The most important thing is that you move.
Run, jog, ride, hike, lift — or twenty minutes on a mat in your front room with nothing but the floor. It is the best thing most people can do for their body and for their head, and it should not cost anything. So the part of Dash that records it never will.
Coming to iPhone. Android to follow.
Charging somebody to go for a walk is the wrong business.
Movement is the one thing that is already free. You put your shoes on and you have it — no membership, no appointment, no equipment. Put a card in front of that and you have invented a reason not to go today, and the people who would feel that reason hardest are exactly the ones who were never going to pay.
So the part of Dash that gets you out of the door costs nothing, and is not going to start. Not a trial with a clock on it. Not a free tier that quietly thins out in month two. Record everything, keep everything, see everything.
Moving is also the cheapest thing anybody has ever found for how you feel — not only for your heart and your legs, but for sleep, for stress, for the days that are difficult for no reason you can name. An app is not going to fix that. Getting out of the door might, and that is the only job this one has.
This is the app, not a trial
- Record every run, jog, ride, walk, hike and gym session
- The effort score, and your progress by day, week, month and year
- Splits, heart-rate zones, elevation, steps and calories
- Challenges, duels and rivalries with friends
- Meets — plan a session with people, and the recap writes itself
- The coach, which speaks when it has something true to say
- XP, your Dash Level and the streak
- Hidden areas, and a chosen audience on every activity
No card, ever, to begin
There is no point at which recording a run starts costing money, and nothing is asked for up front. If you never subscribe you still have the whole app listed above.
Nothing is sold
No advertising, no data brokers, no tracking across other companies' apps. Your location is never part of any of that, and there is no business model here that needs it to be.
So what do you pay for?
The sixty guided programmes, and nothing else. That is the part with months of work behind it and a real alternative cost — a coach. How they were built is further down this page, and that is the case for why they are worth it.
One app, because it is one body.
Almost nobody does one sport. You run on Tuesday, lift on Thursday, walk every day without ever counting it, and when the week falls apart you do twenty minutes on a mat and call it a loss. Apps that handle one of those make you keep the rest in your head — and the whole week was the thing worth seeing.
Dash records all of it on one effort scale. A Pilates session and a ten-kilometre run land in the same weekly total, because to your body they did. Nothing here is filed as the serious training and the rest as an afterthought.
Outdoors, on the map
Run, jog, walk, hike, ride and the rest, recorded with the route, every kilometre split, your time in each heart-rate zone and the climb. Anything inside a hidden area is cut before anybody else sees it.
In the gym
Exercises searchable by the muscle you want and filtered by the equipment actually in front of you — Dash knows your gym, your home and the park you use, so what you can do here is a filter rather than a guess you make on the spot.
At home, with nothing at all
Bodyweight and mat programmes that need the floor and no equipment. They exist because go and join a gym is not an answer, and because the week you cannot get to one is the week it matters most.
The only person you are measured against is you, last month.
Two people run the same five kilometres at the same pace. For one it is a warm-up. For the other it is the hardest thing they have done this year. An app that hands them the same score has measured the route — it has not measured the effort.
Dash builds a baseline out of what you actually do: how long, how hard, how often, over weeks. Every session is scored against that, and the bar rises by itself as you do. Nothing to reset, no category to pick.
Nobody else's number is on your screen unless you personally invited them, and there is no mechanism anywhere in the app for a stranger's week to make yours look small.
It knows your usual
The baseline is your own history, not a table of what somebody your age and weight is supposed to manage. Those tables describe a person who does not exist.
It moves as you move
Get fitter and the same session scores lower, because it genuinely became easier. That is the number doing its job, not the app losing interest.
It counts the unglamorous
A slow walk on a flat week is effort. Recording it keeps the baseline honest — an app that only hears about your best days learns a version of you that never has bad ones.
Your numbers, read back to you.
