Workout Report
What the end-of-workout report shows, how the time split and calorie estimate are worked out and what they cannot capture.
When you finish a live session, Sparta asks one question, how hard was that?, on a scale from 1 to 5, and then shows a report of the session: how long it ran, how that time split between working and resting, what you lifted, which records fell and an estimated calorie figure.
This page explains where every number comes from. The short version: the split and the calories are estimates built from the sets you logged and your bodyweight. They are not measurements, and the report says so.
The effort rating
The finish dialog offers five levels, with 3 preselected:
| Level | Label |
|---|---|
| 1 | Very light |
| 2 | Light |
| 3 | Moderate |
| 4 | Hard |
| 5 | All out |
The rating is asked before the report opens. It is saved once, when you finish, and cannot be changed afterwards.
Active and rest time
Sparta cannot see when a set starts. You tap Done at the end of it, and nothing before that is recorded. What it does know is the moment every set finished, so the gap between two consecutive completions contains the rest after the first set, any setting up and the work of the second. Splitting that gap takes a model:
- Work for a set of reps is estimated at 10 seconds plus 2.5 seconds per rep, capped at three minutes.
- Work for a timed set is the time you actually held it.
- Rest in a gap is whatever is left over.
- Sets you tick within 10 seconds of each other are treated as done together before you ticked them, so the gap before them holds the work of all of them.
- The start of the session counts like a tick, so the time before your first set is a gap too. The time after your last set holds no lifting, so all of it is rest.
Add up the rest across the session and subtract it from the total duration and you get active time. The rest timer is not used: it keeps running while you start your next set, so it cannot tell rest from lifting. Finish without ticking a single set and there is nothing to split: the report shows the duration alone, and the calorie estimate counts all of it as rest.
Three consequences worth knowing. Warming up, setting up a machine or waiting for one counts as rest, so active time is the time you actually spent lifting, usually around a quarter of a session. If you tick every set at the end, the session is one long gap from the start: active time is the lifting your sets add up to, and the rest is rest. And a session left open for twenty minutes after the last set counts those twenty minutes as rest.
The calorie estimate
The estimate uses the MET method, the same approach behind the calorie tables in most fitness references. A MET is a multiple of resting energy expenditure, and one MET works out to about 3.5 millilitres of oxygen per kilogram per minute, which converts to calories with your bodyweight:
calories per MET-minute = 3.5 × bodyweight in kg ÷ 200Working time and resting time burn at different rates. The rates depend on the effort you gave:
| Effort | Working | Resting |
|---|---|---|
| 1 · Very light | 3.9 MET | 1.9 MET |
| 2 · Light | 5.2 MET | 2.3 MET |
| 3 · Moderate | 6.5 MET | 2.5 MET |
| 4 · Hard | 7.8 MET | 2.9 MET |
| 5 · All out | 9.8 MET | 3.1 MET |
Working here means the lifting itself, which is why its rates sit above the whole-session figures in calorie tables. They are set so a typical session, a quarter of it working, comes out at the 3.5 MET those tables give weight training at effort 3. The resting rate rises with effort because your body is still working off a hard set while you sit.
The split makes the estimate follow how dense the session was: supersets with short rests come out higher, heavy triples with four-minute rests come out lower.
Active energy, not total
The figure shown is active energy, meaning the calories you would have burned anyway by sitting still are subtracted. That is the same quantity Apple Health and Health Connect report, so the numbers are comparable.
With only a bodyweight on file, the resting baseline is assumed at 1 MET. If you also add your height, date of birth and sex under Settings → Body, Sparta uses the Mifflin-St Jeor equation instead. The difference is usually around five percent, and it grows the further your build is from average. Adding those fields later affects new sessions only.
A worked example
A 78 kg lifter, 45 minutes, 20 sets of 10, one finished every 125 seconds, rated 3:
- Each set models at 35 seconds of work, so each 125-second gap holds 90 seconds of rest. That is 28.5 minutes of rest and 16.5 minutes active.
- Calories per MET-minute: 3.5 × 78 ÷ 200 = 1.365.
- Gross: (6.5 × 16.5 + 2.5 × 28.5) × 1.365 ≈ 244 kcal.
- Minus the resting baseline over 45 minutes: 244 − 45 × 1.365 ≈ 182 kcal. With height, age and sex filled in, about 190.
What the estimate does not capture
- Anaerobic work. Heavy, low-rep lifting draws a large share of its energy from pathways the MET method does not see. Heavy strength work therefore reads low here, and it reads low in the same way on a watch.
- Afterburn. Beyond the small allowance in the resting rates, energy spent recovering after the session is not counted.
- Your actual tempo. A set of ten at a slow, controlled tempo can take twice as long as the model assumes.
- Mixed sessions. Cardio and lifting inside one session are treated the same.
For comparison, consumer wearables estimating energy in resistance training have been measured at errors between 15 and 57 percent. If your watch says 260 and Sparta says 197, neither is wrong in a way the other can settle. Use the figure to compare your own sessions with each other, where the assumptions cancel out, rather than as a number to eat against.
Sharing a session
The report, and any session’s page in History, has a share button. It turns the session into a transparent image at story size: workout name, date, duration, volume, sets, exercises, calories and the records you broke. Switch off anything you would rather keep to yourself; Sparta remembers your choice for next time. Send the image anywhere through the share sheet, copy it, or save it to your photos. To put it over a picture of your session, copy it, open Instagram, take the photo, then long-press and paste: the background is transparent, so only the numbers land on top. A saved image works the same way from the sticker menu.
Privacy
Your bodyweight, height, date of birth and sex stay on your device. They are never sent to Sparta’s servers and never shown to your group. The effort rating and calorie figure never appear in the feed either, at any sharing level.