XP that a heavier bar can't buy

Gamification in fitness apps usually rewards magnitude: more weight, more distance, more calories, more days. That’s easy to measure, and it’s exactly the wrong incentive. It favours people who are already strong, it rewards overtraining, and anything tied to a body tempts people towards unhealthy places.

PaceStreak’s game layer has one rule, written at the top of api/app/game/xp.py:

Two people of very different strength earn identical XP for the same week.

Everything below follows from it.

Where XP comes from

Source	XP	Why
A training day	20	Showing up is the thing being rewarded.
A second session that day	5	Doubles are real, but splitting one workout into five must not pay. Anything after the second pays nothing.
Days beyond target + 1	5 instead of 20	Training every single day is not better than the plan with rest in it.
A day logged with detail	5	Flat. It rewards completeness, never magnitude.
A kept week	50	The unit of the streak.
A frozen or repaired week	0	It keeps the streak alive, but a forgiven week isn’t an earned one.
Streak milestones	100 to 2,000	At 4, 8, 12, 26, 52, 104 and 156 weeks.
A rewarded personal record	25	Relative to your own history (see below).
Achievements	50 / 100 / 200	By tier.

There’s no multiplier for weight, distance or duration anywhere in that table. A beginner walking three times a week and an elite lifter training three times a week earn the same.

Like the streak, XP is a pure function of history, recomputed whole. There is no XP ledger to reconcile. Edit an old session and every total after it is correct on the next read.

Levels describe maturity, not strength

The level curve is round(80 * n ** 1.6) XP per level. It’s a decelerating curve, so early levels arrive quickly and later ones stretch out. Titles run Novice, Regular, Consistent, Committed, Seasoned, Veteran, and the docstring is explicit about what they measure:

Titles describe training maturity: how long and how steadily someone has shown up, and never strength or body weight. A consistent beginner outranks a strong lifter who trains when they feel like it.

Personal records, with two guards

Records are the one place magnitude has to appear. Nobody wants a tracker that won’t tell them they squatted more than last month. So records are kept, but each one is self-relative: you against your own history, never anyone else’s. And two guards stop them being farmed:

• Plausibility. An improvement of more than 15% over your previous best is recorded, because it might be real, but it earns nothing and is never broadcast to the feed. A fat-fingered 500 kg curl mints no reward.
• Cooldown. One rewarded record per exercise per seven days, so retesting a max every day isn’t a strategy.

Both guards came from the predecessor project, where both lessons were learned the hard way.

Achievements as declarative rules

There are 23 achievement rules in api/app/game/achievements.py. Each is a small declarative object evaluated against a Context of counts: sessions, active days, kept weeks, distinct exercises and disciplines, push and pull sets, early and late sessions, the longest break someone came back from, and so on. Adding a badge means adding a rule.

The constraint is written at the top:

Every rule rewards something healthy: showing up, breadth, finishing, honest records, coming back. None rewards training every day, maximum weight, body weight, or training through a planned rest week.

“Coming back” deserves a mention. There’s a badge for returning after a long gap, because the moment someone returns after two months off is exactly when a streak app usually makes them feel worst.

Tiered rules unlock one row per tier. If someone jumps straight past bronze to silver they get both, so the trophy room reads the same however fast someone progressed.

Leaderboards that are hard to cheat

There are four boards:

• Consistency: the mean weekly score over four closed weeks, each capped at 100% of your own target.
• Streak: current kept weeks.
• Season XP: this quarter’s XP.
• Season records: this quarter’s rewarded records.

Every one of them is either capped at your own plan or measured against your own history. Being big wins nothing. Lying about a weight wins nothing, because the plausibility guard means an implausible record earns nothing. Training seven days a week wins nothing, because the score is capped and extra days pay a quarter.

There is deliberately no board for weight lifted, distance, or anything body-related. Boards are opt-in for the global scope, and people under 16 never appear on them.

Seasons

XP and records also count per quarter. Without seasons, the board belongs forever to whoever started first. With them, someone who joined last week has something to play for.

Turning it all off

Some people want the log and the streak and nothing else. gamification_enabled is a profile switch that removes XP, levels, badges and leaderboards from the app entirely.