Every session is scored against your own recent weeks. A hundred is a normal day for you, and it moves as you do — get fitter and a hundred quietly becomes a bigger day.
Then the same number adds up. Seven days against the seven before is whether you are building; a month against the month before is whether it held. Tap any bar and you get the day it came from.
Compared to you, never to them
A twenty-minute walk after a month off can score higher than somebody else’s ten kilometres. Each activity is measured against your own usual version of it, so a lift never competes with a run.
Coming back counts extra
Train after a week off and the score adds a little. The hardest session anybody does is the one that restarts, and the number is built to say so.
And what you have not trained
Your week shows which muscle groups have had work and names the ones that have not. It is the question a coach asks and a distance total cannot answer — the reason people end up with strong legs and a back that has been ignored since March.
What it measures
All of it, free. Every number on this page is in the free app. Dash sells the programmes and nothing else — your splits, your zones and your year are not a tier you upgrade into.
Hard is a number, not something you have to remember
Time and how hard, not how far — so a walk is never punished for being a walk, and a heavy hour in a basement gym scores like the work it actually was.
Your usual is the median of your recent sessions. It moves as you do, which is why the bar rises by itself and there is nothing to reset and no category to pick.
A kilometre has to be a kilometre.
A distance that runs ten per cent generous feels wonderful and destroys the only thing the number was ever for. If this week is going to mean anything against last week, the measurement has to hold still — and most people never find out whether theirs does.
So recording is the part of Dash that has had the most work done to it, and it is checked against the ground rather than against a feeling. Every number on a finished session comes with what it was measured from, and with how confident the app is that it measured it.
Checked against the map
Recorded tracks are replayed against OpenStreetMap road geometry — the route measured off the road itself rather than off the phone's own guesswork. Dash lands within one to two per cent of it.
The climb comes from air pressure
On phones with a barometer, elevation is measured from changes in pressure instead of GPS altitude, so a flat road stops producing imaginary hills. Phones without one still record the session; they round the hills off and say so.
Every fix counted once
A duplicate-writing fault on some Android phones was inflating distance and pace. It was found by replaying real recorded tracks against the map, fixed, and confirmed in production. That is the standard these numbers are held to.
And it tells you when it is unsure
Every session shows how often the phone found you, the longest it lost you, and how much of the route it actually saw. A number with no confidence attached is a number pretending.
Do not just record your run. Understand it.
Finish a session and Dash writes it up — the route, every kilometre, your time in each heart-rate zone, the climb, the calories. It is the screen most people open first, and none of it costs anything.
Anyone can hand you a distance and a pace. The question worth answering is what actually happened out there, which is why every number here comes with what it was measured from.
See where you went out too fast
A bar for every kilometre, scaled across the run’s own range so a steady run does not flatten into five identical rows, with your fastest one picked out. And where the ground rose, the hill-corrected pace sits beside the raw one — so a slow kilometre up a climb stops reading as a bad one.
Your zones. Your body.
Enter your resting heart rate once and Dash builds your five zones around your own working range — so they move as you get fitter. Without it, everyone who shares your maximum shares your zone 2, whether they rest at 45 or at 75.
Know when you actually climbed
On phones with a barometer, Dash measures the climb from changes in air pressure instead of relying on GPS alone — so a flat road stops producing imaginary hills. Phones without one still record the session; they just round the hills off.
A guided session, measured block by block
Run one of the interval sessions and the write-up follows its shape instead of flattening it into kilometres: every block it asked for, and what you actually ran. The kilometre splits sit underneath, because on an interval session the kilometres are not the question you were asking.
And it tells you when it is unsure. Your maximum heart rate is marked measured, entered or estimated, because those are three different degrees of confidence. If it is not usable at all you get no zones rather than confident-looking wrong ones. Every session also shows how well it was recorded — how often the phone found you, the longest it lost you, and how much of the route it actually saw.
A hard run in week one and a hard run in week twenty are both hard runs.
Both of them count. That is the entire argument, and everything else in the app follows from it.
