Body tracking

Badger can keep body weight and tape measurements alongside your training log. It stays out of the way: there is nothing about it on the Today screen, no banners, and no reminders. Open it from You → Body.

If you never log a measurement, you will never see it anywhere else in the app. If you do, a small Body section appears at the bottom of Progress → Overview with your latest reading and its trend.

Choosing what you track

Only body weight is switched on to begin with. Everything else - body fat, waist, chest, arms, thighs, and the rest - is off until you ask for it.

Open What do you track? from the Body screen's ⋮ menu and switch on the ones you care about. A weight-loss plan might be weight plus waist; a bulk might be weight plus arms and chest; plenty of people leave it at weight alone.

Measurements you switch off disappear completely - they are not grayed-out rows taking up space. Switching one off never deletes anything. Turn waist back on next spring and last spring's numbers are still there.

If the list does not cover something you measure, Add a measurement at the bottom creates your own.

Logging a measurement

Each row on the Body screen has a + button - tap it, type the number, and you are done. The date defaults to today; change it if you are catching up on a reading from the weekend.

Tap the row itself to open that measurement's own page: your latest reading, the trend, and every entry you have logged. Tap an entry to edit it, or the × to delete it.

Reading the trend

The chart draws two things. The faint line with dots is exactly what you logged. The solid accent line is a 7-day average.

The average is the one to pay attention to. Day-to-day body weight moves with water, food, and time of day, so a single morning's reading can be a kilo off in either direction and mean nothing. The average smooths that out and shows you which way you are actually going.

Use the 30d, 90d, and All chips to change the window.

The small caret next to a reading compares it to the one before it. It is only colored when the measurement has a direction you have said you want - waist going down, arms going up. Where there is no goal, a change is just a change, and Badger does not have an opinion about it.

Units

Measurements follow the weight unit you use for lifting: kilograms and centimeters, or pounds and inches. Change it and everything re-reads in the new unit immediately.

Your numbers are never rewritten. Each entry remembers the unit you typed it in, so switching units converts the display and leaves the record alone. A weigh-in you logged as 81.4 kg is still 81.4 kg; an app set to pounds simply shows it as 179.5 lbs.

Apple Health and Health Connect

Badger can exchange three specific things with your phone's health store - Apple Health on iPhone, Health Connect on Android. All of them are off until you turn them on, and each one asks the health app for permission separately, for itself only - switching on heart rate does not give Badger your weight history. Find them in Settings → Your data, or from the Body screen's ⋮ menu.

Writing workouts

With this on, every finished workout is saved to your health store as a strength training session, so your rings, your daily summary, and any other app you have connected know you trained.

Badger writes when the session started and when it ended, and nothing else. In particular there is no calorie estimate, on purpose. A calorie figure for lifting cannot see how long you rested, what your body composition is, or how hard the set actually was - it would be a guess dressed up as a measurement, and your watch already counts what it can genuinely measure.

A workout you back-date is not written: there was no timer running, and Badger will not invent a duration to fill the gap.

Importing body weight

With this on, weigh-ins from your health store - a smart scale, another app, or a number you typed into Health directly - appear in your body tracker as ordinary entries. Badger asks for body weight only.

On Android, Health Connect asks a second question: whether Badger may see data older than 30 days. Allow it and your first import reaches back a year, so your chart starts with real history instead of one lonely point. Decline it and you get the last 30 days, which is all Health Connect shows any app without that permission. Either way the switch works, and you can change your mind in Health Connect later.

Imported readings are checked when you open the Body screen, and you can pull them in on demand with Bring in weigh-ins now. There is no background syncing. The same reading is never imported twice, and a genuine second weigh-in on the same morning is kept.

Opening the Body screen only looks for readings since the last check, which is quick. Bring in weigh-ins now goes back over the whole year instead, so if something stopped syncing to your health store for a while and later filled the missing days back in, that button is the one that finds them.

Imported weigh-ins are saved in Badger like ones you typed, which means they are part of your backups - both the manual backup file and, if you use it, the cloud backup to your own Google Drive. See the Privacy Policy for the full picture.

Heart rate on your sets

With this on, Badger saves one heart rate per set - what your heart was doing at the end of it - by reading the samples your watch has already written to your health store. You do not have to start anything or press anything; if you wore a watch while you trained, the numbers turn up on their own.

It is there for the trend, not the number. Two places show it:

• The Exertion chart on a workout summary, under Pace. It plots your heart rate set by set across that session, so you can see it drifting up as you tire.
• An Exertion chart on an exercise's progress page: your average for that exercise, session by session. If the same weight for the same reps is costing you less than it did a month ago, that is the chart that shows it.

Individual sets carry their reading quietly in the set list too, in the same small text as the rest of the set's details.

Missing numbers are normal. Watches hand their samples to the phone in batches, sometimes minutes later, so Badger checks once when you finish and once more when you open the workout summary. After that a set keeps whatever it has. If nothing lined up, that set simply has no heart rate - Badger will not guess one, and there is no badge, banner, or nag about it anywhere.

You need enough data for a chart to be worth drawing, so the session chart appears once four sets have a reading, and the per-exercise chart once three sessions do. Below that they are not there at all.

Badger reads heart rate; it never writes it. There is no live heart rate while you train, and no recovery score, strain number, or readiness rating - those need more than a phone can honestly measure, and a made-up number is worse than none.

Readings are saved in Badger with the set, which means they are part of your backups, exactly like your weights and reps. They go nowhere else.

If the switches are not there

On Android below version 14, Health Connect is a separate app from the Play Store. Until it is installed there is nothing for Badger to connect to, and the screen says so rather than offering a connection that cannot work.

You can turn either switch off whenever you like, and you can revoke Badger's access from Apple Health or Health Connect directly. Anything already saved in your body tracker stays until you delete it.