disconnect, we immediately stop accessing your data. You can also request full account and data deletion, which is permanent with no retention period.

The AI analyzes your training history, strength trends, recovery patterns, and stated goals to build personalized programs. It applies progressive overload, periodization, and injury awareness — the same principles a human coach would use, but grounded in your actual data. See the features page for a full breakdown.

Tonal's programs are pre-built for general audiences. tonal.coach creates fully custom programs based on your data — your actual lifts, your recovery, your goals, your injuries. It also supports custom training splits and adapts week to week as your performance changes, rather than following a fixed script.

Yes. Choose from push/pull/legs, upper/lower, full body, or a custom split. Set how many days per week you want to train and your preferred session duration. The coach will build your weekly program around those constraints.

Yes. Flag any injuries or physical limitations during onboarding and the AI will avoid contraindicated movements and substitute safe alternatives. You can update your injury list at any time from settings, and the coach will adjust immediately.

Yes, tonal.coach is completely free and open source. No credit card is required. All features are available to all users with no limits or hidden tiers. You bring your own Google Gemini API key (free from Google AI Studio) so the AI runs on your quota, not ours.

Running AI models costs real money per request. Instead of charging a subscription to cover those costs, tonal.coach asks you to paste your own Google Gemini API key during onboarding. The key stays encrypted in our database and is only used to power your coaching sessions. Gemini keys are free from Google AI Studio and the free tier is generous enough for normal use.

Yes. tonal.coach is open source under the MIT license. You can clone the GitHub repository, deploy it to your own Convex + Vercel setup, and run everything under your control. The README has step-by-step instructions for getting a local or self-hosted deployment running.