It fits what you already wear.
Dash is not asking you to abandon a watch you like, or a health app you have been feeding for three years. It reads from them and it writes back to them, so nothing you already have goes stale because you started using something new.
Apple Health and Health Connect, both ways
Heart rate from your watch comes in and shapes your zones. Every session you record goes back out, so your rings, your steps and everything else you use stay correct. iPhone and Android, by the same rules.
Bring the runs from any watch
Export a GPX or TCX from Garmin, Polar, Suunto, Coros or Strava and drop it in. Dash re-measures the points through its own pipeline instead of trusting the file's own distance, which is the only way an imported run can sit honestly beside a recorded one.
A file, not a login
We ask for your export rather than a connection to somebody's API on purpose. A file is your own data under your own portability right, with no terms attached, nothing to revoke, and no company that gets to decide later that you may not have it.
The sensors already in your pocket
Barometer for the climb. Step counter for the walking you never thought to record. Your phone is a better instrument than most people realise; it is mostly a question of reading it honestly.
The point of a challenge is not winning it.
A challenge is a decision you made in advance, on a clear day, sitting down. Its whole job is that the version of you standing in the rain on a Thursday evening does not get to make it again. Winning is a side effect of that, and losing is not really a thing that happens.
So the challenges Dash sets are drawn from your own history — near enough to be reachable, far enough to be worth deciding about. A target nobody could miss is not a challenge, and one nobody could hit is a way of being told off in advance.
Set against yourself
The bar is your own recent weeks. Two people using Dash side by side are not doing the same challenge, and that is the point of it.
XP is a record, not a currency
Evidence that you turned up, kept for as long as you want to look at it. Nothing to spend, nothing to defend, and no table to fall down. Your level never goes backwards.
Or race your friends — up to eight
A week, a metric, a podium. The classement is live, the gap to the runner ahead has a name, and losing costs a coffee. Between people who chose each other that is a conversation, not a ranking full of strangers.
The app never introduces you to anybody.
Everything social in Dash starts from one rule: you pick the people, and the app never introduces you to anybody. No feed of strangers to compare against, no leaderboard of your city, nobody to meet that you had not already met.
So a meet is the message you were about to send anyway — "Saturday, nine, by the pier" — with the answers collected. Everyone records their own session, the way they always do; start within half an hour of the meet time and Dash counts it as together. Afterwards it writes the recap: who came, everyone’s own numbers, and one tap to plan the same one next week — or to turn the group into a challenge.
Plans, not logistics
Pick friends who follow you, a time, a place. They tap "I’m in", and anyone who is in can invite more. That is the entire feature, and it is enough.
The recap writes itself
No shared phone, no pairing. Each runner’s own session, tied together by the clock — who showed up, how far, how long. Facts, never attendance-taking.
Rivalries keep score
Every duel against the same friend adds up — the streak, the last five, your biggest win. The revanche is one tap away, and it never expires.
A coach that knows when to say nothing.
Anyone can generate encouragement. It wears out around the fifth run, and an app that only ever cheers cannot tell you the one thing you sometimes need to hear — that today is not the day to push.
Dash speaks when it has something specific and true to say, and it is equally willing to tell you to ease off. Encouragement that does not know when to stop is how people run through an injury.
It reads what you did
Not what you planned, and not what the plan said should have happened. The session you actually recorded is the one it answers.
It says the specific thing
Your pace against your own usual, this kilometre against the last six weeks. Things no recorded audio track could ever know about you.
It is willing to say stop
Hard effort and slow pace together is a grind, not a breakthrough. An app that cannot name that is only pretending to coach.
Sixty programmes, and every one of them had to justify itself.
A training programme is easy to generate and hard to be right. These were built the slow way: from the training literature where the answer is settled, and from programmes that have actually been put in front of real people where it is not.
Science-based means nothing if nobody will say which science. So here is the whole of it, in the order the decisions were made.
- Frequency
- Training a muscle twice a week beats once for the same weekly volume — around three per cent more growth. So every split in Dash reaches every muscle at least twice, and the classic body-part split, chest on Monday and back on Tuesday, is not offered at any frequency. It is the arrangement the evidence rules out, and it is the one that looks most natural on a five-day week.Schoenfeld et al., 2016
- Volume
- The dose-response curve for weekly sets per muscle climbs from about five sets and flattens somewhere between fifteen and twenty. Every programme here clears ten sets for the muscles it is named for — and a test fails the build when one of them lands at nine. Hand-written sessions land just under constantly, so the floor is enforced rather than hoped for.Schoenfeld et al., 2017
- Load, reps and rest
- Set by the goal you chose rather than by a house style: strength at three to five reps with three minutes between sets, muscle at six to twelve with sixty to ninety seconds, endurance and conditioning at twelve to twenty with thirty. Taken from the position stand, not tuned to feel harder.ACSM position stand, 2026
- Recovery
- Muscle takes twenty-four to seventy-two hours to recover, so there is no seven-day programme in Dash and there is not going to be one. Past six days the extra session cannot add stimulus; it can only take recovery away. A programme is not improved by being impossible to recover from.
- Running
- Beginners reach a continuous thirty minutes more often, and stop less, on a run/walk progression than by being told to run from day one — the one thing the beginner evidence is not ambiguous about. Sessions are prescribed in effort rather than pace, because a beginner has no pace worth prescribing and a trained runner's correct pace changes with the heat and the hill they are on. Three sessions a week with a rest day between them, because the rest day is where the adaptation happens.
- Calories
- Energy cost is read off the published Compendium of Physical Activities and kept inside its ranges rather than invented to look generous. A heavy compound session and a session of curls are not the same activity, and the app knows which is which from the catalogue and from what you actually logged.
And the other half
The part that is not in any paper.
Evidence tells you what to prescribe. Putting it in front of real people tells you how it goes wrong. Four things changed because of that, and all four make the programmes gentler than the paper version.
Ranges resolve downwards
Where a specification says twenty to twenty-five minutes, Dash prescribes twenty. Undershooting a session is something you can correct on the road; overshooting one is how a beginner gets hurt. Next week is where the increase belongs.
Never a ten out of ten
The intensity scale calls ten maximal and says not to prescribe it as a default. An all-out effort is something you choose on a day you feel it, not something an app tells you to do on a Tuesday. Nothing in the catalogue asks for one.
Eight weeks is a review point
Not an expiry. Linear progression on templates like these typically stalls somewhere between eight and twelve weeks, so that is when the app suggests you look at it again. Nothing stops you carrying on, and the counter keeps counting.
No session says repeat
The source tables say repeat for several weeks. On paper that is the right instruction; in an app it is the wrong one, because a card that says exactly what the last card said gives you nothing to arrive at. Every session is written out.
And the promise we will not make. Dash never says eight weeks to get in shape. Nobody can keep that, the number is chosen to sell rather than to be true, and a programme that has to lie about its timeline in order to be picked was not worth picking. What it will tell you is what you did, measured properly, against what you usually do.
Sixty programmes, and every one has a week three.
What for
Every one of the fifty-three sits in exactly one of these — none in two, and none in none. You choose the reason you are training before you choose anything else, because that is the order you already think in.
One to six. You know your answer before you open the app, which makes it a good way to narrow a shelf and a poor way to open one — so it is the second question here, not the first.
Each programme is checked against the equipment you have told us about. One you cannot begin is marked as one, instead of sitting there looking available.
The seven running programmes cover the whole ladder, with each interval called into your ear as it arrives, so the session runs itself.
A plan that only really exists for week one is a list of exercises. These are written to be followed to the end, and the app carries you through them session by session — so the question each morning is which one, never what.
53 workout programmes
Strength, conditioning and Pilates, mat and wall. Sets, reps and held positions, with the timing spoken aloud so you are not squinting at a screen halfway through a plank.
7 running programmes
From a first five kilometres to a marathon. Intervals are called into your ear as they arrive, so the session runs itself and you can watch the road instead of your wrist.
Pilates and conditioning, not only the weights room
Mat and wall Pilates, cardio and HIIT alongside the strength work. Sets, reps and held positions, with the timing spoken aloud so you are not squinting at a screen halfway through a plank.
Or build the whole thing yourself.
Two hundred and fifty-two exercises, searchable by the muscle you want and by the kit in front of you — and Dash knows what is in front of you, so “what I can do here” is a filter rather than a guess you make in the gym.
From there it is your days, your exercises, your sets. Name the workout, name each day, set the rep range and the rest, link two as a superset. It runs exactly like one of the sixty, because to the app it is one of the sixty.
Write your own exercise
Anything the catalogue does not have. Name it, say what it works and what it needs, and count it in reps or in seconds — it then draws the figure and counts towards your weekly volume like everything else.
It is never guessed at
Your own exercises are never offered as a substitute for something else. We only know what you told us, and guessing what it replaces would quietly put it in the wrong session.
Filtered by where you are
The library knows the equipment at your gym, your home and the park you use. Anything you cannot do today is still readable — it just is not pretending to be available.
Your front door is not a data point.
A running app learns where you live on the first morning, from the place every route begins and ends. Dash treats that as the problem it plainly is, rather than as a setting somebody might find later.
Hidden areas, on by default
Draw a zone around home. Routes are trimmed inside it before anybody else can see them, and the trimmed version is the only geometry another person ever receives.
You pick the audience
Every activity has its own. Private stays private, and nothing becomes public because you did not notice a box.
Nothing is sold
No advertising, no data brokers, no tracking across other companies' apps. Your location is never part of any of that.
The argument everything else follows from.
Five decisions, made once. They are the reason several obvious features are missing from this app and are going to stay missing.
Dash measures what you did against what you usually do — the only comparison that has ever changed anybody’s training.
You pick the people. No feed of strangers, no leaderboard of your city, nobody to meet that you had not already met.
Evidence that you turned up, kept for as long as you want to look at it. Nothing to spend, nothing to defend, and no table to fall down.
Almost anyone can ship a voice that cheers. Encouragement that does not know when to stop is how people run through an injury.
Charging for a run would be charging for movement, which is the one thing this exists to take the friction out of. The paywall is around the programmes and around nothing else.
Staying quiet is the harder half.
Almost anyone can ship a voice that cheers. Very few ship one that knows there is nothing worth saying right now.
Free is the app. The subscription is the coaching.
Charging for recording a run would be charging for movement, which is the one thing this exists to take the friction out of. So the paywall is deliberately narrow: it is around the sixty programmes, and around nothing else.
Forever, no card
Not a trial that runs out. This is the app.
- Record every run, ride, walk, hike and gym session
- The effort score, and your progress by day, week, month and year
- Splits, heart-rate zones, elevation, steps and calories
- Challenges, duels and rivalries with friends
- XP, Dash Level and the streak
- The coach, and meets with the people you invite
- Hidden areas, and a chosen audience on every activity
- Read all sixty programmes in full — and do the first session of three of them
The programmes
The part that took months of content work, and the only part with a real alternative cost — a coach.
- All 53 workout programmes — 305 sessions of strength, conditioning and Pilates
- All 7 running programmes, from a first five kilometres to a marathon
- Every session carried through to the end, with the timing spoken into your ear
- Everything in the free column, still free
Three days free through the App Store or Google Play, which show the price in your own currency. Anything you have already recorded stays yours if you stop.
It is not out yet. Ask to be told when it is.
Dash is finished and in testing. One line to us and you get one message back on the day it reaches the App Store — no list, no newsletter, nothing else ever.
Coming to iPhone. Android to follow.